02 Monday Mar 2015
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Louise inserted her card, selected English, and requested a cash withdrawal. The ATM made satisfying mechanical noises, then a message appeared on the screen. “We apologize,” it said. “Your bank has requested that we retain your card.” The screen went blank. No cash. No card. We have a month to go in France.
26 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery
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19 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery, Travel
I have been beating myself up for fourteen years for not having patented the wheel.
09 Monday Feb 2015
Posted in Accommodations
I’m adding them up in my head: thirteen, I think. Thirteen restaurants explored since we’ve arrived here in the French countryside, none with too much success. Some were too confusing (Louise mistakenly ordered redundant courses of sausage at one, and she speaks the language); some were too loud, or too unsavory, or too expensive. Many were all those things.
No, that’s not right. There is one, the most recent one, the one to which we’ve vowed to return.
29 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
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.
21 Wednesday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
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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.
10 Saturday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
Portland 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.
05 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
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.
01 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted in Travel
Tom, Louise, and our daughter Sybil at our bon voyage lunch yesterday. Today is liftoff. Paris tonight!
24 Wednesday Dec 2014
Posted in Accommodations
Is she shy? Louise?
No. Not Louise. If a male rhino were charging her, she’d smile and ask him if he would like to sit down and talk about it. Definitely not shy.
She’s also an indefatigable shopper, a lover of all things French, and an unrestrained Parisian fangirl. So why hasn’t she written a post about our stay there? We’ll be there in a week, after all.
The Expat Almanac 