The Virtue of Almost

This week marks an important milestone on our little estate. After many months of debate, planning, getting quotes, and of course actual labor, the refurbishment of our swimming pool is nearly complete.

That word “nearly” might trouble some people. I can sympathize. Milestones should be about actually finishing something, about achieving a sense of closure. I mean, how inspiring is it to hear “Just do it, eventually?” Who brags about giving a job their 85%?

Ah, but this is France.

To say that things here move at a slower pace would, I think, be missing the point. Yes, it’s southern Europe as opposed to northern Europe, and it’s countryside rather than city, and each of the respective stereotypes of general slowness have some ring of truth to them. But it’s not so much the slowness of pace here as the intermittency of work that leaves us in so constant a state of almost-arrival. Anyone we hire to do anything seems to be perpetually coming and going, starting and stopping. There are always extra parts on order, or extra machinery needed, or additional experts to be consulted. Any process here seems to acquire extra steps, like the random baritone vowel sounds that characteristically insert themselves into the sentences of the southern French. Behn, euh, c’est preque euh, finit euh.

I’d love to say that after living here for four years I’d figured out a reason for all this. I’ve trotted out a few theories, and I think I might well be onto something with the idea that it all relates to the French capacity for appreciating nuance. In this slow quiet corner of an already introspective, abstract nation, people accomplish things in fits and starts because at every step they perceive issues that might simply be ignored in a more straightforward culture. Our nearly finished pool, like our half-repaired boiler or the perpetually about-to-be-overhauled transmission on my Renault 4, is in fact a Gallic form of celebrating the bedazzling multifariousness of life. Maybe.

The problem is, I’m finding myself doing the same damn thing. Our house and land is generously peppered with nearly-completed projects, half-hearted attempts and partly-realized ambitions. The most colorful of these can be traced back to that most dangerous of books, the great lexicon of country-living ambitions, John Seymour’s Compete Guide to Self-Sufficiency. The wreckage of Mr. Seymour’s well-intentioned encouragement is all around me. 

Fortunately for everyone concerned, including and especially my back, the drystone wall I dreamed of building has yet to evolve beyond the accumulation of a large pile of rocks at the edge of the upper field. Our yearly stab at a vegetable patch has seen more success. We have managed to acquire a collection of tomato, courgette and pumpkin seedlings, and have staked off a new patch of earth for this year’s potager. It is promising, at least, and the years have proved it more realistic than my early-aborted plans of bee-keeping.

But my favorite project, and the one that best illustrates just how these things get slowed down, is my farm gate. The field that separates our house from our rental cottages borders on a small road. This isn’t such a problem – it’s a narrow country lane that ends at the next farm, the sort of road where two cars couldn’t pass without one pulling off the side, the sort of road where two cars rarely pass anyway. But that field bordering on that road spoke to me. A vision rose in my head, a Seymouresque vision of that field separated from that road by an old fashioned hedgerow,  á l’Anglaise. I’d seen many of them during our years in England, read about them in Winnie the Pooh and the Wind in the Willows. I wanted one, and the good Mr. Seymour was telling me that with a little work it could be mine. A hedgerow, with an old-timey farm gate (important to allow access for my beloved jaunty blue tractor) was within my reach.

That was three years ago, and I’ve been reaching for that gate ever since. I started with the hedge itself, each winter setting aside a bit of time among other projects to carefully gather saplings in the surrounding forest – hawthorn, hornbeam, maple and broom – and slowly planted two staggered rows of rustic bushes that will one day, I’m certain of it, grow large enough for me to interweave them as befits a proper hedgerow. In the meantime, I put in two sturdy fenceposts – thick chestnut, also from our woods – and set about planning the gate.

Enough care and planning went into this gate to make it worthy of St. Peter himself. Two years ago I settled upon a design, measured, cut good long chestnut poles for the top and bottom and shorter ones for the sides and crossbeams, and bought all the metal parts (hinges, bolts, screws). It would be a double gate, one half large enough to allow access for the beloved JBT, the other small and easier to open for foot traffic. It had taken a while, my priorities were always elsewhere, but I had just about everything gathered together and ready to go.

And then, that spring, one of the guests in our cottages had the idea of building a little hut for the kids. He asked if that would be alright and if he could use some wood from the pile at the edge of the field. It seemed like a fun project, something our various guests could enjoy all summer, so I said okay and went about my business. He was a builder by trade, and he put together a wonderful little pyramid. The kids loved it. And I did too, until I noticed that its frame was composed of all the posts I had so carefully cut to size for my gate.

So my gate spent the next two years entombed in the traditional Egyptian manner, as honored and useless as any dead pharaoh. Other priorities reasserted themselves. Life went on and my hedge slowly grew. My fenceposts stood silently, watching that pyramid like two great sphinxes, waiting, waiting.

But this spring, the mummy awakes. The pyramid was becoming unstable, so I took it down, excavating the lost pieces of my gate and with them a renewed determination to complete this long dreamed-of project. I have replaced the pieces that could not be salvaged, gathered my tools, found the hinges that had been gathering dust in a corner of my shed, and started building.

And it’s nearly finished. 

Les Sacres du Printemps

Spring is a magical time – the maples and hornbeams are budding, dusting with pale green the grim lattice of dark bare branches that enclosed us all winter. With the birds back in force, the wisteria flowering and Wordsworth’s hosts of golden daffodils just finishing their annual march through the Quercy, the warm poetry of nature renewed can at last return to our frozen souls. I suppose my soul’s up for it, but quite frankly the rest of me is just too tired.

Every year it’s the same. When we close up the cottages for the winter, Sophia and I tell each other that this year, this year we will get most of the fixing up work done early, so that spring will not be stressful. And we always make a good start of it. But then winter makes its own demands and imposes its own limits. The cottages – not built with winter in mind – grow too cold to heat efficiently. So rather than struggle to get paint onto the walls before it freezes onto the brush, we shift our energies to the house, the land, other obligations. And next thing we know, there we are in March, every single March, making a mad dash to get the place in order before our first guests arrive for the Easter holidays.

It’s not just us – the entire countryside is on the move, getting ready for summer. Caves and castles are opening for business. Even the farmers seem intent on beautifying the place, carving the earth into immaculately ploughed fields, row after row of red-brown clouts of soil snaking deftly in synch with the surrounding landscape. When the tourists arrive, they will see the Quercy in its rightful state of pristine beauty, a land of sunshine and vineyards and clean tidy medieval villages.

Unfortunately the mass of work that goes into making everything picturesque seems to come all at once, and it’s not always so charming. Amid all the efforts to restore our surroundings to their perfect state of pretty, amid the cleaning and digging, the frantic painting and one particularly astounding feat of amateur electrician work that I honestly think could be compared to brain surgery, I found myself faced last Monday with yet another inconveniently-timed reminder of life’s less-picturesque side. I had to attend a school Parents Association (the “APE”) meeting.

I’m not going to prevaricate - these meetings are like dental surgery. I like the people, at least. Catherine the baker’s wife is the APE secretary, and she’s a good guarantee that the meeting will stay lively. Claire, Sylvie, Jean – I suppose I should be grateful for the social aspect of it. But after a few minutes of friendly chit chat, the fun and games stops, and the dark side of this otherwise idyllic world raises its venomous head. You see, apart from always cropping up when everyone is at their busiest, these meetings are entirely in French.

I don’t mean the language. That’s hard enough, granted, but the real issue is the French approach to doing business. There is a persistent Anglophone stereotype of the French as obsessed with talking in circles and hanging themselves up over bureaucratic nonsense. I get very defensive when confronted with stereotypes about the French, but this one’s true. Monday proved it. I spent three hours of my life listening to my dear friends talk about sausages.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss arrangements for the Marché des Ecoles, the second annual plants and pastries sale we hold to raise money for everything from books to school outings. It was just growing dark but there was still a faint red glow on the honey-colored stones as I drove up the winding narrow road to the tiny hilltop village of Cassagnes for the meeting. This is good, I thought, this is real. We live here not to be permanent tourists gawking at pretty villages, but to integrate, to do my part. But the rosy glow vanished as soon as I entered that village hall. There were twelve people at that meeting, and at no point were less than four of them speaking. While the G20 tackled the global economic crisis in London, the Quercy G12 negotiated the details of sourcing and preparing the sausages and frites that are to be sold as lunch at the plant sale. The frites are sold in little open carton boxes. So do we need plates for the sausages? No, people put their sausages on top of their carton of french fries. But what about those people who want sausages but no fries? And what about bread? Is it included in the price of the sausage or do people need to pay extra. Should those who eat their sausages without bread be penalized by having to pay for bread they don’t want? We wouldn't want to show prejudice against all the Atkins diet aficionados in the Quercy, now would we? In English, viewed from a distance, it would have been worthy of Monty Python. Up close and in French, an hour of this becomes a human rights issue. 

And then, as if the various sausage and fries controversies weren’t enervating enough, things got political. I think there is some kind of strange rule that the smaller the community, the more complicated the politics. The three villages of Montcabrier, Cassagnes and St. Martin-le-Redon share a nursery and elementary school. The nursery school is at St. Martin and the elementary is in Montcabrier. Each of these schools has a separate Parents Association board, each with its own President, secretary and treasurer, as well as a second for each position. That makes a total of 12 Parents Association board members for a total of 48 kids.

Even in France this bureaucracy/constituency ratio of 1 to 4 seems kind of extreme, and yet, the simple suggestion of merging the boards has become a battle that makes the run-up to the invasion of Iraq look congenial. We Cabrimontains, as the largest village of our three-village regroupement scolaire, tend to let our power – we are nearly 400-strong, after all, compared to just under 200 souls in Cassagnes and in St. Martin -  give us imperial pretensions. Or so you might think listening to the debate. The fact is that the “debate” seemed to center more around how to organize a vote on the issue. Is it appropriate just to let people tick a box, or must we hold a meeting? The conclusion was that if we hold a meeting, only the people against the merger would bother to show up. But the by-laws seem to require a meeting, and a group of die-hards from St. Martin would insist on their God-given rights. We discussed the various options, and heard several impassioned pleas for a democratic resolution (including assured anonymity in the balloting procedures) until midnight rolled around. Had we stayed any longer, I have no doubt we would have discussed dimpled chads.

As it was, we finally all agreed not to vote on whether or not to have a vote, and then opened a bottle of cider and a packet of cookies to celebrate. Democracy was tested and endured, and the treasured independence of the good people of St. Martin was preserved.

We all stacked the chairs and tables back against the wall of the village hall, turned out the lights and locked the doors before heading home. It was a clear night, the roads silent and empty as I wound my way down the Theze Valley toward home. The moon hung as a yellow crescent low on the horizon, a Cheshire Cat grin suspended in the darkness. Not a single reason to object to the merger had been produced in that entire three-hour meeting. The moon kept smiling, and I couldn’t help but smile back. Sometimes I have no idea why we’re here. I’m still glad we are. 

That other tradition

Tradition is important. It binds a family, a village, a people by reinforcing its links to a common past. The village news years drinks, carnival, the upcoming easter egg hunt at the Marqueyssac gardens, these are all traditions here that we've come to look forward to year after year.

This week we're celebrating another tradition. Every year, we reinforce our link to a common past by putting off repairs in the cottages until some point just after it becomes impossible to get them all done before our first guests of the new season arrive. It's a beautiful custom, a celebration of spring's renewal and an anticipation of the warm joy of summer, when the cottages will be filled with people who will expect such niceties as clean kitchens, functioning bathrooms and woodwork that does not flake large quantities of dried paint into their tea. 

All this is to say, this week's post is going to be a little late...