Catching Up!

Hi all! It's been a long time since I've updated this blog, but now that life has settled down a bit I'm going to do a bit of catching up. First, here's photos of friends who visited with us last September. One of the places we visited was the town of Sarlat. Here's a photo of one of the pedestrian streets in this lovely old town.

And here's a photo of some gorgeous window boxes on the front of the mairie.
We also went to one of the local towns, Lalinde, that has a lovely old covered market that serves as a good place to sit and enjoy a cool drink. Here's my artist friend Leslie:

And here's John with Leslie's husband Tony.

Resurrection!

No, not that one. I'm resurrecting this blog, and celebrating the resurrection of the outside, natural world as well.A fitting day to do it, after these years of it lying fallow.

I love Easter, but for me, Easter is not a religious holiday. We atheists don't do religion, after all. For me, it's a celebration of spring, of everything coming alive once more. The grass is green. The primroses are blooming, the daffodils, which started timidly a few weeks ago, are now in full bloom. The peach trees are putting out buds, testing the air, getting ready for the warmer days ahead. 

In the surrounding farms, fields of colza are showing islands of yellow and soon there will be huge swathes of yellow fields of it, patchworked into the green of the surrounding fields. The fields of colza, or rapeseed, were one of the first sights that made me fall in love with France. It's a stunning vista, huge fields of brilliant, intense cool yellow, that seems to make the landscape come to life, wake up from its winter sleep, wake up with a splash of sheer joy.

A resurrection indeed! 

Tulips and Grape Hyacinths

Pansies

View from the Porch this Morning

Unlike my experience in Massachusetts, I've never seen snow here on Easter Sunday. Today is no exception. The sun is shining, the porch I'm sitting on is so warm it's hot. The flowers on the terrace, under the bird feeders, are resplendent with pansies, tulips, grape hyacinths. The tulips are the star of the show right now, ruffled parrot tulips pale pink and yellow. There was a third thing planted with them, but there's no sign of whatever it might have been, and I can't remember at all. The joy of being seventy - I have an excuse for being forgetful, a trait that has actually plagued me throughout my life.

In many of the local farms, fields of colza are showing patches of yellow and soon there will be huge swathes of yellow colza flowers, patchworked into the green of the surrounding fields. These expanses of colza, or rapeseed, were one of the first sights that made me fall in love with France. It's a stunning vista, huge fields of brilliant, intense but cool yellow, a color that makes the landscape come to life, wakes it up from its winter sleep, with a splash of sheer joy.

Yes, a resurrection indeed!

Easter Dinner

Here in France, the traditional Easter dinner is lamb. We prefer ham, but here hams are mostly country ham, which is delicious but not what I want for Easter dinner. I want soft cured ham, glazed with honey and mustard and adorned with cloves. This year we cam across what we thought might be just the thing in a local supermarket. It's a jambonneau,and is actually a ham hock, with the bone still in, and looks for all the world like a tiny, tiny ham.

We bought one, John put on a glaze and warmed it in the oven along with the roasting potatoes, as it was already cooked. Here's photos of the little wonder. Admittedly, it looked more like a ham before it went into the oven, where it came apart a bit. But it was delicious! A perfect two-person 'ham' even though it's a bit ragged looking. Next time, we'll try tying it up before cooking it.

 

Happy Easter

Easter - a celebration of spring! Back in the US, we'd usually celebrate with a dinner of ham, but here the only sort of ham available is what we think of as country ham, delicious in its own way, but quite different from the juicy, slightly sweet ham we'd have for dinner. On Friday, we went to the LeClerc in Bergerac to do our grocery shopping and came across something else that's seldom if ever seen here - chicken breasts with the bone and skin not removed. I was so excited to see these that they became my choice for Easter dinner. Since John doesn't eat chicken - or any other sort of birds, he opted for a roulade de porc Provencal, from the butcher counter. Both were wonderful. With them, we had a potato gratin and some fresh asparagus - and wine of course.

Dessert came from one of the local patisseries. These are called framboisiers and consist of layers of cream, sponge cake and raspberries. They, like absolutely all French pastries, are delicious. Amazingly enough, though, in the years we've been here, I've grown a bit bored with French pastries, and don't eat them all that often. Instead I yearn for apple pie, pecan pie and ordinary gold cake with white butter cream frosting - in other words, standard birthday cake! And I secretly long for powdered sugar doughnuts....

Before dinner, I picked this bouquet of flowers from the yard and garden. There's one of the last blooms from a lilac, a rose from the bush climbing up the trellis in front of the house, pansies and snapdragons that have been blooming all winter, and with them some wild flowers: dandelions, daisies, a couple of others whose names I don't know, and even some sprigs of grass. Nothing like flowers to celebrate spring.

Farm Country

The hay was cut two days ago, sat drying in the sun for a day, and then today it's swooped up by an impressive piece of machinery, and then sprayed into a truck running beside the giant machine.

Spring!

This is the view looking from our veggie garden towards the treed area - which I call the forest - and to the field behind. This is the first time we've seen these tulips. Last year this time, we were finishing up packing for the move, so we missed most of the spring flowers. Right now the air is perfumed with lilacs, apple blossoms, mock orange and wisteria. It's delightful. I plan to add to this by planting a honeysuckle under the bedroom window.

On Friday, we were in the nearby town of Beaumont and saw preparations for some event - maybe the brocante (antiques and used furniture and whatnots) that we forgot to go to yesterday. The local butcher had added a huge donkey statue in front of his shop. It's soft, covered in black cloth - a cloth mother? (Reminded of this by seeing a BBC show on TV about Harry Harlow and his monkey experiments) The donkey is carrying a shopping bag bearing the butcher's name, and stands beside a display of photos of people sporting these bags. I suppose anyone who is anyone must have one - or so the butcher wishes anyway!

A Different Sort of Lunch

A belated St. Patrick's Day lunch. I love corned beef and cabbage, or New England Boiled Dinner if you prefer. But here in France corned beef is not available, so you have to make your own. I got started late, and the corned beef wasn't ready until this week. We cooked it up today and served it with the traditional potatoes, cabbage, carrots, turnip and parsnip - with a bit of horseradish on the side. John said it was the best corned beef he ever had, so I must have done it right! (I almost forgot to take the photo - I had already started eating when I remembered - thus the already partially eaten potato) We'll follow this up with soup made from the broth and leftover veggies, corned beef hash, Reuben sandwiches, who knows what else. Hmmm. Can't get pumpernickel bread here either. I'll have to search up a recipe.

Spring!!!

This past Monday, the first day of spring, we had lunch in the town of Cadouin, a lovely World Heritage site, where we met our friend Liz at a local restaurant. Liz is a terrific artist and is painting murals in a private house in the town. They're gorgeous! Didn't take any photos since it's someone's private house. Anyway, here it is, the first day of spring and it was warm enough to eat outside. John celebrates by relaxing in the sun.

A New Toy

This is Pogo, the latest addition to our stable of large toys - you know, things like washing machines, cars, front end loaders. (Hmmm; don't have one of those) Pogo is a riding mower, shown here in the front lot of the BricoMarché, a French hardware/home improvement store chain, and will be delivered to us next Wednesday and I can start riding around on it. Last year we hired a local fellow to mow the lawn through the summer and at 30€ per week it adds up, considering that it's already time to mow. Every day we hear the sound of mowers in the neighborhood. It sounds like summer, and here it is only March11. Last year we also didn't have this young fellow mow very often in August and we were sorry - the grass got tall enough to harbor chiggers and they had a very nice feast - on us. We itched like mad for weeks from those little monsters. I've read that an important thing that needs to be done if you want to avoid having chiggers in the lawn is to keep it mowed short in the late summer. So, here we are - armed and ready to do battle with microscopic arachnid larvae. Not to mention keeping the lawn looking good.

Home Improvement

In the last couple of weeks, I've gotten back to stripping wallpaper in the living room, which had the most atrocious stuff on the walls - a mixtures of pale, sickly blues, and all of the paper wrinkled and stained. Horrible! Here's a photo of the (very cluttered) living room from when we first saw this house.

You can catch glimpses of the wallpaper behind the furniture and wall ornaments.

Here's a photo of the current state of the living room:

This the same corner in the previous photo, with a whole different collection of clutter! That unpainted bookcase is currently serving as a place to put paint trays and brushes and miscellaneous other tools. The far wall, now painted a warm neutral grey, will next have shelving added, because we've run out of places for books. But the other wall, at least the area to the right of the full bookcase, will have quite a different paint job - here's a photo of its current state.

Here you can see the layer of wallpaper that was under the really ugly stuff - not that this stuff is all that better! Anyway, while sitting at my computer in a chair by the window, I kept looking at that patch of paper and plaster and thinking how great it would be to have a painting just that size right on the wall. So why not, eh??!! So here it is, the current state. It will take some time to do this but I'll post photos as the work progresses.

Catching Up Again

Hi all! It's been a long time since I've updated this blog, but now that life has settled down a bit I'm going to do a bit of catching up. First, here's photos of friends who visited with us last September. One of the places we visited was the town of Sarlat. Here's a photo of one of the pedestrian streets in this lovely old town.

And here's a photo of some gorgeous window boxes on the front of the mairie.
We also went to one of the local towns, Lalinde, that has a lovely old covered market that serves as a good place to sit and enjoy a cool drink. Here's my artist friend Leslie:

And here's John with Leslie's husband Tony.

Cows Cows Cows Cows

Cows in Beaumont, cows at their Sunday best, all clean and glossy. Yesterday was the day of the fête celebrating the 50th year of the local Comise Agricole. Cows, of course, were part of all this - as were sheep, chickens, ducks, geese (we skipped the opportunity to watch the gavage, the force feeding of geese that forms a basis of the production of foie gras). The cows here, at least the ones on display, were all Holsteins. Milk is their raison d'etre. Here's some of the ladies, one of whom has got herself on the wrong side of the rope enclosure:

Across the path from these, was this lovely little 'Dalmatian' calf. A Dalmatian Reincarnation?

Farther along, there was a grand show - a cow pedicure. We saw this cow being led - or more precisely, being pulled and pushed and tail-twisted - to the pedicure salon, a large steel set of livestock stocks, into which she was deposited with a lot more pushing and pulling. Once in, the apparatus grasps one leg, lifts it and presents it to the pedicurist, first for a trim:

and then for a finishing buff and polish with a disc sander:

Next to the pedicurist's truck were a group of calves - waiting their turn?

Meanwhile in the main square in the town, there was the usual market, with food, clothing, just about everything, even a hurdy gurdy player.

Isn't she something!

But life is more than just having fun at the local fetes, eh? Yesterday afternoon our friend and brilliant handyman (and horse vet, but that's a whole other story) Partick, came to start installing a counter top over our kitchen cabinets. Here's the result of yesterday afternoon's work:

Previously, this cabinet was topped with random bits of wood, wobbling around. Now it has a real counter top! Today, Patrick is tackling the opposite side of the kitchen, a much trickier problem. Here's the state of things there:

It seems that our state of life now is that we bumble around, trying to bring order out of chaos and then all of that precarious order tumbles into chaos once again. It always comes out better in the end, but it does seem an unrelenting process. Entropy is entirely too strong a force in our world!

This endeavor also uncovered some dodgy bits in the floor :

To fix it properly, everything along that wall would have to be removed, including the newly installed sink, but Patrick has come up with a solution involving a slim piece of metal laid onto the existing floor, spanning the dodgy area and preventing the washing machine from plummeting into the cellar one fine day.

I am thrilled with all this progress, in fact, tiring though it may be rearranging everything in the house on a daily basis, or so it seems. Once these kitchen counter tops are completed - Oh, I forgot to mention, the reason this can all now happen is that we finally found a stove top to fit the area this stovetop will sit on top of an Ikea cabinet (of course) with lots of drawers. And yesterday's work also included a lazy susan being installed into the corner cabinet. What this means is that we now have storage room for those things like pots and pans. Wheee! We can unpack the rest of the kitchen boxes, which means we can then unpack the rest of the book boxes behind those boxes. Someday, in the future, in a galaxy far, far away, we may just be able to live our normal lives, without the looming piles of unpacked boxes.

A day in Sarlat with friends from the US

Our friends Pete and Jan are visiting with us for a few days. We'll play tourist here until Saturday and then we'll head to Paris for a long weekend. Yesterday we went to the town of Sarlat, an old medieval town restored in the 60s, the first in a series of restorations initiated by then minister of culture André Malraux back in the 60s. Sarlat is like a storybook town come to life - old winding streets, buildings of honey-colored stone, now with restaurants, fancy shops, everything a tourist could want, but also everything an artist could want. Here's an example of the varied architecture you'll see in this very special town:

Here's Jan and Pete

When we left Sarlat, we went home by way of the town of Tremolat, a very small town with - surprise surprise - lovely houses. Could anything be prettier than this cottage?

I love going to the supermarket

Our trip to the nearest supermarket covers 5.3 kilometers of back roads through farmland. It's a trip that's just a little bit different every day. Yesterday's entry showed the sunflower fields. Today there's a new sculpture that has appeared in a hayfield. I love it - the tractor makes the hay and then the hay makes a tractor. As I stopped to take a photo of this, an old farmer came walking down his driveway, offered his hand and said he saw by our number plate that we weren't from here and wondered if we needed directions. I told him No, we had just moved to here but hadn't yet changed our car registration. We chatted for a while and it turns out he knew the people who used to own our house. It's a very small world here. And a friendly one.

Sunflowers!

July is sunflower season and we're in the midst of both the month and the fields of flowers. Here's a photo taken on our way back from the supermarket today. This scene will soon be in a painting, I think. There's a small area at the side of the road where I can park the car and a few meters farther along is a spot with this view. What could be better? The sunflowers are not as spectacular as they could be this year though; they really need rain. We had a very rainy, cold unpleasant spring but once summer started, exactly to the day, the weather turned sunny and hot. There has been no appreciable rain since June 21, unless we count a 5 minute shower a couple of weeks ago.

OK, back home. I thought I'd give you a tour of our garden. Here, both in English and in French, the word 'garden' means what we call a yard in America. As you'll see most of this garden isn't what we'd think of as a garden, since it's mostly lawn and trees.

Here's the steps going down into the garden. There's an arbor arching over the steps and it's covered with trumpet vine, a very popular ornamental plant here in France. John trimmed this vine this morning, making it easier to walk under the arbor. Before he trimmed it, even I had to duck down to walk under it.

This is the view from the bottom of the steps, the pigeonnier with another huge old trumpet vine arching over its facade. A lovely thing, but in need of much discipline! It's too late to give it a good pruning now, but it will get a severe chopping back in time. Right now, the trumpet vines are taking over the yard, completely covering one of the apple trees, for instance. Once the leaves fall, we'll have to have someone in to hack it back.

To one side of the pigeonnier, we've installed a clothesline, here in use. It's been easy washing clothes these past few weeks with all the sunny weather. The area to the left holds our picnic table and chairs. Beyond the clothesline is our orchard, with apple trees, plum trees and cherry trees. There are also two peach trees, one just to the right of the clothesline, and another in front of the house, both of which we were assured were almond trees. But the fact that the land under them is littered with old peach pits leads me to think they are indeed peach trees.

Beyond the orchard is what was, and will be again next year, a vegetable garden. By the time we had the garden cleared this year it was too late to plant much of anything. Yes, I could plant some things now, but first I'd need to have the space roto tilled, since it was weeds for the past 5 years. In this clay soil, now turned to marble with the drought, breaking ground with a spading fork is just not an option. Anyway, here's the garden, with a line of roses defining one side. At the rear of the garden are large trees and bushes, with the stream beyond. When Cedric was interested in clearing the yard - an interest that faded rather quickly - he was also interested in finding little steps that lead to the small stream, La Bournegue, that forms the rear border of our property. Here's one set of stone steps he dug out. He says there's at least one more set of steps along the stream and possibly more.

the other side of the vegetable garden is a hedge of Rose of Sharon bushes.

Beyond this hedge is what I call the forest. This is a deliciously cool spot on a hot day. In the distance you can see the small greenhouse and the garage. To the right of the trees in this photo, there's a lovely stone-edged raised bed, empty now, that will be fun to play with in the future.

There's two large walnut trees in the forest, this one giving the largest walnuts I've ever seen, to judge from the shells littering the ground under it - and hidden in the cellar by various wild creatures living there for the past few years.

And here's the driveway, with it's border of the high laurel hedge and large and heavy wooden gate opening onto the street.

From the street, you can see the remaining part of out domain, a small field en friche as they say in French, meaning gone wild, not used or tended to. Maybe in time it will be part of a horse paddock.

But next to it is a very much larger field with - sunflowers!

And so ends our tour of our little piece of French countryside. Hope you enjoyed seeing it.