The Perfect Calm

We all have different ways of dealing with stress. When I was a lawyer, we all had one of those cushy little stress-balls in our desks – generally a freebie from one of the big financial printing companies – and we’d sit around squeezing the things and drinking coffee. Some people run. Some knit, play Sudoko, go on long walks. These days, when I’m stressed, I call Fabrice.

Fabrice is our odd-jobs guy. I’d say he looks the part, but he doesn’t really. Imagine a young guy from a tiny French village doing occasional jobs as a woodworker, builder or gardener, and I’m not really sure what you think of, but it’s not Fabrice. At first sight, he looks more the part of an urban junkie, someone who in a city you might expect to hit you up for some change. He’s rake thin, slight of frame, and about half his body mass is accounted for by the huge bundle of dreadlocks perched uncertainly above his kind, fine-featured face. If Tolkein’s elves listened to Bob Marley, the result would more than likely resemble Fabrice.

The youth of Montcabrier have a tendency, like the youth of most small rural communities, to leave home and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Some come and go. But Fabrice has stayed, and has no interest in leaving. The outside world is quite simply too crowded and fast-paced for his liking. So he lives here in a sort of parallel universe, staying alternately with friends, with his parents, or alone in his van. As far as I can tell, he is happy.

We had Fabrice around this week helping to clear up after another round of tree-cutting. He pulls up in his old car, dark gray but for one white fender, and climbs out. He opens the trunk, pulls out his chainsaw, a gas can, an old machete with a taped-up handle. He says a quiet bonjour, we discuss the weather, and then he gets to work.

I watch him for a few minutes cutting branches, methodically stacking logs, one by one, and it reminds of Buddhist monks going about their daily monastic chores. Is he contemplating God as he drags branches and packs them into the trailer? Is he practicing awareness meditation? Pondering Rousseau’s writings on the Noble Savage? I don’t know, but he gives off a sense of calm that is almost soporific. When he’s around, I find myself moving more slowly, speaking more softly. I feel reassured. I used to assume, based largely on his appearance, that he spent his free time smoking weed, but I’ve come to doubt that. Fabrice is a mind-altering substance in his own right.

He pauses, looks around, gathers strength and then swings his machete, separating another branch from a fallen tree. To talk to him you would hardly imagine that the world is in the grips of financial meltdown. He scrapes a living from odd-jobs like this, a bit of construction work, occasionally helping a friend who sells bric-a-brac at local markets in summer. It’s not that he’s lazy – he will carry heavy logs, dig, plant, chop down trees, haul branches all day long without ever appearing tired or uttering a word of complaint. And it’s certainly not that he’s unskilled. Over the years I’ve come to learn that he is an accomplished carpenter – he’s done some amazingly meticulous jobs for us, from building a bookcase to repairing a couple of antique chairs. He even makes traditional wooden rowing boats – I suppose that’s as close as he’s got to a hobby, although it’s hard to imagine him having much need to blow off steam. I once asked him if he sold any. Yes, he makes them to order, in theory at least. But given that his only attempt at marketing is a small wooden sign that reads “bateaux” nailed to a tree along a dead-end country lane, I’m not holding my breath. But then again, neither is he. All he’s after, as far as I can tell, is to live in peace in this quiet corner of France. One could do worse.

But these days I’m starting to see an ambitious twinkle in his eye. A new law in France has made it much easier for people to start their own small businesses and not have to pay enormous social charges, so Fabrice is thinking of setting himself up in a business building wooden houses. He has managed to buy a small plot of land of his own in the forest, reached by a dirt path. Not the choicest real estate, perhaps, but it’s perfect for him. He’s looking for good straight pine trees to cut down to use for building a little chalet. It won’t have electricity, and he’ll heat it with a wood-burning stove, but it will be his, and I would imagine it will suit him just fine.

Of course, my secret fear is that we'll lose our friendly, dependable and curiously enlightened odd-jobs man. He's settling down, building a house, thinking of starting a career. Joining the rat race. But I don't think that will change him. Fabrice will bring that sense of calm to whatever he does. In the meantime, he's very welcome to bring it here.  

  

Keeping it Simple

We came to France for a simpler life. It sounds easy, a goal that should require nothing more than a shedding of things, perhaps a reorientation of priorities. But living a simpler life has proven challenging in some unexpected ways. It takes more patience than I had imagined. It requires physical fitness and mental discipline. And, as it turns out, a simpler life requires a lot of complicated equipment.

When I was first browsing dreamily through John Seymour’s Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency I had different ideas. It all seemed so natural – the book is filled with lovely illustrations of hoes, spades, axes and scythes. A scythe, that’s what I wanted. To spend hours and hours on the land, scything and reaping and threshing and shunting, I wanted nothing more than to live in a world of obscure, hearty Anglo-Saxon verbs. And I was itching to go out and buy all the obscure Anglo-Saxon nouns to do it with.

And it’s amazing just how many of those nouns, Anglo-Saxon and otherwise, I need for even the most basic of tasks. Take firewood. Yes, our ancestors managed to keep the home fires burning using wood processed with axes and saws, but having tried it, I understand why they tended to die young. Today, if you’re cutting your own wood you need a chainsaw. And then of course you want a spare chain, files and perhaps a grinder for sharpening the chain, and a trestle or sawhorse for cutting the meter-long stacked logs into smaller sections for burning. Bigger logs need to be split, so you get an axe, but for even bigger ones, it’s best to get a sledgehammer and a wedge – preferably a neatly twisted one like I’ve got so it splits the wood more easily. It’s all satisfyingly heavy and conveniently cool-looking.

For maintaining the grounds the chainsaw is useful, but it doesn’t stop there. You’ve got brush to cut, grass to mow, branches to trim. You’ve got a garden that needs digging, weeding, planting. Fences, gates, patios need fixing. All this requires massive amounts of gear, much of which involves at least an electric motor if not a combustion engine. There’s the hedge trimmer, the brush cutter, the various power hand tools, a compressor. After the chainsaw, my favorite bit of equipment has always been my jaunty blue tractor-mower. I ride around on it all summer mowing grass and all winter hauling logs. It is my mid-life crisis red convertible, and it makes me happy.

But even the tractor’s place in my heart has been usurped by something new.

We came here with ideas of living in harmony with nature, of reducing our footprint. But it’s not always easy, and ever since we moved in we’ve been plagued by the question of what to do about the terraces. You see, the terraces around our house and holiday cottages are packed earth covered by locally-quarried gravel, an inexpensive, low-impact and very French alternative to paving. But weeds spring up, and the surface area being too big to simply pick them all by hand (believe me, we tried), we have in the past had to resort to chemical weedkillers. But finally I have discovered an environmentally friendlier solution, and yet another piece of equipment.

Some clever person has come up with the idea of destroying weeds by inducing thermal shock. Simplicity itself: a metal tube with a handle attaches to a long flexible hose, which in turn attaches to an ordinary gas bottle of the sort used for gas stoves. A six-inch flame bows out the end of the tube, and you simply hold that flame over the weed for a second or two, until it starts to wither. The shock kills the weed, but does not pollute the environment. In other words, I’ve bought myself a blowtorch.

I spent a very happy and only moderately dangerous afternoon scorching weeds the other day, and I’m totally hooked. This thing is great. Not only does it eliminate unwanted plants, but it’s capable of obliterating pretty much anything in its path – dead leaves, twigs, pets, inquisitive children, all bow before the power of my butane-fed jet of fire. I’m busy dreaming up all sorts of new uses for this new toy. Bonfires will be a piece of cake from now on. Previously I have struggled to perform what should be a simple task of igniting a large pile of dead branches. No problem now, with my portable arson kit I’ll be incinerating garden waste as fast as I produce it. It’s not quite subtle, but after a few humiliating experiences of watching my fires dwindle before accomplishing the job, I’m done with subtle.

I’m not the only one who gets worked up about this kind of thing. I’ve noticed this tendency among both the local farmers and the expats who move here, this obsession with equipment. It’s normal enough – you’ve got a job to do, you need the right tools, but clearly there’s more to it. Farmers here go into massive debt just to own a lot of farm equipment that they could much more efficiently rent as needed. I scoffed at first, but once you’ve seen one of these modern grape harvesters at work - huge sci-fi contraptions that straddle the rows of vines and pick the delicate grape clusters as they roll along – it’s hard not to get drawn in. In cities, people have fancy cars and granite countertops. Here, we’ve got machinery.

But I’m content with what I have. My blowtorch is a small and relatively simple device, but it does the job. And best of all, as I torch plant after plant, weed after insidious weed, into ashes, I can do so with a sense of satisfaction in my heart, knowing that the path of devastation I leave behind me is non-toxic and totally environmentally friendly. I can feel like I’m doing my part.

But the gratification of my pyromania is a definite bonus. 

Rabbits, dinosaurs and a damn good coffee

We have a Saturday morning ritual. It started last year. Sophia decided one morning to try out the farmer’s market in the nearby village of Villefranche-du-Perigord and came back raving about it. So now, every Saturday, we talk about going.

“Do we need anything there?”

“We could maybe use a few more tomatoes.”

Inevitably one of us has recently been to the big, efficient and aggressively un-picturesque supermarket in Montayral. So we shrug, look outside. It’s raining, or it’s already late morning, or we’re feeling lazy.

“Next week, definitely.”

But occasionally one of us bucks tradition and actually goes. As I did this past Saturday.

Villefranche is one of the old “bastide” towns, “new” towns built around the time of the Hundred Years War (14^th and 15^th centuries) as centers of trade that would be loyal – ie pay taxes - to the king rather than to local feudal lords. As picturesque medieval villages go, Villefranche is a pretty ratty one. Lost deep in the forest, far from just about everything, its claim to fame is that the surrounding woodlands are teeming with chestnuts, cep (porcini) mushrooms and deer. Villefranche has a real backwoods feel to it, like the Ozarks only with better food.

The market itself it tiny, especially off-season. There are three or four fruit-and-vegetable stands, our local Montcabrier vintner selling his wine, and usually the mobile pizza van. That’s about it, which is what I love about it. I suppose it appeals to my sense of solidarity with the underdog. I’m a lot like Charlie Brown, who goes to buy a Christmas tree and chooses the smallest, saddest one because it needs him. Surely Villefranche needs me.

And surely no one in Villefranche needs me more than the guy running the smallest of the fruit-and-veg stands. He’s always there, at least he has been every time I’ve shown up, with just a small table of vegetables set up in front of his little van. I don’t know his name – I probably wouldn’t be able to understand it if he tried to tell me. He’s one of these gruff old farmers who speak in a garbled patois that most Parisians wouldn’t understand either, which gives me some comfort as I smile and nod idiotically at the various sounds he produces during our brief interaction.

He’s having a conversation with a few older old men in Occitan, the ancestral language of southern France, which sounds like a mishmash of strangely-pronounced French, Spanish, and Harry Potter spells. He sees me waiting, continues his conversation for a few more minutes as I examine his caged rabbits (they too need me, but they’re better off in a stew than in the clutches of our cat Oliver, who tried to breed with the last rabbit we “rescued”), and then looks up at me as if seeing me for the first time. His friends continue on among themselves, and he comes over to see what I need. I make a polite remark about the weather. He responds “eh behn, za fay du byeng, ung peh d’zolay.” I don’t always know exactly what he’s staying, but I recognize friendliness when I see it. So I smile and reply with something noncommittal as I pick over the half dozen little heads of lettuce on his table to find the one with the least mud plastered to it. I get a few onions. Sometimes he has butternut squash, but not today. What he pulls out of that little van is whatever he pulled out of the ground that morning, no more, no less. Two euros exactly, he informs me. The prices, I’ve noticed, he pronounces with startling clarity.

Feeling smug at having had a genuine olde worlde moment, I move on the other fruit-and-veg guy who has a larger repertoire than my friendly veg-and-rabbit man, and then I’m off to the bakery. I always feel a little guilty there, as if I’m betraying Catherine and Gerard at the Montcabrier bakery, but they make great croissants, and I kind of enjoy smiling at the haunted-looking girl behind the counter, presumably the baker’s daughter, and having her respond with a dark, complex Fellini film sort of expression.

From there I go to the rock shop, and here’s where Villefranche becomes just a little strange. It’s not just a rock shop. It’s a jewelry shop, but much of it is taken up by fossils and minerals. It wouldn’t be at all out of place in a big city – it seems aimed at catering to everyone, from polished tiger’s eye pebbles to custom made necklaces to enormous fossils that any museum would be proud to display.

Fossils are my thing, so I love the place, but I have to ask myself: how many people around here are really looking to fork over several thousand euros for the lower mandible of an Allosaurus? Even the prospect of selling the €500 dinosaur egg seems a little dicey to me. What must friendly veg-and-rabbit man think of this place – is he saving up his euros to acquire a glittering watermelon-sized cluster of amethyst to put on his mantelpiece? “Zay byeng, za.”

I suppose it’s just something that happens in underdeveloped areas beautiful enough to become holiday destinations. This is one of the poorest parts of France, a region of small family farms, where even the better-off locals can remember childhoods hoeing fields or force-feeding ducks. But they now live side by side with retired English and Dutch and urban French couples, with bankers and lawyers who buy second homes here, with foreign families starting holiday cottage businesses and enrolling their children in village schools. Different economies, different priorities, are forced to live side by side.

And the results are mixed. It means that young people have a hard time affording housing here. It means their local cafes and bars, their markets, their churches are invaded by outsiders many of whom hardly speak French much less Occitan. Perhaps it means the loss of a certain sense of authenticity. And yet, it’s not the rock shop or the upmarket café that threatens the local way of life here. They tend not to displace previously existing businesses, and they are locally-owned. It’s the supermarkets in Montayral, so quick and easy and available to everyone, that risk slowly putting an end to the livelihoods of people like friendly veg-and-rabbit man. The outsiders, seeking local color, often are the ones most inclined to shop at the farmers’ markets. The foreign influx, despite its downsides, means income. It means jobs, it means enough people buying produce to keep the markets viable, it means more variety of goods and services.

And it means I can listen to a little Occitan, endure the brooding gaze of the baker’s daughter, examine the lower mandible of an Allosaurus and then go have an Ethiopian Moka Sidamo coffee in the quirky little café up the road, all on a Saturday morning 15 minutes from home. Zay byeng, za.

Becoming a Small

We’ve just come back from spending two weeks in California, and I’ve discovered something unsettling. I’ve shrunk.

If you’ve been following this blog you’ll have guessed by now I intend this in a vague quasi-philosophical sense that will give rise to various reflections on life in rural France about half way through this post. I’m hoping to get there, but first things first. I’m talking clothing.

One of the things we invariably do in America is buy clothing, which is both less expensive and less, er, polyester than much of what we can find within an hour’s radius of our house. But this time around I suddenly found myself buying a shirt in a size “small.” How’d I become a small? I have my suspicions. It’s the same reason that even if I buy a shirt that’s ostensibly my size it fits me like a garbage bag. I’m not shrinking in an absolute physical sense. I have become small now, in a relative sense, because people in general are getting, well, wider.

But - here it comes - this sartorial downsizing has broader implications, a symbolic resonance if you like. Living someplace so small-town and remote has changed me, changed all three of us, more than we might have expected. We have come to feel smaller in what has started to seem like a very big world. Even though I was born in Los Angeles, I felt dwarfed and disoriented on this latest trip back home. Montcabrier to Los Angeles is perhaps an extreme transition - plenty of thoroughly urban people feel dwarfed and disoriented in LA. Plenty of Los Angelinos feel dwarfed and disoriented in LA, which may just explain that impression of pampered goofiness which haunts the world’s entertainment capital. But the fact remains, our tolerance for big has shrunk.

One particular shopping trip really said it all. We went to the Topanga Plaza, a local shopping mall, ostensibly the same mall I visited regularly as a child, with the simple idea of picking up some inexpensive clothing and letting Sebastian ride the double-decker carousel. No big deal, but every step of the way I was reminded of the pervasive smallness of our new home. Having gotten used to narrow country roads, often only a little more than one car wide, just pulling out of my mother’s driveway was confusing. Her suburban street, a cul-de-sac with minimal traffic, is already wider than the main road to Cahors and even a short section of it would qualify in most villages as an ample parking lot. Each lane on a California freeway could nearly serve as two on a French motorway (and Los Angelinos, I noticed this time, are no better at staying within these wide lanes than the French are at staying in their narrow ones). But then they need to be: one in three cars is an SUV or Hummer large enough to transport livestock.

So we arrive at the mall, and in the course of five minutes pass more shops than we could find within a 45-minute drive of Montcabrier. The food court alone offered a dozen varieties of ethnic food – having to choose between Korean BBQ, sushi and Mexican when you have gotten used to the idea of pizza as being ethnic is daunting, but a wonderful problem to have. And then it hit me: our entire village, the whole thing, from the ruined medieval gate at the west end to Jojo’s house at the east, from the village’s resident donkey in his field at the north to the old priory with its Renaissance chimney to the south, would fit within this one enclosed climate-controlled retail space. Even the ceiling with its plentiful roof-windows could easily accommodate the three-tiered triangular bell tower of St. Louis, Montcabrier’s church.

I have to admit, it gave me a vaguely uncomfortable feeling, wandering around so banal a place and yet reacting with a mix of scorn and awe more appropriate to visiting Dubai than to shopping at the local Target. Lost among clothes racks big enough to require planning permission in Europe searching for something wearable among shirts that that look like they should come with poles, stakes and mosquito netting, I felt nostalgic for our little world. And yet this too is home for me. This is what was meant to be my world. Not just the corndog stands and the tacky environmentally nightmarish suburban trucks people drive in, but the vibrancy, the diversity, the sheer energy that comes with packing millions of people into a relatively small area. It is all mine to embrace or to reject, but what did not sit well with me, what really got me thinking, was the fact of being at once so drawn to it and yet so uncomfortable in it. I find myself between worlds, which on some level means being nowhere at all. I am homesick, but I’m no longer sure where home is.

Sebastian has no such sense of angst, as far as I can tell. While Sophia and I waffle about questions of culture and lifestyle and identity and belonging, he just gets on with it. Montcabrier is his world, and LA is a magical far-off land where every couple of years he gets spoiled by his grandmother, plays with his cousin and solemnly shakes hands with Mickey Mouse. Sophia and I may inwardly giggle when he asks if the canary yellow Ferrari that has just blown past us is the mailman, because of course back home that yellow is the signature color of the French mail service, but Sebastian just takes it in stride. Like having to learn French by osmosis when he entered nursery school, this cultural acclimatization is just a normal part of his multicultural world. Papa’s home town is huge and American. Mama’s is a bit smaller and Dutch. Sebastian’s is tiny and French. It’s all fine with him. He is able to appreciate it all for what it is, which in itself is a gift.

Arriving back at my mother’s house, I open the remote-controlled garage door and we drive in to park. Sebastian seems far away and thoughtful as I unbuckle him from the car seat.

“You know,” he says at last, looking around, impressed, “this is a good barn. It’s so big, you can just drive right inside it and not get wet in the rain. I like this barn.” He’s got a point. 

The Guns of Winter

February. The sounds of winter hush and crackle along the frozen landscape like frost patterns on windows. The cold whisperings of nature drift through the air like a mournful, cryptic sentence already hinting of spring: the ticking of woodpeckers, the dripping of dew as it thaws from the bare branches, the leaf-rustling of the blue tits and red squirrels searching for food. The crunch of frost beneath hesitant feet. And of course, the occasional staccato burst of gunfire. Winter in the Quercy means hunting season.

When we first moved here I was all about quaint rural traditions. I’d bought John Seymour’s classic guide to self-sufficiency and – okay, let’s get confessional – I had fantasies about growing our own vegetables, keeping chickens for eggs and bees for honey and home-brewing wine, beer and mead on the side. And part of those fantasies involved joining the hunt and bagging the occasional wild boar. To be fair, we have managed to tease a few tomatoes and raspberries from the soil, and I haven’t given up on producing my own bottle of wine some time before I die. But my visions of early-morning deer stalking with my farmer friends have run up against one stubborn problem. La chasse, as the hunt is called, is a little spooky.

I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting – manly adventures in the woods, I suppose, confronting and defeating a charging wild boar, perhaps roasting the thing over an open fire in the woods while the farmers taught me ancient secrets of animal tracking or local medicinal plants. Okay, maybe not, but realistically, although the only things I’ve ever hunted in my adult life were clay pigeons, I had witnessed both American and English hunting and had assumed that the French version would be some combination of the two.

American hunting, like much of American society, plays out a mythos of rugged individualism and unbounded opportunity. Rich or poor, any man can head into the woods and face his prey, engage in the eons-old quasi-spiritual dance of souls between man and beast, a ritual homage and putting off of man’s own sense of mortality. The idealized American hunter is rugged, solitary, free and sanctioned by God to kill things and talk nonsense about it afterwards. Fox hunting in England is pretty much the opposite. Ostensibly the goal is to cull foxes, but that’s merely an excuse to gather hounds, horses and upper class English people in snazzy jackets and jodhpurs for a morning of riding, eating and drinking. It’s essentially an elite social bonding ritual, and the only struggle is to look good while staying on a horse as it jumps over hedges and ditches in pursuit of a pack of dogs. The only thing he has in common with the American hunter is that he too is sanctioned by God to kill things and talk nonsense about it afterwards.

Now the French version is in a league all its own. In one sense, it’s hunting at its most pure. By and large, the hunters here are local farmers, and their goal is to cull crop-destroying wildlife – deer and wild boar – and to put a little extra meat on the table. There’s no half-baked philosophy or elitist tradition here, nor any divine sanction or silly talk. It’s a job that needs doing, so the men get together a few times a week over winter and do it.

On the other hand – Well, it’s always that pesky other hand that keeps things interesting. Unlike so much in French culture, hunting here is anything but subtle. I’ve tried to find some romance in it. Perhaps there is something beautifully primeval about hunting in packs – a long stroll down genetic memory lane inevitably takes us back to tribes with spears ganging up on mammoths – but it’s not easy to idealize dozens of men fanning out through the countryside in beat-up white hatchbacks and 4x4s hoping to gang up on Bambi with enough firepower to invade a small country. Although la chasse probably does recapture the chaotic frenzy of a mammoth hunt more closely than its Anglophone counterparts, it’s a pretty ugly affair. While one group races up and down country lanes to no clear purpose, another gang has spread out along strategically chosen roads, guns in hand, to await their prey. The third group, a pack of very hungry dogs, usually followed by a puffing paunchy Frenchman blowing a hunting horn, is busy trying to flush the deer and boar out of the woods and into the line of fire of the hunters. And when that happens, the real fun begins.

Paint the scene in your head. A line of woods, an open field, a road and a handful of armed men standing about 50 yards apart from each other. It’s a cold winter morning, the landscape dusted with the vagueness of frost and mist, the chill displaced from the hunters’ blood by a good shot or two of pastis shared that morning before they set out. The barking of dogs grows closer, the blast of a hunting horn rips the air, and suddenly a frightened, hapless deer bounds out of the trees into the open field. Does a single, well-aimed shot crack through the bitter morning air offering instant resolution of the timeless confrontation between man and beast? No, you guessed it, that quiet field ignites in a deafening unsteady barrage of gunfire. As we listen to shot after futile shot echoing through the woods, I feel grateful for France’s strict gun control laws. If these guys had access to more firepower I wouldn’t be surprised to hear machine guns and heavy mortars ripping through the forest.

It is a testament to the poor aim of these hunters that there is ever anything left of the animal once they’ve brought it down. Yet I know from experience that large chunks of deer often remain in edible condition. They show up often as Loto prizes, or sometimes as gifts to local landowners. There is something grotesquely charming about having a smiling, scruffy-looking man drive up to your house in a battered old car and offer you a clear plastic bag of unidentified bloody meat. Thank you for understanding our time-honored traditions, those bags of meat say. Don’t ever go walking through the woods in a brown sweater or coonskin cap, they silently add.

It’s easy to make fun of the hunt – stories about drunk hunters shooting each other are particular favorites of walkers and disgruntled landowners – but I have kind of a soft spot in my heart for these guys. They’re rough, they’re reckless, and they seem like exactly the sort of people who should not be running around armed. But they work hard, they believe in what they do, and they’ve done their best to be nice to us. They slow down as they pass by our house, conscious that we have a small child and that we rent cottages to families. They wave politely when they see us, and every year we get an invitation to the hunters’ association ball. But they have never asked me to join the hunt, and I’ve never asked to come along. Better for everyone, I suspect.

On the other hand, brewing mead is sounding a lot more plausible to me these days. It keeps you indoors.

The wrong sort of silence

Silence comes in many colors. We get a lot of the good kind of silence, the one that comes from being in the countryside, away from crowds and cars and major airline routes. But there’s another kind, that peculiar silence that falls over a conversation when someone has said or done something inappropriate. The silence of the faux pas. At Sebastian’s soccer practice last week, the silence was deafening.

It all started when I made the mistake of saying hello.

You would think, in the interest of social harmony, that saying hello should be encouraged by being made easy. It is where I come from. American greetings come only in a few varieties. Hello, hi, yo, hey, what’s up – even the intensely annoying “hey there” will rarely cause much consternation. But for the French, who for centuries were the uncontested leaders of European civilization simply by being really really complicated, life is not so easy. Here, saying hello is a series of signs and countersigns, like in spy films, during which you are given the opportunity to establish whether or not you are civilized, i.e. French.

My hello to Jean-Pierre, one of the soccer coaches, was just plain wrong. It may seem easy in French class. Bonjour. Good day. Ça va. How are you, or literally, how goes it. But dear old Mr. Welch, my high school French teacher, never mentioned the unwritten rule. Maybe it’s a leftover from the hard times during the war, but the use of bonjour is strictly rationed to one per person per day. If you’ve said it to someone, you are expected to remember that fact and not say it to the same person again. To forget is presumably inattentive and therefore rude.

Jean-Pierre’s a real stickler for not double-bonjouring. I secretly suspect he takes a playful pleasure in catching me out. His eyes twinkle as he flashes that puzzled, almost professorial smile and reminds me that we have already said bonjour. And then he leaves that silence, the one I tend nervously to fill with some particularly flagrant piece of bad grammar. Jean-Pierre is a kind and honest man – his silence is never scathing, and at least he never looks at me, like some others have, as if I were a patient in a psych ward - but he sure doesn’t make it easy.

Moving on from Jean-Pierre, I almost immediately stumbled into the next trap. The kids were all doing their practice drills, kicking the ball around cones with varying degrees of success, and on the sidelines stood two of the mothers. One of them I’ve gotten to know by now, but the other I’d never seen before. And as I walked up to say hello – an easy bonjour, I thought, having not seen them yet today - I suddenly found myself faced with the big question. Do I or don’t I? I’m talking about the bisou.

Bisous are those little kisses the French give each other when they meet, and they can be a real pain. Technique is easy enough once you know it. They are air kisses, not big wet smackers, and typically you lightly touch cheeks while doing it. Here in the Quercy one gives two of them, one per cheek. In Paris, I’m told that some people give up to four. In the city of love, even a single hello seems to border on making out. 

But the hard part is knowing whom to kiss. Even the French don’t run around smooching just anyone. The gender rules are easy and obvious: women give bisous to both women and men, whereas men give them only to women. Children are treated as unisex but otherwise are not exempted. It takes a little time getting used to letting near-strangers giving your kid a kiss on the check, I can tell you.

The hard part is deciding if you know someone well enough to have been accepted into their bisou circle. My understanding is that you only bisous friends and some acquaintances, so it involves some judgment calls. That’s where it got tricky at football. Having previously crossed the bisou threshold with Soccer Mom #1, we said bonjour and air kissed. So far so good, but that left Soccer Mom #2. Bonjour, we say, then panic sets in. I feel rude if I don’t kiss, but kind of lecherous, or at the minimum presumptuous, about cuddling up to this total stranger. She too seems uncertain and fearful. We look nervously at each other and them it comes. Silence. This kids play on. We watch. The conversation is over before it has even begun.

I guess these things take time to unravel. David explained to me the proper behavior if you have already said bonjour to someone and then see them again later in the day: you either ignore them, jump into conversation without any greeting as if they’ve been standing next to you the whole time, or you say “re-bonjour.” The bisous thing just takes practice, as does the similarly vexing question of when to use “tu” or “vous,” the informal and formal forms for “you.” Other mysteries have proven harder to solve. Saying ça va, for example, is usually treated as perfectly normal and polite, but every once in a while someone responds to this casual “how are you” as if you just asked them about their favorite sexual positions. It’s stuff like this that can make you want your kids to take up chess.

It’s all turned out alright so far. Jean-Pierre is as friendly as ever, and I don’t think Soccer Mom #2 was actually offended. Although I have no genuine excuse for not remembering when I have said bonjour on a given day, the people here seem pretty forgiving when I get it wrong. Nobody in the village has turned hostile after I inadvertently said tu instead of vous, and I have yet to be slapped for an inappropriate bisou. We are foreigners, after all, and the good people of Montcabrier have cut us a good deal of slack.

And the silence never lasts too long. If you want real silence, real awkwardness, try spilling an entire cup of hot coffee in the lap of a fellow passenger on a transatlantic flight, as I just did.

Sometimes, pleading cultural differences only gets you so far. 

A Moment of Epiphany

Our son came home from school with the fève yesterday. He always does.

Every year when we are packing away the Christmas decorations and Epiphany rolls around, Sebastian starts talking about the Galette des Rois and the fève, or bean, he is certain he will find inside. It’s a wonderful tradition. The galette, a pastry usually filled with frangipane, is supposed to contain one bean. Whoever gets the bean is “king” for the day. Sebastian, a six-year-old born to the purple if ever there was one, comes home with the bean and a little paper crown every year.

Of course the bean stopped being a bean more than a century ago, and was replaced by tiny ceramic figurines. In the old days they were little nativity figures, so whoever got to be king would come home with a miniature angel or Baby Jesus to put among other childhood keepsakes. Modernity being what it is, these days your child is far more likely to turn up a character from the latest Pixar film than a Biblical figure. I have to admit, that sharp little piece of ceramic lurking in my son’s dessert seems alarmingly easier to swallow than the corporate crassness of replacing Mary and Joseph with Asterix and Obelix. But the look on Sebastian’s face when he puts on his paper crown makes the risk seem worth it. He hasn’t broken a tooth yet.

Now, I’m not one to doubt my little boy’s suitability to be king every year, but I couldn’t help becoming a bit suspicious. At school they go through several of those pies every January, and Sebastian’s figurine collection is starting to pose storage problems. “I think there was more than one fève in that galette.” he ventured cautiously, interspersing his accented English with perfectly pronounced French words. “Actually, lots of kids got one.” This didn’t seem to diminish the excitement in the slightest.

When Sophia commented that the ones we buy at the supermarket have only one figurine, his highness shot us an exasperated look. “No, but Danielle’s dad made the galette for our school lunch. He must have put in lots of fèves.” He looks at his figurine proudly - this one is a somewhat sleazy-looking man in a yellow suit, with bits of almond filling still lodged under the ridge of his jacket. “Can I watch some television?”

I’ve never met Danielle’s father – unfortunately chance has dictated that I will always imagine him as a sleazy-looking man in a yellow suit – but he has made my day. Beyond the fact that our son survived yet another encounter with a school-sponsored choking hazard, I love knowing who baked Sebastian’s Galette des Rois. When I try to imagine a similar thing happening back in the US or in England, I keep running up against images of concerned parents objecting on the basis of hygiene laws, legal responsibility, child safety… Offering homemade pies from relatives of school employees – Danielle cooks the school lunches, among other things – seems to my American legal mind like a potential liability issue. Back home, perhaps it would be.

But the French, bless them, just don’t see it that way. It’s not that there is any lack of regulations. On the contrary, the French love them, and French bureaucrats are famous for wielding them with astonishing inflexibility and even a certain sinister pleasure. But, especially out here in the countryside, the law is made to be ignored if it gets in the way of more important values, like food.

This relaxed Gallic approach to rules has its downsides, as anyone who has managed to survive driving in France will appreciate. But in a tiny community like this, it’s priceless. Rules exist to guide behavior because, particularly in a large community, social norms are incapable of doing so. In a community of a few hundred people, however, where everyone knows everyone else (and, let’s be honest, is almost certainly everyone else’s cousin), the rules can be tucked in a drawer, to be pulled out only in time of need. As long as no one complains, there is no problem. No harm, no foul.

This doesn’t work in a community of strangers. Parents, as a general rule, don’t want random strangers feeding pies to their kids. But in a small community, there are no random individuals. Strange ones, perhaps, even a few scary ones. But in a village everyone is accountable to everyone. The cook in the school cantine is also your neighbor. Her husband works at your bank. Her brother-in-law is the cantonnier, the man in charge of local roadworks and other odd jobs around the village. And her father, turns out, is the guy who manages to pack all those figurines into the school’s Galettes des Rois. It’s all entre nous.

If it all sounds a little inbred and stifling, well, it can be. That guy who nearly got you killed by trying to pass you on a blind curve… before you start exploring fascinating subject of English versus French hand gestures, you may want to think twice about who he might be. Next week he could resurface as the grandson of the charming widow who lives in the farm up the road. He could be the mayor’s younger brother. Whoever he is, he is closer to you than you want him to be, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

But this small town interconnectedness is also liberating. Danielle’s father is free to make his galettes for the schoolchildren. It allows Laurent the bus driver to give all the kids on his bus a piece of candy every day in symbolic defiance of his own diabetes (even in defiance of parents’ valiant but futile attempts to control how much candy their kids eat). In an age when, at least in the US, teachers cannot touch their pupils for fear of child abuse allegations, it allows Danielle to give the children hugs when they are down. In short, it paves the way for random acts of kindness.

And it means that Sebastian always gets to be king. This could be a problem…

Apologies

Greg suffering from a very quaint, traditional rural southwestern French flu. A bientôt.

In Search of the Perfect Christmas

Ever since I was little I’ve been in search of the perfect fairytale Christmas.

Maybe it’s just a product of having grown up in LA. Southern California is kind of seasonally challenged when it comes to the whole Christmas thing. There’s no snow, no frost on the window panes. There are no chestnut trees, and the only open fires are produced by either sterile gas burners or toxic Duraflame logs, neither of which are fit for roasting anything. So out of a kind of yuletide Napoleon complex, we overcompensate. You will never find so many people in Santa suits, holly wreaths, blinking lights or plastic reindeer than in LA. From late October to New Years Eve LA becomes one enormous celebration of climatically-confused winter-wonderland kitsch.

So ever since I left I have continued to act out this symbolic, neurotic quest for the perfect Christmas. Christmas in London ticked most of the boxes. Working on Fleet Street and living in a Victorian terrace house gave the season an undeniably Dickensian flavor, and the thought of mince pies and dark ales and the lights strung up over Regent Street still takes close to center stage in my imaginary idyllic holiday season. Even despite London’s particular winter horrors - the drunken office Christmas parties, the London Underground with its winter smell of chilled petroleum-based sludge, the disturbing English tradition of the Christmas pantomime – despite those downsides, we had good times in London over the holidays.

So now it’s our fourth year of Christmastime in the Quercy, and the fairytale jury is still out. I don’t quite know what I imagined – horse drawn sleighs maybe? Carolers wandering door to door, crossing the good mile or two between farms to sing a song and be rewarded with hot chocolate? At least a bit of snow, surely. The reality here, on the other hand, is resolutely more mundane.

The French don’t traditionally make much of Christmas. New Year’s Eve is their big excuse for winter celebration, and much of the Christmas festivity one sees nowadays is imported from the German or English traditions. That makes for an easy transition. The leap from Father Christmas to Père Noël wasn’t any harder than that from Santa Claus to Father Christmas. The mulled wine and Christmas lights remain a constant, and if mince pies have fallen off the radar screen, they’ve been replaced by crepes, walnut cakes and aligot, a specialty of the nearby Auvergne which seems to be a potato-and-white-cheese-based form of wallpaper paste. The French may lack the peculiar enthusiasm that the English bring to Christmas, they make up for it with a slow, quiet, family-focused holiday that has its own charms.

In fact, the quiet here can be a little overabundant. During summer, when our holiday cottages are full and our time and attention are in constant demand, we yearn for some solitude, but as winter sets in it sometimes brings a little cabin fever with it. Our old friends and extended family are all abroad, and most of our new friends here, whether French or foreign, have fled to spend the holidays with family elsewhere. Amid the hush of the winter countryside, house after house silent, shutters closed and chimneys cold, it’s hard not to wonder whether perhaps they all know something we don’t. And with the climate just mild enough to preclude the consolation of snow in most years, it’s no surprise that Claire and David rush off to family on the Mediterranean coast, or that Miranda takes the kids back to England during the school holidays. They know better than to hang around for cold rain and deep silence.

This year the village of Duravel hosted its second annual Christmas festival, and we were determined to take advantage of whatever holiday cheer we could lay our hands on. A Christmas of Legend, it was called. I suppose the idea was to bring to life various fairy tales, and to the extent that that was the goal, they did it well. And yet, as we bought our ticket and entered the enclosed public park where the event was being staged, I couldn’t help wondering what on earth all this had to do with Christmas.

For a start, there were the witches. I’m not just talking about one or two to evoke the story of Hansel and Gretel, which at least has a Christmas connection, however tenuous, via the gingerbread house. No, there were dozens of them. Five or six at least were clustered at the entrance, leering at the children as they entered and taunting them with threats to boil them in a cauldron. Another group had set up camp around the cauldron itself, just up the path, waiting for their hapless victims with a punitive glee which reminded me ever so slightly of Sebastian’s old kindergarten teacher. It was as if the French witches’ union had chosen Duravel for their annual convention. Their noses and green skin were most impressive, but there was a certain lack of, well, of ho ho ho about them.

The other fairy tales worked a bit better. There was a short Snow Queen play which, although inaudible, at least looked enchanting. The kids seemed to enjoy the maze of white pebbles which lead to hidden treasure (in practical gift certificate form), and only perhaps one in three burst into tears when adults in wolf costumes jumped out from behind trees to startle them. There were lambs, and a baby donkey, and in one corner an opportunity to have a photo taken with a scruffy-looking Père Noël. For braving the wolves, Sebastian was given a small Furby – its unreplaceable battery already dead - with McDonalds printed on the label. He was as happy as a clam.

This gentle, well-intentioned chaos was as far from a star-studded neon-lit Los Angeles Christmas as it could get. With the possible exception of those witches’ noses – detailed enough to have come straight off the set of the Wizard of Oz – everything about the evening was defiantly imperfect. The lighting was blinding in some places, nonexistent in others, and taken together would have met the test for gross negligence in any American court of law. The theatrics were resolutely amateur and the hygiene standards at the grilled sausage stand troubling. But for all that, it was wonderful. Scores of people had volunteered their time to make the evening a success, and for the hundreds of people who came, all the effort and good intentions seemed to be what mattered most. What it lacked in polish, it more than made up for in its generosity and simplicity. It was local. It was ours. It was a chance to get out and see other people. That’s all that mattered.

So I guess that’s where things stand with my fairy tale Christmas. No place is perfect, nothing can quite live up to the ideals we form in our heads while growing up. But a little imperfection focuses your attention on what matters. When the big day came, we gave Sebastian a new racetrack and I dutifully spend hours putting it together. The cars jump off the track all too easily, as they did with mine when I was little. There were tears. They dried again. It was as flawed and wonderful and happy a Christmas as anyone could want.

And this morning we had snow. Plenty of it.

Merry Christmas.

The Not-so-Fine Art of Woodcutting

Winter is in full swing, and a tenacious fog has wrapped itself around the Quercy. Colored lights have been strung in all the surrounding villages, and a large Christmas tree festooned with odd bits of multi-colored tinsel has taken up residence in front of the village hall. And from every chimney, down every country road, a cheerful plume of smoke rises to merge with the low leaden sky.

It’s woodcutting season, and I’m in my element.

Honestly, there’s nothing like starting up a chainsaw to boost a man’s sense of machismo. The weight of the machine, the little jolt of torque as the chain starts to spin, the seemingly gratuitous but necessary gunning of the motor to disengage the choke – it’s all calculated to bring on a testosterone high like nothing else. For me, it’s a high that lasts right until I start cutting.

I love cutting wood, but somehow, even in my fourth winter here, I’m not very good at it. Oh, I’ve improved, no question. I’ve got a better sense of how often to pause, pull out my file and sharpen the chain’s teeth. I know just what length to cut so that it’ll fit in the wood-burner, and which logs are too knotted to bother trying to split once I’ve cut them to size. I’ve got my rhythm, and I’ve still got all my fingers, so I can’t complain.

And yet it’s always humbling. Some days the logs seem to fight back. I’ll nestle one into the V of the sawhorse, and just as I reach down to pick up the chainsaw the log will inexplicably shift its weight and hit the ground with a mocking thud. So I reposition it for better balance, but now not enough of it is protruding for me to cut the right length for our insidiously small wood-burner. So I try sliding it with one hand, I try kicking it a bit with my foot, I try invoking the spirit of the tree it once was. And all the while I’m grateful to be alone as my mojo is ground into so much sawdust.

Splitting the thicker pieces usually involves the same sort of Marx Brothers routine. No matter how carefully I set the short section of log on its end, it rarely stays there long enough for me to hammer a wedge into it and split it in half. I won’t go into the silent humiliation, rarely witnessed by others but just as poignant nonetheless, of hefting my sledgehammer and swinging at the perfectly balanced log and wedge only to miss.

All this is just shooting fish in a barrel compared to cutting down a tree. Live trees have much more creative ways of fighting back than logs. They position themselves on awkward slopes near your house. They drop dead branches on your head while you’re cutting. Even in the throes of death they will twist as they fall - see you in hell, you can almost hear the branches curse as they plummet towards you. Taking down these wily bastards is an art in itself, and although I’ve mastered it enough to tackle the smaller ones on my own, I don’t mess with any tree that’s too big for me to hug. We have a few of those that need to go this winter, and that’s where Francois comes in.

I keep putting off calling Francois. He’s a pleasant and kind man, and is one of the best tree cutters around. He doesn’t grossly overcharge me, and he is always ready with a smile, friendly conversation and expert advice. At least, I think so. I can’t understand a word Francois says.

Having trouble following all of a conversation is a pretty common problem when you live abroad and speak the language imperfectly. There are always moments when you have to ask people to repeat themselves, and the French, at least around here, are usually pretty obliging. But you can only ask for so many repetitions before people start speaking to you very loudly, which for the record really doesn’t help at all. So then you’re left with piecing together the words you do you know and filling in the gaps with your best guesses based on context.

After a while you start to watch out for the telltale puzzled looks, awkward silences and nervous laughter that warn you when you’ve guessed wrong. These looks, like the toes bruised from logs falling on them or the singed hairs on my hand after an awkward encounter with the wood-burner, are the daily reminders of how much we still have to learn here. At one time Sophia and I spent our days bringing our expensive educations to bear on the arcane complexities of corporate law. Now we find ourselves struggling for mere competence in the daily necessities of living in so raw and unmediated a place.

I’ll get around to calling Francois. I’ll ask him when he can drop by, and he’ll say something like behn, damang, fang de matinay in his gruff, rapid-fire Cassagnes farmer’s twang of which, on a good day, I can make out one word in four. And I’ll say sure, great, see you then, and be forced by my own cowardice to hang around the house for days hoping that he hadn’t actually suggested an afternoon in February.

And when he does arrive, and is in the process of pointing at various trees and emitting strings of sound that I’m sure could be resolved, with enough time, into something resembling the French language, I’ll start to feel tempted. Perhaps cutting down big trees is actually less challenging than deciphering the local dialect. Next year, maybe I can start taking a shot at the trickier ones myself.

The temptation won’t last though. A day or two later I’ll be cutting firewood again. Between bursts of sawing, the familiar sound of English expletives will drift across the fields and woodlands around our house. Francois’s work will be safe for another year.