Les marchés

I love farmer’s markets.  Every week we have a small-town market on Wednesdays, and big trip to Bordeaux on Thursdays.  We left at four in the morning, an hour that definitely belongs more to night than day.  It’s so early that I feel a sense of urgency as we load up in the dark and drive out through the still fields of corn and sunflowers.  As dawn sneaks up on us, the misty arcs of the watering devices slowly become visible against the lightening horizon. We set up while the sun rises and the first customers, almost exclusively all old ladies, form an impatient line behind the stand.  Last week at Bordeaux the sunrise was an eerie blood red doubly reflected by the river, and by seven o’clock we were scrambling to cover the bread from the sudden downpour.

Even before the summer started, I worried about working the cash register.  Math has never been my thing, ever since second grade when we learned addition by counting dots that had been drawn on each number. For example, the number 3 has three dots on its points.  Now this works for 1, 2, and 3, but you can draw 4 in two ways, and I never agreed with the dot placement on 6 and 9.  It was a newfangled system, a sort of ill-fated Phonics or Suzuki method that is catchy but only gets you so far.  But maybe I shouldn’t blame my abysmal math skills on school, since ultimately my brain refuses to grope its way around numbers.

At the farmer’s market everything is about change.  The euro is a beautiful currency, with colorful bills that are all, well, relatively new.  The one and two euro coins are satisfyingly thick, and can add up to a lovely surprise in your change purse.  Smaller than that, and things get messy—for a while I missed the quarter, but when you have 2 cent pieces somehow 25 cents seems unnecessary.

In addition to my acquired or inherited (thanks Mom) ineptitude for numbers and the somewhat foreign currency, there is the French way of counting.  After sixty—soixante–someone get tired.  Or, more likely, the poor guy realized that septsante sounded too much like sept cent (700) and that septante was just ugly.  So, there is soixante-dix up through soixante dix neuf (60 +19).  Then, to have a little more fun, we switch to multiplication: eighty is quatre-vingt (4 times 20).  That of course makes the nineties into something ridiculous: ninety-seven becomes quatre-vingt dix sept, or in other words, 4 times 20 plus seventeen.

Regine who works the Wednesday market has never been one to mince words.  “This one,” she says, grabbing my arm after I’ve just given a customer back the wrong change, “is a bit special.”  She taps her forehead.  “Americaine.”  They both laugh.  “Oh why yes!  McDonalds.”  says the customer in English.  When I was still in Paris, the first word associated with American was Barack Obama.  Now it is usually Michael Jackson.  Either way, I’m glad I wasn’t here when it was surely Bush (“Boosh”).

Apart from the math problem, and the fact that I probably deserve all the concerned looks the customers give me, the markets are fun.  There is a sort of motherly pride that comes when you box up a tartelette that you yourself made the night before.  The mint in the tabbouleh was my idea! I want to shout when I hand over a box.  Cheese cutting is especially fun.  We have the moderately sized cheeses they make at the farm (au naturel, pimento, pepper, cumin, and a garlic basil that smells abominably), a few gooey ewe’s milk cheeses, and some very large tomes of Comté and Cantal.

First, you have to answer the questions about the cheese.  Is it dry?  Do you know how long it has aged?  Then, you plunk the cheese on the cutting board and take hold of the long knife with handles on both ends. You place the knife on the crust to cut a wedge, and then you must always show the placement of your knife to the customer.  You learn to offer smaller wedges to the men, who seem to relish telling me to go bigger, while most women take an odd pleasure in shuddering in horror and asking for a piece much smaller.  With the huge Cantal, I have to stand on my tiptoes and use my weight to cut through to the bottom of the cheese.  I like to think of it as my weekly musculation.

“Oh la, I’ve got to clean my nails tonight,” Claudette said the day before my first market.  We were planting beans in her immense, extremely tidy garden.  “When you go to cut the cheese and the customer is watching, it’s not so good to have all this dirt under your nails.  Tuesday nights I always use a little lemon juice in the shower.”

I’ve never had a manicure and don’t give much thought to fancy nails, but it’s true that I notice when someone has dirty hands.  I used to automatically pre-judge it as bad hygiene.  Now I really understand why women wanted pretty nails to show they did not do manual work.  Nail polish chips when you’re washing dishes all day.

After the market peters out around one, Vincent sets up a table in the shade with the leftover cheeses and breads.  There is always a small crowd at the Bordeaux lunches, whether it’s Vincent’s old rugby friends or the prim ladies who sell honey next door.  Once I sat next to a slick wine vendor who never took off his sunglasses.  He told me that in a good Bordeaux, you can always find notes of chocolate and Cuban cigars.  Another day I sat next to a bitter British expatriate, who (if I can believe him) spent his youth in Morocco trafficking weed.

A word about English-speaking expatriates.  Those that I have encountered have been extremely friendly, eager for my attention in an almost desperate way.  When you live in a country where you don’t really know the language, I suppose you are happy to talk to just about anyone. At first, I was always excited to talk to a fellow English speaker, if only to prove to myself that I could still be sarcastic (something that has not produced successful in French).  But talking in English amidst all the French can be hard.  Somehow, the words seem mushy in my mouth, and I can’t stop saying oui instead of yes.

There is a brash feeling of privacy that comes from speaking a different language amidst a crowd of people whom you suppose cannot understand.  This may explain the annoying loudness of American tourists in the Paris metro.  As a result of this shaky security, my expatriate conversations tend to become extremely personal.  The British ex-pothead wanted very much for me to believe that Bordeaux was built from the blood money from slave trading, and that the British were mainly responsible for the glory of French wine.

Another old Welsh man once told me his scarily extremist views on immigration: they should all be sent back to Africa.  At the time, we were walking literally through fields of gold during a particularly splendid sunset.  Every Friday at eight, Claudette and her band of sprightly villagers take a two hour ramble through the neighboring fields.  The eighty year-olds and I walk through fields of wheat at a brisk pace, “Are we going too fast for you?” Claudette asked me when I lagged behind to take a photo.  We stop occasionally to discuss odd-looking weeds or steal plums from the neighbors’ trees.   Until then, I had much enjoyed listening to this Welsh gentleman, his accent reminding me of some quaint character in Hobbitville.  Behind us, one adorable grandmother had stopped to “faire pipi” in the woods.  I watched her run (73 years old) towards us in the lavish light of the sunset as the Welsh man explained his political views to me, and it all felt ridiculously disconnected.  This last week he was not there, and even though it rained on us twice during the walk, I enjoyed it much more.

I’m reading Hemingway again, For Whom the Bell Tolls.  On the back cover the NY Times (a bible as good as any) claims that this is the best book that he ever wrote.  I can’t pretend to be an expert, but it does seem to go deeper than A Farewell To Arms, which he wrote young and I read first.  If Jane Austen writes femininely and Oscar Wilde’s tone is androgynous (or maybe I’m confusing it with flamboyant), Hemingway is powerfully masculine.  Not the blustery showy kind, but with a gaminess so true it cuts.  There are passages that I read and then have to put down the book and come up for air.  It could be that without internet, TV, and other distractions, books can acquire the power to get your heart racing. Or it could be a damn good book.  I just finished a chapter where there is an almost combat in the snowy mountains of Spain, and it read like an impeccable action movie.  And I don’t mean the DaVinci Code sort of read.

My only problem with this overwhelming manliness is that it leaves almost no room for the girls.  Sure, there are intelligent women, but the strong characters are square and old and about as manly as possible.  Pilar has a deep booming voice and seems to have renounced her sexuality for power.  The attractive ones are always standing behind their man, one hesitant and caring hand on his shoulder while he thinks of more important things.  Maybe I’m taking his writing too personally, but I don’t know any girl would like to be admired and then sent back to tend to the fire while the adults discuss around the table.

It may be true also that the condescension of these old farmers can get my shrill little feminist bee a-buzzing.  I think it has a lot to do with my accent, which becomes a comprehension barrier when one is deaf–and that’s basically every man over the age of 60.  The fault of tractors, I think.  It also is the age difference, since obviously young folks know nothing.  Everyone knows that humanity crumbles a bit with each new generation infinitely less polite than the previous.

It’s true to a great extent, I suppose, that the farms were much better off in the good old days.  The farm here at Crozefond was one of the first biological farms in the region, but that doesn’t stop the neighboring tobacco farmer from spraying his pesticides from a helicopter.  They can’t even wash the cows with their well water, since it is contaminated with nitrates from another neighbor’s manure which he leaves too close to the river.  It’s hard sometimes to really understand the helpless anger of some farmers, but when the problem is as specific and solvable as the neighbor moving his poop pile, I get mad too.

We have a new face at the table, an old messieur that everyone calls TinTin because he resembles the Belgian cartoon character.  That is, if TinTin aged fifty years and went completely to seed—lost his tuft of orange hair, got thick round glasses, and took to the bottle like Captain Haddock and grew an impressive potbelly.  Tin Tin is always right.  I don’t mind when he is telling me something I don’t know (the difference, say, between royal jelly and honey).  But when he explains to me how piano is good for the hand muscles, it can get tiring.  Also, he insulted my cooking.  Since we eat what the garden produces, this means zucchinis and tomatoes every day, twice a day.  I tried to get creative and put a bit of pesto in with our usual stew, and he complained it had a peculiar taste.  Certainly he does not help to clear the table.  Now, TinTin is as much a guest as I am.  He has come for two weeks to fix some bicycles and help kill some chickens.  I get annoyed when Claudette and I are washing dishes while he remains seated commandingly at the table. )

Anyways, excuse the ranting.  It is true that he and Claudette work off each other to tell the most amazing stories.  When they were kids, they lugged the pails of cream to the creek where the cold water served in place of a refrigerator.  Their parents used horses instead of tractors, and I learned that the common Laguiole pocket knife has a grip on the blade made especially for when farmers needed to quickly cut the reins if the horses bolted.

Today is Sunday, which means we had meat for lunch.  This is a rare enough occasion since it’s not every day that they kill a cow or chicken around here.  The day we had veal I found I didn’t have too much appetite.  Rihanna and Mad-Eye have both disappeared and I don’t dare inquire where.  Speaking of gaminess, which seems to be the word of the day, you wouldn’t think that beef could be so pungent.  The steak is darker all over—after a few minutes in the pan it changes from ruby raw to a dark brown that looks seared but isn’t, and even the pink inside is well, bloodier.  And somehow, there remains that faint cow odor, almost like manure, in the back of your mouth.  It sounds gross but it isn’t, and now I understand when TinTin and Claudette agree (a rare thing) that beef should taste like beef and that there’s no need for other seasonings.

Anyways, lunch today was chicken.  Chicken in France has much less white meat and, if I can say without snobbery, it is much better.  After spending a year with my bourgeois Paris host family futzing with the proper way to hold a knife and fork, I was admittedly surprised when Gilbert picked up his chicken in his hands and crunched away.  He also peeled a clove of raw garlic and ate that too.

I was proud that, when fishing around in the pot, I was able to recognize and avoid the veal liver (tastes like blood).  It was only later, when I had given up poking at my chicken piece that I realized what it was.  Gazing absentmindedly at the plate, I suddenly recognized the shape of the cock’s comb.   I stopped mopping up with my bread and stared in horror at the shaved away part of the head where the beak was previously.

“Well,” I said later when the dishes were safely cleared, “I wasn’t aware that one could eat the chicken head.”  Claudette must have noticed my reaction earlier.  “Oh yes,” she said, “what is really good are the eyes.  And the brain.  Oh those little blue chicken eyes.”  I was in the middle of trying to remember if it was possible for chickens to have blue eyes when she couldn’t keep her straight face any longer.

“But,” she said seriously after her and TinTin had a good laugh, “my father really loved the feet.  It’s a nitpicky job taking the nails off the toes, but he’d go at a good ten feet at a time with gusto.”

J’ai la flemme

Fatigue comes in many different flavors.  When you are standing in a kitchen for ten hours a day, the lower back is the most common variety.  I try to relieve the verticality as often as possible—if you bend over while scouring the table or refilling the flour sack, it helps.  But of course there are many subtle tastes of tiredness.  There is the burning along your biceps when stirring thick yellow Madeleine batter for ninety cakes.  The cold, stomach-turning ache that comes from mushing frozen pumpkin by hand.  The pressure along your temples from the blast when you open the oven door.

And I need to say a thing or two about stinging nettles.  Before this summer, to me stinging nettles were like some sort of antiquated poison ivy only found in tall tales—like the briar patch that Brer rabbit was always getting thrown into for punishment.  Stinging nettles are the plant that stings at first contact, itches like a mosquito bite after, and then a few hours later, the tingling prickly sensation starts.  It feels vaguely like pins and needles, but with no numbness. Apparently, stinging nettles are good for circulation.

On Monday, I went down to the pond with gloves and a big pail to pick les orties.  The gloves are cute, ending neatly at my wrists where they basically provide no protection.  Also, it was probably a bad idea to wear shorts.  All that afternoon I had the cold crawling sensation around my ankles and kept thinking it was the ants again.  We did have quite a population that showed up when we made apricot jam.  The jam is the same color as the setting sun if such a thing could be bottled.  Definitely worth the ant trouble.

In France, they eat stinging nettles.  To be more exact, we put them in quiches.  I had a hilarious time telling a few Australian tourists at the market last week that la quiche aux orties was, well, stinging nettles.  They decided to take the pizza.

I don’t mean to complain, exactly.  Claudette, who I live with, is 71 and won’t let me carry the ice cream bucket, since she says it is too heavy for me.  As I stumble out of the patisserie at 8 pm, she jogs off (a sprightly jog at that) to water her massive garden before dinner.  She never complains, but coos contentedly every time she sits down, “Oh, but that does me good.”  Today I caught her saying it while we were still setting the lunch table.

“But you’re still standing,” I had to point out.

“I’m already imagining it in my head,” she said.  Never have I seen such optimism.  I would consider her a throwback to nature, but her husband Gilbert is 74 and I believe he still has a six-pack.  He is deaf and extremely grumpy, and comes in from the fields sometimes at midnight to bang around in the kitchen—a habit that I can’t decide to attribute to the deafness or the grumpiness.  He is devoted to the cultivation of ancient seed varieties, and cooks himself vile-smelling herb stews that I suspect may be the key to perpetual youth.  Sometimes he shouts at me that three years in a Kibbutz would whip me into shape.  I’d say four weeks here on the farm should do it pretty well.

Crozefond, Farm #3

Cows are underestimated.  For an animal that we regard as little more than a walking hamburger, or here in France as cheese in its earliest state, it’s easy to overlook their merits.  Sure they are overtaxing the earth with their bottomless appetite for corn and their planet-warming farts, but calves can be pretty darn cute.  And compared to the pigs, who all started squealing horribly the second I got near, the cows are wonderfully placid. 

            Rihanna was born the day before I got here.  I call her Rihanna because she has beautiful black eyes that are just slightly spaced too far apart.  Also, a white star on her forehead.  Then there is Mad-Eye with a spot over one eye, and Rambo, who is hard headed and often runs himself into things.  Dollface has long white eyelashes and likes to lick, while Hennie is undeniably boring so I couldn’t help but name her similarly.  The day we went to Bordeaux for the market, another calf was born.  This one is all fuzzy grey, and wobbles around on legs that can’t quite straighten yet.  I’m waiting for inspiration before I name him, but he spends most of his time curled up in the corner, blinking surprisedly at the flies.

            Every day around 6:30 in the evening, Nicolas the middle brother whistles for Vicky the border collie, and together they round the herd into the dairy, where there is a gated cement ramp that leads to two rows of milking machines.  Milking a cow, even with the little sucking machine, seems to my immature mind an inescapably sexual act.  First you hose down the udders–pokey pink dangly things–then dry them thoroughly with a cloth.  I was drying my udders a bit too gingerly since after all this is that in-between-the-legs region, and Luc showed me how do it with an open palm so that you don’t start the milk flowing yet.  Then, you take the sucky machine, which looks like an octopus with four tentacles, and one by one suction the tentacles onto each udder with a little popping noise.  The machine chugs away for a few minutes, then detaches itself and swings free when there is no more milk.  Somehow, perhaps extremely naively, I expected the cow’s udders to deflate when they were empty, but this did not happen. 

            I have always wanted to milk a cow by hand, and Nicolas let me try a few tentative squirts.  I could see how without the machines, it would be a long job to milk all fifty cows.  The farm here at Crozefond is well-equipped, but still with the rotatiller and hay-bale making tractor, things take time.  I can’t even begin to fathom how people did this with scythes and mules and the old warped tools that are nailed up on the walls for decoration in so many of the houses around here.

              Fresh milk, still warm from the cow, is good.  It is not frothy cream of my imagination flecked with fragrant bits of hay, but it is still good.  When I asked for milk at breakfast, we walked over to the dairy where there is a huge metal humming thing.  You open the lid, dip a pitcher in, and there is your untreated milk.  After a few days in the fridge, the cream separates on top.  After a few more days, I stop drinking it.  I’m not particularly squeamish but I do have great fear in the area of creamy things gone bad.  The other room of the dairy, where the cows don’t go, has white shiny tiles on the walls and floor and lots of stainless steel piping.  Here they make butter, big rounds of raw milk cheese, yogurt in little glass pots, and ice cream.  Also, the most amazing rice pudding that has a golden layer of caramel on the bottom. 

            The secrets of the dairy remain undiscovered–I’ve spent all my time (and I mean almost every waking hour) in the patisserie with Vincent, the youngest brother.  He is a former rugby player who likes to shout English phrases at me “where is ze knife?” (pronounced ck-neef) while slapping around the dough for the apple turnovers. Last night he hosted a huge bonfire at his house for La Fête de Saint Jean.  Apparently, Saint Jean was burned to death and it is an old tradition in every village to have a huge bonfire in remembrance.  It all seemed somewhat morbid to me until I remembered my high school’s Homecoming football game, where we burn a scarecrow-like effigy of our rival the night before and dance around the flames maniacally.

            The wood was piled in a perfect circle about two stories high, and we all stood around drinking boxed wine waiting for the perfect sunset to hurry up and fade so that the fire could be lit.  This was my first French barbeque, and there were long links of wonderful-smelling sausages that people folded into split-open hunks of bread.  None of that perfectly sized hot dog to go with its pre-made bun.  Here it was an old flour sack filled with baguettes that you cut with your neighbor’s pocketknife.  When that was finished, Vincent brought out a wedge of Cantal cheese about the same size as a watermelon, and neatly cut it with a wire that seemed to be made for that purpose. 

            I talked with a few khaki-clad Brits, who had a summer house just up the road.  They thought I was French, and I was so flattered that I kept the conversation going in French until it became too painful.  “Non merci, je suis pleine,” said one very proper and anxious lady when Vincent came by with more cheese.  He just grinned and disappeared into the crowd, leaving me to tell her that literally “I am full” really means “I’m knocked up.”

            The woodpile was so big the fire would have burned all night, but when the boxed wine was finished, people started packing up.  Someone got in the huge tractor that was parked at the corner of the field and doused out the fire in huge jets of water.  Then a few of us went back to Vincent’s house, where we sat in his wine cellar and ate rum-soaked prunes.  Prunes, les pruneaux d’Agen, are a specialty of the region.  I have an old-lady-like obsession with dried fruits, but these things were as strong as an orange wedge that has been soaking in Sangria for a week. 

            As the night wore on, Vincent continued to circulate dusty bottles from the shelves.  There was prune eau de vie, apple Calva, and a glass bottle of clear liquid with a whole pear floating inside like some sort of pickled specimen.  This drink is apparently very rare, since you must slip the pear into the bottle when the pear is still a tiny bud on the tree.  The bottle stays on the tree while the pear grows, and it is very difficult to get the conditions just right: it can’t get too much or too little sun, and it must be tilted so that the rainwater doesn’t collect inside.  The old guy next to me tried to convince me that they fused together two halves of the bottle around each pear, but he had eaten quite a lot of prunes and was not altogether coherent.  And even if everyone else at the table was pulling my leg as well, I still hold fast to the image in my mind of a pear tree glimmering with glass bottles like soap bubbles caught between the leaves.

La vie en rose (you knew this title had to appear at some point)

When I first heard the term sound pollution sophomore year of high school, I thought it was a joke.  We were in Environmental Science, and I was jaded after learning about all the fun things that can crop up in drinking water, not to mention that the world would probably come to a sticky end in another 50 years or so.  Plus, I lived in the country, where the only noise pollution was when our neighbors got a bit drunk and used the backyard for shooting target practice.  At least, that’s what it sounded like.  They recently tried burning down their house for insurance benefits, so we won’t have to worry about them for a while.

In college, sound leakage becomes much more of a problem.  Packed tight like little bees in our hivelike rooms, we all knew by Brian’s consistent alarm clock that he was going to be late for class, and that Kristen went to the bathroom at least four times a night.  The walls in my apartment in Paris were equally thin, and the lovely fifth floor neighbors would thump on the walls if my friends stayed over too late.  Fortunately my clarinet is handy for revenge—and if I were feeling particularly malicious I’d practice that immense glissando that opens Rhapsody in Blue.  If you are not able to perfectly modulate the tonal sliding in between notes, there is a good amount of off-key squawking that goes on.

Out here in the country, we get even more legitimate squawking from the neighbor’s chickens, who go into occasional frenzies when they lay eggs.  Our neighbor also has a herd of goats, and there is a sign on the road that warns Attention Troupeau.  Whenever I go jogging, the entire troop follows me, standing silently and watching when they have run the length of the enclosure.  It’s very flattering knowing that when I return, they’ll be there waiting in solemn attention. 

I have the impression that our neighbor disciplines her chevres very well.  Every evening, she yodels for them to come back to the barn.  Her version of a yodel is a very piercing, urgent type of screaming, and the first time I heard it while picking lettuce for dinner, I thought someone was being gored by a wild boar.  Speaking of wild things, every night there is a community of them that gathers underneath my open window.  I have spent much time lying awake trying to identify these mysterious beasts.  They squabble among each other, sounding like either very squawky frogs or very hoarse birds.  When there is a particular disagreement among the community, their voices raise into these staccato raspy wails.  I’m pretty certain it’s a secret community of Velociraptors.        

            I’m leaving this farm tomorrow, and I’m loath to go.  Apart from the billions of flies that the neighboring goats attract, this place is paradise.  We’re in the thick of rose season, which means that we’ve been making rose gélées, rose syrup, rose liquor, and an eau de parfum that is distilled with a spirally tube.  Ours is extremely leaky and we are constantly having very good-smelling disasters.  Every few mornings we go out to pick bucketfuls of pink Damask roses.  It can’t be too early, for dew dilutes their perfume, nor can the sun be too high, since midday heat shrivels the petals.  Before we soak the petals in hot water and some lemon juice to keep the color, the new Wwoofer and I sigh over the fluffy piles.  “I’ve always wanted to take a bath in these,” she says. 

Moi, je n’aime pas les douches.  The compost heap is full of soggy rose petals that, after they’ve stewed overnight, look like shredded wet toilet paper.  After about five minutes, baths lose their romance.  And call me a wimp, but the bathroom here in the basement is teeming with spiders.  They may be thin and elegant, but I wouldn’t want to risk tempting them out of their corners with any sort of thing as appealing as rose petals.

How to have a Nearly Perfect Day

We got up early, eating breakfast silently on the balcony.  There is a lot of not talking here, even when people are together.  I’ve always had a fear of silences and have a talent for making even the most comfortable silence into an awkward one.   However, I’m learning how to not talk, and it must be said that not talking in French is much easier than not talking in English. 

Instead, I pay attention to the light.  Where we are is not technically the south of France, but there is still that golden quality that outlines peach fuzz on the rumps of cattle and turns the bales of hay into Rumpelstiltskin’s gold.  In the mornings the sun makes everything precious, passing amber through a glass of tea or making the undersides of the leaves on the kiwi plant glow like murky green glass.

As we drove into town, the road cut through cool patches of forest that the sun had not yet touched.  In the village center fishmonger’s stand was a longtime up and running, and the square was scattered with carts of lettuce and snap peas.  We parked between two cheese stands and unloaded clangly glass bottles of syrups, liquors, and jams.  Chantale is as particular about her stand as she is with her kitchen—the mustard does not go in the fridge nor do the eggs, of course.  The pricey liquors are displayed in the middle of the stand while Tuesday’s too-sweet batch of rose gelée is hidden in the back.  And you must never confuse the clean with the dirty tasting-spoons. 

            The sun as it climbs out of the mountains dissolves into the great bowl of the sky, diluting the blue into something harder, hotter, and farther away.  I sit on a stool in the shade, watching the old ladies fondle zucchinis at the vegetable stand.  Someone brings us chocolate croissants and they are delicate and greasy after two weeks of barely tearable country bread.  Chantale runs off to do errands, leaving me to tell customers that chestnut liquor could be an apératif and a digestif and that no, the spoon bowl is not for sale.  It’s exciting seeing so many people at once, but in the afternoon when we pile our wares back in the truck and drive up the mountain, I feel relieved. 

After lunch I wander up a path behind the house and discover a horse and a little donkey chumping grass together in a clearing.  They come over and I offer them handfuls of flowers when the far-off tractor disappears behind some trees.  The horse flicks its tail irritably and the donkey looks up at me with mournful eyes.  There is a mysterious ticking noise coming from a battery attached to a solar panel, and I learn the hard way that this is how fences are kept electrified. 

Saturday afternoons we have off, and I spend the rest of mine reading in the grass, gradually becoming itchier until finally discomfort overrules laziness and I retreat to the house.  Chantale is putting on her boots in a flurry to go water the garden, but she briefly pauses to tell me that we are going out for dinner.  Her friend the contrabassist and his ‘bluegrass’ band will be playing Cajun music at an inn this evening.  I say bluegrass with a bit of irony not because I am the expert being from Appalachia, but because it’s funny how cultures take the foreign and turn it into their own (Tex-Mex, anyone?).  This is the third time I’ve encountered the French love for bluegrass, something I would not have expected.

When we drive down the mountain for the second time that day, the sun has returned to slant in the opposite direction.  Now the Alps are visible, rising faintly beyond the Ardèchoise mountains.  They look like paper cutouts, where the white of snow is wrinkled through with ski trails.  “Ho, I see a Swiss!” Serge says whenever he looks at them through the binoculars. 

This time we go down the opposite side of the mountain, arriving at a tiny village with a tiny chateau all in stone and surrounded by a wall.  The restaurant is at the joining of a few curvy alleyways, where the band Alex and the Alligators are already playing and our table outside is ready.  Chantale and Serge of course know everybody, and they do the triple cheek kiss (people are friendlier here than the 2-kiss Parisians) with the neighboring tables.  As the red glow lessens and finally fades on the stone walls, the inn’s owner comes over with his glass of whisky and sits talking with Serge.  He tells us every year they have a medieval fair in this very square.  All you have to do was cover the ground with hay and borrow a couple of pigs and chickens to let loose, and the village is medievalised. 

Our meal was supposed to be Cajun-themed (“une soirée exotique”) to fit with the music, but I for one doubt the likelihood of finding a mango crème brulée or an accordionist in New Orleans.  They did, however, bring out a tiny bowl of Sriratcha sauce (“the spicy Chinese,” it was called) as an accompaniment to the rice. 

I was mildly surprised that the huge lamps affixed to the crumbling walls turned on of their own accord, half-expecting to see someone come down the street in a cap and long pole.  The band started up an especially lively number, and the lithe black waitress came out and started dancing.  From the table of Dutch tourists rose up an enormous blond woman, who began to cha-cha very slowly and regally.  Another table that had been speaking Spanish all evening (everyone notices the tourists) started clapping in impressive syncopation.  Chantale in all her modern dance glory raised up her arms and whirled in circles, her chartreuse homemade skirt billowing out in the gathering darkness.  As we rattled home up the terrifying gravel path, I had a brief moment of fancy that Nathalie in the backseat with me, always silent, always hard to please, was my older sister, and that Serge and Chantale were my crazy French parents.

Fontfreyde, Farm #2

I’ve been thinking a lot about genius lately.  I just finished Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, in which she writes about herself through the unrealistically worshipful eyes (even for a lesbian lover) of Toklas.  She calls herself by her full name “It was then Gertrude Stein started her book that would change the style of modern language” and gossips about all her famous friends.  Apparently Picasso when drunk performed traditional Spanish dances on the floor, and young Hemingway was an extremely attractive lèche-botte (kiss-up, or as the French delicately call “boot-licker”).  This of course only makes me like him more.  Gertrude Stein was quite definite about what she thought about genius, and even if her own writing is tangly, it’s true that she had a talent for befriending the talented. 

            You always read about those old salons, where Einstein and Kafka chilled broodingly together in Prague, or where Virginia Woolf and her sister gathered intellect about them in Bloomsbury.  It must be true that smart people create momentum when they bounce ideas off other smart people.  Then the whole group of them, one night after a bit too much wine or absinthe or whatever the latest pre-trendy drink, hit upon an idea really extreme, and voila quoi, a movement is started.

            So, what is all this pseudo-intellectual talk leading up to?  Well, first of all it is the byproduct of the fair amount of solitary time I have.  When alone in a strawberry field without rational people to squash me down to size, I start getting unrealistically ambitious.  What did Gertrude Stein have that I have not?  (Answer: a lot.  Maybe if I start referring to myself in third person…)   Here is my new life goal:  since I can’t pretend I have enough talent to be an artist riding on the crest of a new movement, I’ve decided it will be my salon that hosts these creative agitators.  To completely devalue all feminist arguments, I would be perfectly content to provide the witty conversation and stimulating aperitifs that provoke the next Tristan Tsara to stick a spoon up his nose (or whatever it was) and create Dadaism.  As long as he doesn’t bleed on my tasteful salon decorations.

            My pre-occupation with genius may also be a self-defense strategy against my problems with languages.  That I do actually have half a brain, which my current Wwoofing family doesn’t really believe.  It seems that my half a brain, while now able to understand basically all conversation, is unable to convince my mouth to participate in this general Frenchness.  “Est-ce que vous voudriez une éponge?” I ask Serge, who is clearing the table.  The fact that I am still using the more formal vous with him means that he does not like me.  He comes to a complete stop, straightening up and squinting his eyes at me.  “Une éponge?” I falter, now completely unsure that I haven’t committed a huge mistake in politesse like the time I didn’t completely shut the door to the bathroom and he got up in the middle of dinner to close it.  Was passing him the sponge some form of slapping him with a glove?  “Pour la table?  Essuyer?”  I’ve fallen back on simple unconjugated verbs and motions, pretending to wipe the table with this problem-causing sponge.

            “Ahhh, une éPONGE,” he says finally, pronouncing it in the exact same way that I thought I had been.  “I didn’t understand.”  As a result of my uncooperative American tongue, Serge and Chantale now pause and often repeat, “do you understand?” whenever they talk directly to me.  Which is not so often.  There is another Wwoofer here, Nathalie, who is taking a six month sabbatical from her stressful news-editing job in La Defense (the business quarter outside Paris where all the skyscrapers were banished) to do a WWoofing tour of the country.  She is French only in that she smokes and loves cheese.  Otherwise, she wears camouflage pants and makes fun of me.  I look up to her enormously. 

            Serge and Chantale are a French couple who live in a beautiful house up on the mountainside. Their three grown daughters live in yurts they built themselves in the next field.  Serge is skinny and blunt and does a lot of carpentry.  Chantale is a willowy former dance and yoga teacher who does pottery.  She took Nathalie and I today down to her atelier (a shack next to the house) where she showed us the kiln that Serge built, and her beautiful earthen glazed bowls and sculptures.  They make syrups, liquors, and jams, eat flowers in the salad, and grind their own chestnut and chickpea flour in the nearby mill.  Naturally I am obsessed with them.  Naturally, they talk to Nathalie who is sarcastic (having fully mastered the French language) and who, in her thirty year-old way, is much more useful than I am.

            When I arrived, Serge and Chantale were in Lyon selling their jams at a medieval fair.  Nathalie picked me up in the nearest village, and after having a drink at a café and intimidating me immensely, we came back to the beautiful house on top of the mountain and had a beautiful meal on the balcony.  It is weird spending a day and night in a house whose owners you haven’t yet met.  Being curious (or more like nosy) I investigated.  There were many pictures and calendars of an Indian woman who seems to go by the name of Amma, and countless cds of Tibetan, Indian, and Native American prayer music.  When I found whole cardamom pods and cumin seeds in the cupboard, I knew I would like it here. 

            For our first day of work, we were to gather flowers which we would distil into syrup.  I was delighted, imagining us capering around Heidi-like in flowing skirts and baskets.  Chantale, who is tiny and graceful with a curly mop of grey hair, got out a long pole at the end of which there was a rusty and dangerous looking scythe.  “You look like death,” I told her.  Later I realized that perhaps I should never again attempt to joke in French.  She led us to a huge bush (sureau) blossoming in gauzy white flowers that reminded me of Queen Anne’s Lace.  Taking up the scythe, she aggressively hacked down a few branches.  Then she showed us how to rip the flower off the plant and toss it in fluffy handfuls into a bucket.  “Stamp when you wade into the high grass to scare off snakes,” she said.  The word snake in French, “serpent,” conjures up scary dragon-like images in my mind, somehow. 

When we had destroyed enough flowers, I realized that my hands and arms were covered in itching welts.  Later as we were boiling down the flowers, Nathalie discovered she was allergic.  They may be pretty to look at, but I suppose everything in nature has its own self-defense.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.

La fin s’approche

So, I’m technically a senior in college.  I feel like I maybe should have worked harder to achieve this.  Molly back at Williams tells me she has 60 pages to write before the year is finished for her (or more like before the year finishes her).  I had three exams, two that were open note, and one that I didn’t study for at all, thinking the exam was a week later than it was.  Wednesday night:  Kari, So, what time is the exam tomorrow?  Me:  Oh, do you guys have an exam tomorrow?  Kari:  Yes, that would be the exam for OUR class.  Me:  Oh.                    Maybe the best (worst?) thing was that it didn’t matter much.  Last year at this time, I had developed an eye twitch and didn’t leave the library, surviving off a diet of leftover Easter chocolate bunnies.  This year I restrict myself to only a bit of wine at cooking class an hour before the exam, and whine about my hand hurting, since writing in French is anything but concise.  In-class essays are not the prime example of good writing, and in French my coherence level drops even further: when in doubt, take the English word, double some consonants and add an e at the end.

With classes over, I can’t even pretend like I have things to do.  It’s funny–I read something about how Europeans have leisure time, while Americans have idle time.  I’d consider myself a fairly leisurely person, if leisurely means late to everything.  And I know, above all things, that it is incredibly obnoxious to complain about having too much free time.  But really, sometimes I find myself worrying about how to fill my hours.  I mean, it’s Paris!  It’s spring!  I’m at the prime of life, according to my host mom, who always urges me to “profiter” while I still can.  The slight edge of desperation in her voice is slightly unsettling.  

So, we indulge ourselves.  I particularly like wandering around with my huge manual camera, taking pictures of the piles of fruit in the markets and the interesting looking people at cafés.  The fruit stand owners don’t like it so much (it’s even illegal at the very fancy antique stands at the Marché de Puces), but the café goers vogue it up, profiling and blowing cigarette smoke dramatically for my benefit.  I also like lurking in playgrounds, and luckily with my zoom lens I can stand far enough away from the kids so that no one gets sketched out.  

All winter, I felt like I chased the sunshine around Paris, taking up my camera every time I thought I saw a break in the clouds.  As of today, I had to wipe the sunscreen off my hands before adjusting the focus.  The metro is becoming more and more unpleasant.  In the winter, it was a relief to walk down the steps and feel that warm waft of air with that particular burned rubber metro smell.  These days the metro remains un-airconditioned, and even the poles feel greasy to touch.  Also, when the car gets crowded and people stand holding onto the overhead bar, well, that’s a lot of raised arms and exposed armpits.  They have a weird sort of spray-on deodorant here in France, but I’m not convinced of its capabilites.

But I shouldn’t be complaining.  I’m trying to get as citied-out as possible, since it’ll probably be a while before I live in a city again.  Hopefully, Paris again.  This city is my first, and just like a first lover, I will always compare it with the ones that follow.  I’m just hoping that my standards have not been set ridiculously high.

Tuesday Part deux

Then, of course, I was late for my clarinet lesson.  My teacher, as usual, was later.  This would probably be annoying for punctual people, but we work well together.  The only time I’ve ever doubted her is when she set my reed on fire.  It was a new reed, and a little too hard but definitely promising.  “Tiens,” she said, reaching for her lighter.  It flamed up good for a second, and left me with a very charred piece of wood.  We both stared at it.  “Hop la,” she said encouragingly, chipping off some blackened bits.  Somehow I did not like the idea of putting that in my mouth.  Surprisingly enough, it did not play well.  “Tastes like ashes,” I said, making a mental note not to complain about reeds in the future.

When I got out of my lesson, the sun had gained confidence and everyone was out and about on the street.  There’s a primary school near the metro stop, and every day at this time all the slim Parisian mothers gather to pick up their beautifully dressed children.  I am in awe of French children, mainly because of their ability to speak French better than me.  There is a funny trend going on in children’s eyewear, however, that makes it hard for me to be too intimidated.  Someone had the brilliant realization that when 4 year olds wear glasses, they automatically look adorably precocious.  Why not exaggerate this look by giving the kid perfectly round Harry Potter glasses in bright plastic colors?  I can almost catch the smirk on these chic Parisian mothers’ faces, as they hand out the after-school croissants:  when you’re fifteen, mon chéri, and see pictures of yourself in those cherry red spectacles, you will truly hate me. 

Tonight I feel especially cultural, since Leah’s host mother’s friend is having an art gallery opening.  It is in a beautiful room where the roof is one huge skylight, and the snacks are gold chocolate euro coins (Hanukkah in May!) and elegant but bizarre dishes of rose colored radishes.  The paintings are all of La Defense, which is the business district (hence the coins) on the edge of Paris where all the skyscrapers are clustered.  Paris is ridiculously linear, where Napolean’s obelisk at the Louvre is directly in line with the Arc de Triomphe, with the squared trees on the grand Avenue Champs-Elysées connecting the two.  Later on, when Paris had to expand itself again (there are maybe two former “peripheral” boundaries, now well within city limits), they built another huge arch at La Defence, this time a huge empty square of what looks like black steel.  Right behind this gaping portal the skyscrapers crop up along the skyline, looking huge even in the distance as compared to Paris’s average six-story building.  Since I live right by the Arc de Triomphe, I have the perfect view of the skyscrapers.  Somehow, I’ve gotten it into my head that they look threatening clustered together along the horizon, like an invading army.

But the paintings at the art opening are pretty, with lots of glassy mirrored buildings depicted with squiggles.  The man pouring drinks definitely laughs at me when I ask for my third cup of juice, but it is way too hot under that glass roof for wine.  We make our way around the room, pretending to study each painting.  After a while the steel and glass and white squiggles all start looking the same, and I think I’ve eaten maybe 50 euros worth of chocolate coins.

On my way home, the sun is slanting in that saturated way that only happens after long gorgeous days.  The fact that it was gloomy and wet this morning makes it that much more poignant, and I decide to get off the metro at the church Sacre Coeur to take some clichéd sunset pictures.  I brought my old school manual camera with me to the art opening (do I have an inherent need to feel artsy?) stopping in the park beforehand to take pictures of the flowers and loungers.  The zoom lens is heavy, but it lets me take pictures of hilariously short-sighted children without their nannies getting suspicious. 

Two stops before Sacre Coeur, the metro stalls on the tracks.  An alarm is going off somewhere, and the fuzzy voice of the train driver crackles on, “Please wait a few minutes, there is an accident in the tracks.”  Our train is crowded, and people shift and mutter in sympathy, or maybe just annoyance.  “Mais j’ai un rendez-vous, moi!” shouts someone.  In casual French, an extra moi is added on the end of the sentence, which has always seemed to me a bit egotistic.

The murmuring gets louder, and I can hear shouting on the platform outside.  People start pushing to get out of the train, and a crowd forms around two men circling each other.  I stand up as one of the men slams the other up against the outside of the train.  Another man from the crowd breaks the circle and interferes, trying to pry the two apart.  It is a very weird moment, with the train paused at the platform with its doors vulnerably wide open as the rush-hour crowd surges around it.  There are no police anywhere, and I suddenly have the irrational fear that the train conductor, in a rage of annoyance at the hold up, will storm out of his cabin and leave us abandoned on the tracks.  Luckily, everyone keeps their head, and soon the bell sounds for the doors to close, and everyone rushes back onto the train.  As we pull out of the station, everyone cranes to watch the two men getting shoved apart on the stairwell.

Unfortunately due to that little adventure, by the time I climb the steps to get to the top of Sacre Coeur, the sun has basically set.  There is a guy with a guitar singing Billy Joel in a careful accent to an audience of tourists, and the carrousel lights have just turned on.  Even though it is just May, it already feels like one of those ripe late summer evenings.  There are numerous couples cuddling on the lawn with their bottles of wine and I walk past them trying not to look too closely.  From my high vantage point on the hill, I can make out the glimmer of gold on the dome of Les Invalides, and the red and blue piping on the Musée Pompidou.  The line from the obelisk to the two arches isn’t visible from this angle, but the skyscrapers at La Defense are looming like always.  From up here they seem less like an invading army and more like a spiky wall, surrounding the city.

Late at night, when I am in my room the rain starts again, tapping on the skylight so urgently that I think someone is at the door.  I’m back where I started this morning, but this time it’s nice not having to get out of bed when it rains like this.

A Normal Tuesday part I

I want to write about the weather, since it developed my day in a very formative manner.  When I woke up this morning, the light was of the bluish sort that happens when dawn never fully arrives, but sneaks in slowly.  The kind of morning where you don’t notice it’s light out until you see the silvery reflection of the sky in the puddles on the sidewalk.  There’s a skylight in my kitchen right above the shower, and since I am at the top of the building, I have the privilege of hearing the rain fall above me.  Small compensation for the six flights of stairs, especially since I have a suspicion the skylight leaks.  But at least I can cook in natural light–I made a real omelette the other day, without having to turn it into scrambled eggs at the last minute, and felt extremely competent about the whole thing.

Back to this morning, where I had an extremely painful second-to-last Cinema and Literature class.  I say second-to-last not without bitterness, since the only reason I made it out of bed was with the sweet (false) promise that this would be the last time I had to get up on the wrong side of 8 am.  Someone gave an exposé on the background music of three films, so most of the class was spent rewinding and fast forwarding between movie chapters.  The interesting thing about dialogue in movies, is that I really can understand almost all the mumbles if I watch the scene frequently enough.  When you watch a movie in French, you cannot completely relax, since all things whispered, slurred, or completely unexpected require special attention.  It makes me wonder how much in American movies I actually don’t hear something, but catch enough words to know exactly what was said.  Or, for instance, in real life.  I went out for a drink with my friend Sree who lives up on the sixth floor with me (maybe we should start calling it the Penthouse to give it some glam), and we were constantly second-guessing and pretending to understand each other’s accents.

Anyways, back to Cinema and Literature.  When a quiet rain gradually patters out, or a boring class finally ends, there’s a moment where it feels like someone has pulled the cloth from your ears.  Suddenly you notice the hush of the rain has lifted, and you can hear the birds squabbling outside the half-steamed up classroom windows.  The clouds haven’t lifted, but they’re a more optimistic stone gray color that matches the buildings.  Molly and I venture into the steam bowl that is the metro in search of a bikini she lusts after.  It even has a name: the Lolita.  Les Halles (pronounced without making a liaison from the s to the h–as far as I know just another rule of pronunciation that the French maliciously love to break) is a rather unpleasant combination of huge metro station, underground shopping mall, food court, movie theater, and–most bizarrely–a swimming pool.  We found Etam, store of the Lolita swimsuit, but they did not have the exact suit.  In fact, Les Halles is so large that there are two Etams hidden in its grimy corridors.  Then, we search for lunch aboveground, hesitating between a boulangerie that boasts the ‘best baguette’ prize and a Libanese place.  The man at the Libanese place hears us speaking English, and tries his bad English on us, even though I stubbornly order in my slightly better French.  As we eat in the garden, the sun makes its first appearance.