Monthly Archives: January 2015

Cold!!

29 Thursday Jan 2015

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windshield-r

It’s cold here. High-humidity cold. It seeps into your skin like a nicotine patch. It’s as persistent as a senate filibuster and as welcome as a letter from the IRS.

Today we were supposed to be under our favorite palapa in Puerto Vallarta, slurping margaritas and wiggling our toes in warm sand. You know the story. Instead, with hardly two weeks to adjust, we trundled off to live for three months in an eighty-year-old French farmhouse, constructed of solid masonry that retains cold like a numismatist collects stamps. Outside, a grousing heat pump tries to salvage heat from air that has none. Inside, eighty-year-old radiators, once bristling with steam from an oil-fired boiler, now circulate lukewarm water from the heat pump, warming the air with a whisper rather than the shout of ancient fire.

Thus, today we meet the second of five words that I’m using to describe our French experience: cold.

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Joan of Arc: Prophet or Pest?

26 Monday Jan 2015

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Loches dungeon (click to enlarge)

Loches dungeon (click to enlarge)

Right in the middle of the town of Loches there is a castle. And right in the middle of the castle is a marble stone indicating the room where, in 1429, Joan of Arc begged Charles VII to man up and go to Reims to get crowned.

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Hibernation

21 Wednesday Jan 2015

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Hibernation 29-11-12

After eight months of high society in Portland’s haute Pearl District, Louise and I now inhabit la France profonde, which is pretty much the Pearl’s opposite. We feel like pages ripped from a Fitzgerald novel, come to rest in deep France, where it’s quiet as a monastery and urban influences are as scarce as feathers on a frog.

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A Little Guilt Trip

19 Monday Jan 2015

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L to R: Stephen, Kay, Tom, & Louise. Just look at those desserts!

L to R: Stephen, Kay, Tom, & Louise. Just look at those desserts!

Of our 821 regular readers, about 800 of you totally ignored my birthday Saturday. Regardless, being old and creaky has not diminished my interest in celebrations, although the actual number is irrelevant.

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Angles-sur-l’Anglin

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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Angles sur l'Anglin

Field trip! Yesterday we left home to visit Jackie Fisher’s favorite village in the region: Angles-sur-l’Anglin, which is about 25 minutes away. The tongue twister of a name means “Anglos on the Anglin River,” because it is one of the many regions here occasionally populated by the English, usually post-invasion. Today, the British actually buy land and houses here, which is so much more civilized.

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Martizay at Seven

10 Saturday Jan 2015

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portland at seven

Portland at Seven

Martizay at Seven

Martizay at Seven

I stand on the balcony in the dark and listen: A rooster crows. Faintly, church bells. Other than that, nothing. Nothing at all. It’s as dark as despair, as still as a trance. If the moon made sounds I’d hear that too. It’s waning, only a few days distant from full, and the trees cast moonshadow.

This  is morning in Martizay. My breaths on the balcony are the first breaths of the day.

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Pitchforks and Wheelbarrows

05 Monday Jan 2015

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We have arrived in the tiny town of Martizay, France. It’s a whirlwind of activity here, both for our hosts Jackie and John—who are preparing to depart tomorrow morning for the UK where they will stay until late March—and for us, as we unpack our bags, shed clothes we have been wearing for four days, and learn all there is to keep up the farm while it’s under our stewardship.

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