A Baguette a Day: My First Year in Saint Antonin

Introduction

The move to France didn’t happen overnight. That’s for sure.

As I see it, it was a move that was three or four years in the making. It all began from my residence in the beautiful red rocks of Sedona, Arizona when I was fifty-nine years old.

Linnea Barnes, who is my partner in life, and I contemplated a departure from Sedona throughout 2010. We were ready for a change in scenery, which is funny, because Sedona offers some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, the kind that is hard to say goodbye to. I guess there was more to a departure than simply a change in scenery. I had been living by myself in Sedona for five years before I met Linnea. I had been contemplating a departure for several months before she and her two golden retrievers, Blaze and Beau, moved in with me in June, 2009. Despite the excitement of sharing one of the most beautiful places in America with someone else, we both found ourselves wanting to leave for an entirely different adventure. We had no idea where this desire would ultimately take us.

Picking up stakes is rarely easy. It’s a process. The process was clearly underway. Two major hurdles confronted us that were making a departure particularly challenging. One, I owned a house in a weak real estate market. Two, we didn’t know where we wanted to go. We were face to face with decision time and decided to take action rather than wait for an imperfect world to lay out a neat plan for us. Taking action on the house was pretty straightforward. At the same time I put my house on the market, I was able to rent it, fully furnished, to my twin sister and her husband, who were happy to stay there until it sold. Good vibes all around. With our impending departure, Linnea and I held a garage sale to get rid of some odds and ends. Whatever furniture we left in the house was furniture that we were hopeful we could sell to the future buyer. All that remained for us to do was to pick a city to move to. For us, picking a city wasn’t easy, very few places fit the bill, but it happened.

We picked Dallas, believe it or not. A choice that surprised us because we weren’t into big churches, big cars, big attitudes, big politics, and a big emphasis on money. We picked it for all kinds of other reasons. It is a major city with all that stuff that major cities offer. It has a sunbelt climate. It has a thriving art community, which is important because Linnea and I are artists. And, I had a lot of friends there, including some friendships going back thirty years. We couldn’t think of anywhere else that could deliver on those desirable measures. When we left Sedona, Linnea was behind the wheel of our Mini-Cooper with Blaze and Beau in the seat next to her. I followed her in a big U-Haul truck. Three days later, we moved into an empty rental house in woodsy Bluffview in Northwest Dallas with a few pieces of furniture I culled from my den in Sedona and some bedroom furniture out of one of the guest rooms. We liked Bluffview, at first. It has big trees and a mix of architecture that makes it interesting. And it’s safe because Bluffview is a very upscale place to live. Unfortunately, as we soon discovered, we really weren’t welcomed into the neighborhood. The money crowd surely didn’t buy into the casual-who-cares lifestyle of two artists who just wanted to paint and be a part of the art community.

When we arrived on a warm, sunny day in early February, the weather was not remotely like anything that resembled a typical winter day in Dallas. That weather didn’t last. Two days later, a nasty cold front moved in, like an NFL linebacker on fourth and inches, and delivered an iconic arctic blizzard that would wreak havoc on the city of Dallas and its pursuit of perfection in hosting Super Bowl XLV that very weekend. The Green Bay Packers won, beating the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25. The Packers were the team I grew up which made for a good start in week one in Texas, notwithstanding the icy roads and face-biting cold air.

Life is full of surprises. Leaving Dallas after nine months was one of them. Just not our cup of tea after all, especially after living through its hottest summer ever. Sadly, Blaze, the older of our two golden retrievers, died from cancer in August. Shortly after that, we decided to move. Alas, the relocation process continued with yet another estate sale. We managed it ourselves, again, with the usual goal of reducing the burden of moving things to our next destination. We said goodbye to our friends in Dallas and drove a loosely packed twenty-four foot rental truck for two days to Portland, Oregon, with a load considerably smaller than the one we had coming to Dallas. We were full of optimism once again and our truck was full of our paintings, in addition to everything else we weren’t able to sell in the Big D.

We loved Portland for all kinds of reasons, notably the food, funkiness, originality, architectural tradition, and new friends, but nine months of rain did us in. I think Beau was the first golden retriever ever to get tired of water. We all pretty much had it with wet feet and wet paws. Anyway, in June, we loaded a moving truck once again, the smallest one yet, and drove to California where we rented a mountainside condo in Lake Tahoe for the summer. We had no desire to stay beyond that. It would be an excellent place for us to relax and plan our next move, one which would benefit from the basis of our recent experience of poor decision-making in search of a place suitable for our interests. More surprises lay ahead.

It was a wonderful summer in Lake Tahoe. A lot of hiking and fishing in-between our creative endeavors was absolutely rejuvenating. The time spent in all that fresh air allowed us to recover from the temperature extremes and deflated expectations of Dallas, not to dwell on the record rainfall in Portland. Daily hikes among the tall pines under a big, blue sky along with plenty of trout fishing in pristine streams opened our minds to taking a step beyond the fifty states. It was relatively easy to look beyond our borders because we couldn’t identify any city in the country that we really wanted to live in. In the course of this process, we took a baby step and decided to move out of the fifty states and into what might someday be our fifty-first state. That’s right, Puerto Rico, an island in the Caribbean, down there somewhere south of Cuba.

In late August, I made a quick trip to San Juan to investigate. After three very hot days spent searching in sweat-soaked clothes for an apartment to rent, I found a place for us that would take a big dog. We rented the breezy second floor of a house on the beach in Ocean Park, an upscale suburb five miles east of the city of old San Juan. Unknowingly, but happily, the beach turned out to be our savior from relentless tropical heat and, more importantly, relentless mosquitos.

Puerto Rico was never a place we meant to settle into for very long. It was a trial step into living outside the country, without really living outside the country. After all, Puerto Rico is a territory of the USA and mimics the USA in many ways, yet it is foreign enough to give us a sense of the challenges we might face. These challenges included a language barrier, a different culture, a few different rules, a different climate, and different foods. It offered all those things and, as it turned out, some terrific new friendships, mostly with CDC people who were experts with mosquitos and dedicated to fighting Dengue Fever. They are good friends to have in Puerto Rico! We were determined to use that time to identify the place that would be perfect for us, a place that promised more permanence than our recent experiences provided.

In the exhaustive search for that next place, we identified Chiang Mai in Thailand as the most promising landing for us, a place that fulfilled many of our wishes on the big list of criteria. Clearly, we were emboldened by our island experience of being out of the country and decided on expanding our horizon by considering southeast Asia.

At the start of our eighth month in Puerto Rico, Linnea and I took a two week reconnaissance trip to Thailand to test the waters, reluctantly leaving our precious Beau in a kennel in Condado, the tony suburb between Ocean Park and old San Juan. We had done a lot of homework on the internet. A lot. We were convinced that Chiang Mai was THE place. In fact, we were so convinced that prior to our scouting trip, we told many of our friends that it was a ninety percent chance that we were moving to Thailand in a month. Ninety percent, that’s pretty much a done deal!

We hated Chiang Mai from day one, which was actually day three after a two day stopover in Bangkok and a twelve hour train ride to get to it. The air in this northern city is very polluted from an ongoing and increasingly chaotic jumble of cars and motorcycles and tuk-tuks. When we walked around town, we had to hold handkerchiefs over our faces to filter out the bad air. So much for a done deal. We returned to Puerto Rico much wiser for the experience, but disappointed, of course. The vision of an inexpensive Shangri-La with exquisite food served by warm and wonderful people was a valid one, but one that had probably expired twenty years ago. It’s not very clean and it now appears to be inundated with commercialism. Innocence lost.

A month after we returned from Chiang Mai, we said goodbye to our friends in Puerto Rico and moved to Scottsdale, Arizona to re-group for a few weeks, maybe more, in a desert climate. It was August and very dry and hot. Living there was relatively easy because we picked a poolside room at a dog-friendly hotel. There was plenty of grass outside our door, which was nice for us and, for obvious reasons, perfect for Beau. We made appointments with our favorite doctors, caught up with some old friends, enjoyed our favorite international cuisines, and plotted a new course. You see, all this was a process, indeed, and rarely was it easy, though it was always fun. But there’s more, of course, as our search continued.

In Scottsdale, we had to re-think everything. We reviewed New Zealand and Australia again, of course, for obvious reasons. Both countries have some real pluses. But, like the first time we considered them, we quickly nixed them again for the same two reasons they didn’t make the cut before. The distance from the States was simply too much to contemplate at that point, especially coming off of our trip to Thailand. It would be very difficult for Linnea to see her twenty-three year old son Vinnie. Chiang-Mai was far, but New Zealand and Australia were even farther. More importantly, visa requirements made it very difficult to move to either of these countries. Both attached a lot of challenging qualifications for people in our age group.

We shifted our focus to Europe, a continent that we initially excluded from our consideration because of its relatively high cost compared to Asia and the Central and South Americas. Perhaps capriciously, we punted on a future anywhere in Asia, convinced that pollution was a problem, certainly in Thailand, and probably everywhere else in Asia in the near future. We also opted out of the countries south of the border, but for a different reason. Separately and together, Linnea and I have seen quite a bit of Central and South America. There are many pluses to living in a half dozen or so countries there that are often identified as appealing to retired couples, which too often means people with no money. However, one key factor moved to the forefront during our Puerto Rico experience: we didn’t like the idea of living in an environment where all the homes and businesses had security bars on their windows. The jailhouse look was a real turn off. Everywhere, rich and poor neighborhoods were layered in iron bars and surrounded by walls, walls that often had barbed wire or broken glass implanted on the tops. The iron bars, as an architectural motif, turned all the buildings into human cages, keeping people in as much as keeping them out. As artists, this architectural feature greatly disturbed our aesthetic sensibilities. A real plus for Asia was the absence of these bars. Of course, other problems were evident. Thus, Europe suddenly came into play.

We knew that the euro is a pricy currency, but we have learned to pick our spots, be frugal where frugality is called for, and splurge when we can’t help it. We’d make it work, of course, but the question of Where? was challenging us once again.

The process continued and this was just another step along the way, this one requiring more investigation of cities to put on the short list and the subsequent elimination of cities. We plotted a two week trip that would take us to our final contenders: First, Ireland. We could fly into Dublin and drive down to Wexford, our target city. Then, to the east coast of Spain, also known as the Costa Brava, and then to the south of France. Wexford was alluring because it claimed to have a mild, even sunny climate compared to the rest of Ireland. I guess everything is relative. In general, Ireland was alluring for several reasons, as long as we were blind to the weather. Hopefully, it wasn’t as wet as we heard. Within twenty-four hours of landing at Dublin Airport we knew it would be Portland weather all over again. Even in Wexford, where it was sunnier than anywhere else in Ireland, it couldn’t possibly be sunny enough for us. No place could be that green without a lot of rain! We quickly shifted the purpose of being in Ireland to having fun rather than prospecting for a residence.

We spent two nights in Dublin. Drank too many beers. Stayed up too late, both nights in a hotel room above a famously noisy Irish bar. All this activity made for a memorable time in an English speaking city with very friendly people. It was a fine place to visit. Onward we went. We flew out of Dublin for Barcelona ready to tackle the northbound drive up the Costa Brava on our way into the south of France, thus continuing our search for a place that we could call home.

Two weeks later, at the end of our trip, we punted on Spain AND on the south of France. The Costa Brava had picturesque fishing villages like a string of pearls on an aged ingenue. They were fine for a weeklong vacation, but way too limiting as places bent on catering exclusively to tourists. Also, Catalonian was the local language and the idea of someday speaking it seemed to us to be an unsurmountable hurdle, especially when it is a language that relatively few people speak. We’ll take French anytime over learning to speak Catalonian, so we aimed for France. As quickly as possible, in a whirlwind tour in the remaining days, we drove northwest from the Costa Brava to Toulouse and then made a u-turn, eastward toward Aix-en-Provence, Cannes and too many petites villages to list here, though I recall nearly all of them. To our amazement and much to our disappointment, Toulouse just didn’t grab us, though it’s a gem of a city. The vast majority of the south of France struck us as too touristy, too pricey, and probably ruined by Peter Mayle’s bestselling book A Year in Provence, as the French were unable to deliver the vision for Americans that he created.

Linnea decided it was time to think out of the box. I agreed. So, when we returned to Scottsdale, she began her own personal search on the internet. We hadn’t given up on France. There was much about it that still interested us, though the south of France had been ruled out. Her diligence paid off! She found a property in southwest France that we liked very much. The fine print said a dog would be okay. We took a leap of faith and rented a house in a town neither of us ever heard of and in a region that was totally unfamiliar to us. That is how we picked a three hundred year old renovated farm house in the hamlet of Le Bouix, near the village of Beaulieu-Sur-Dordogne, on the Dordogne River, in the region of Correze, five hours south of Paris by car and five north of Marseille. In southwest France.

Remember, it’s a process. Now, with a three month lease in hand we set out to get our visa for entry into France and into a life that that could take place beyond the limitations of a tourist visa. We immediately took the steps to procure a retirement visa from the French Consulate in Los Angeles. They required us to have a residential address in France, which we had in hand with the rental in Le Bouix. With that qualification and a few others, our visas were good for one year with the promise of an annual renewal, provided we behaved in France. Preparation for our departure was greatly simplified by the sudden sale of my Sedona house with all its furniture and the timely, but nerve racking, courtesy of the people at the French Consul in Los Angeles. We finally got our visas and passports the day before our flight to Paris! Nothing like cutting it close!

When it was time to fly to Paris, we had a departure all lined up for two adults, an eighty pound dog (who flew in a pet crate in cargo), and four suitcases stuffed right up to the fifty pound limit per bag, along with four jam packed carry-on bags, two of the latter for each of us. Everything else we owned was stuffed into a very small storage closet in a Los Angeles storage facility in Glendale that would allow easy access for Linnea’s son, who was living in Hollywood at the time. He agreed to help us in case we needed something out of it while we were in France.

Going to Le Bouix was just the start of our adventure, of course. In our third week in France, we visited Saint Antonin-Noble-Val, a medieval village about two hours to the south. It was love at first sight. This would become the place for us. Voila! I love saying, Voila! The story begins.

CHAPTER ONE

October: The First Month

The Flight to France

Linnea and I, and Beau, arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport at the eastern fringe of Paris early in the morning on October 10th, 2013. We left Los Angeles the day before with a brief stopover at JFK to change planes where we pinched ourselves as a reality check for our commitment to a new life abroad. Our plane out of New York made a smooth touch down seven hours later and, with that, the reality of our adventure became undeniable. That moment was now behind us. A life in France was in front of us.

Beau is a very well-traveled golden retriever. He was on our plane, in his crate, in the temperature-controlled cargo hold. When we landed, our first concern was his welfare. Even though this wasn’t his first trip on a long flight, I’m sure it was stressful for him. Our bags got to the carousel before we did. We put them onto a sizable cart and then moved expeditiously in tracking down the tail that wags our dog. Finding him turned out to be a very easy task. After what seemed like a very short time after we got off the plane, we were standing by the doors of a special freight elevator for live cargo, where we were instructed to wait. Linnea and I locked arms and could barely contain ourselves with the expectancy of seeing Beau, our very handsome and lovable dog. Of course, you know his name means handsome in French.

Every dog lover knows the giddy feeling of anticipation of a rendezvous with a beloved pet. We hadn’t seen Beau for over sixteen hours, since Los Angeles. That’s a long time. I don’t know about Beau’s sense of time, but I am convinced Beau is aware of the passage of time, at least in a short and long sense. To our surprise, less than two minutes had passed when the elevator doors opened up and Beau’s crate was presented to us full of a big furry, happy, whining dog. The instant we saw his crate we called out, Beau! Beau! Beau! I freed him from his little prison cell with the dexterity that comes with focused urgency. Linnea and I dropped to our knees to smother Beau with affection. We created a paroxysm of love. We three were together again, hugging and howling, with one of us doing a whole lot of licking, and all of us quite entangled in a dynamic pile of arms and legs. Shall I dare say no reunion could have been better?

Getting Underway

Getting our rental car was easy. It was a Peugeot sedan and it had plenty of room. I doubt if more than thirty minutes passed from the time I left Linnea and Beau to the time I pulled up to the curb to pick them up. We jammed the six big, checked bags into the trunk and put Beau in the back seat with the carry-ons. But, there was no room for Beau’s crate. What to do? It was an easy decision. When we drove off, we left the crate on the sidewalk. We were hopeful that someone else would put it to use, and equally hopeful that Beau would never need to fly again. We couldn’t take it with us. What else was there to do!

All things considered, it was a good start, one that was free of any complications, let alone any disasters! We were happy. We landed that morning at seven thirty and left the airport fully loaded sans crate at nine o’clock, bound for our rental home in Le Bouix, three hundred miles into southwest France. A house we know only from the internet and a place we’ve never been to. We didn’t slow down. We had to get to a rendezvous with our landlord at five.

Of course, life is never as easy as you want it to be. Driving out of the airport and skirting Paris at the morning rush hour gave us a quick taste of the reality of life in The City of Light. Charles de Gaulle is on the east side of Paris. We had to exit on the west side to get to the motorway that would take us south. We crawled along in the stop and go traffic for nearly two hours, often coming to a complete stop for minutes at a time. We settled in and occupied ourselves with marveling at the fact that we were actually in France, that we had made it this far feeling pretty good. It was just a matter of time before we got into the open countryside and find ourselves zooming down the motorway. Until then, in the thick of the rush traffic, it was hard not to notice the countless motorcycles that passed us at shocking speeds. They shot by us on both sides of our car along the lane lines, as if walking a tight rope. Each biker must have been sporting a death wish. They were all traveling at breakneck speeds, literally, between the erratically spaced columns of cars. They were missing the cars’ side mirrors by a matter of inches, seemingly fearless in the rush to get someplace more important than life itself. I had never seen such an astounding number of motorcyclists in any other city, even worse than Bangkok two months ago. They all reminded me that the other name for motorcycles was donor-cycles.

Well out of Paris, signs appeared telling us that we were a quarter of a mile before a toll booth. It was the first of many toll booths that we’d encounter on the motorway. It’s funny how we Americans can feel challenged by the simplest things when we are in a foreign land. We three had turned into heavy breathers, primed for the moment when we would pull into the gate. We laid out the money at our fingertips, ready for whatever was asked of us. If we screwed up, there would be no opportunity to back out. Cars would be lined up behind us, eager to honk, if we caused any kind of delay. Surely, they could see our hesitancy. Surely, they could tell that we’ve never done this before just by looking at us. By smelling the fear! We worried that we might do something really stupid. When we got closer, we discovered that this set of booths was simply for dispensing tickets. It doesn’t get easier than that. I rolled down my window, took a ticket, and drove off, like everyone else. It was a laughable moment.

Later on, in our first encounter with the toll booths that collected money, the preparation all started again. With the toll booths coming up, we asked ourselves, What now? With so many booths to choose from, Which one do we aim for? And, What do all the symbols above the lanes mean? We wonder how these toll booths differ from the toll booths in the States. Whatever, we can’t panic. Beau picked up the energy of the event. He sat up, his ears perked, alert in full awareness of the change in tempo. We could see different signs hung over various segments of booths and, as in the States, it appeared that some kind of auto-express mechanism was in play with the far left segment. We headed right. Once again, we scrambled for our euro bills and coins, setting them out in neat piles for easy selection when the moment arrived for us to come up with the right amount of change. We aimed for a booth with all kinds of icons displayed overhead, including symbolized coins. That’s the one we wanted. We decided to try a credit card first, it seemed simpler. In case that didn’t work, we had the cash and coins spread out in front of us. We pulled up to the machine, alert and ready to do whatever it took. My card was rejected. Plan B. We paid cash, in a frenzy. When the barrier went up, our relief was palpable. We smiled at each other and cheered as we drove away. We get easily excited over life’s little victories. Beau was in on our joy. He senses everything.

That’s a funny thing about traveling in foreign countries. Being in one can make a person think things are really different from the way it’s done at home. In reality, if we stay calm, we quickly discover that their methods and systems are virtually the same as ours, or similar enough. Almost always.

Yes, we paid every toll with bills and coins from then on. It was an easy process, but not at first. For the next two tolls, I continued to try my credit card first, but it was always rejected. We did the cash drill about four times that day and got better at it each time. By the fourth time, Beau didn’t even budge from his prone position on the back seat. Been there, done that, right Beau?

Getting to Le Bouix

The scenery on the five hour drive down the motorway into southwest France was spectacular. It was easy to see that France is a very beautiful country. It has an enormous diversity in landscapes. The land is saturated with medieval hamlets hugging their thousand year old churches. We resisted the temptation to stop at the ancient villages, which Americans often found so captivating. Unfortunately, we ate up a lot of time in Paris traffic. We had little time to spare.

Before we left the States, we planned in advance to meet up with Bob, our landlord, in Beaulieu-Sur-Dordogne, which is a town that isn’t far from Le Bouix. We had a road map, which is a nice thing to have, though Le Bouix was too small to be on it. I had a rough idea where our town was. I marked it with an X on the map. I wasn’t really worried about finding it on our own, even though our skills in speaking French were very limited. I could get by, maybe, though French was still beyond Linnea’s reach. This made asking directions a real challenge. Sure, I can ask basic questions and point to a spot on the map, but that’s not the challenging part. The challenging part is understanding the reply. Furthermore, finding Le Bouix on our own might be hugely complicated by the fact that we didn’t even know how to pronounce Bouix. I didn’t really catch what Bob called it with his Scottish accent. Once we got close, I might be asking directions to a place that no one had ever heard of because I wasn’t pronouncing it correctly. Is it Bow-icks? Bowe-ee? Bou-eye-eks? Books? Bewks? Boo-eye-eeks? Maybe Boo? No, none of those, as we would later learn, it’s Boo-eeks. Even so, you may not think that finding Le Bouix sounds very difficult, but keep in mind that we discovered that there are plenty of people who live within ten miles of Le Bouix who weren’t even sure where it was. Yes, it is that small. Bob warned us. It is a mere hamlet of a dozen buildings and five chicken coops on a hillside, buried among an infinity of hillsides. That’s Le Bouix!

Our House for the First Three Months

Fatigue was setting in. After seemingly endless hours of travel, including the most recent six spent behind the wheel of our rental, we were getting close to our meeting site in Beaulieu-Sur-Dordogne. We’d be on time, barely, and only because we built in a lot of flex into our travel plans. A lot. As it turned out, after the delays in Paris traffic, there would be no time for anything other than pulling into a parking space in the town square. It was going to be close, but we would still get there in time.

We looked forward to meeting Bob. We couldn’t call him after we left the States because we removed the domestic SIM card in our iPhones. We’ll find him. I wasn’t worried. I’m expecting him to be the kind of guy who stands out in any crowd. He sounded like a terrific guy in our brief phone chat just before we left the States. He is from Scotland and has a wonderfully engaging personality that is full of the Scottish tongue. For our meeting site, he picked the town square in Beaulieu-Sur-Dordogne, a town that is not far from Le Bouix. It was a bigger town than Le Bouix and a lot easier to find for any couple coming in exhausted by the drive from Paris, fresh flown from the States. When we finally met up, our instincts were right. We liked Bob right away. He is a caricature of a burly Scotsman with lines on his face that are a testament to a storied life. After a warm greeting in exchange for our one minute summary of our first eight hours in France, he informed us that we could only find the house if we followed him because the house was a bit into the hills. His words. The way he said a bit into the hills made we think we might be going into the Dakota Badlands. We were glad he was going to lead the way. We were very tired. Maybe good for another hour, at the most. Dusk was at hand, though we had plenty of light left that would allow us to see where exactly we were going. To our enormous relief, getting lost was no longer a possibility for us.

We climbed into our respective cars in the square. Bob told us to follow him for about seven kilometers, before taking a right, then uphill in a drive that would eventually take us into a maze of nameless, country lanes and through innumerable blind curves suitable only for cautiously slow, small cars. Ten minutes later, with Bob as our guide, we drove into those hills in the dusk hour, bug-eyed in disbelief over the beauty of the forests and pastures surrounding Le Bouix. If someone had come around one of those blind curves on the way up, we would have been toast. I was busy behind the wheel looking at everything, but the road. It was all so beautiful.

When we arrived, we could see that the hamlet of Le Bouix was lost in some kind of time warp. Were it not for a TV dish on the first house that came into view, I would have guessed that we took a country road right into the 17th century. If you’re looking for a one word description of Le Bouix, you can easily go with medieval. Our house was a three hundred year old barn that Bob remodeled for the twenty-first century, though you wouldn’t have known it by looking at the exterior, but for the TV dish. Yep, as we pulled in, the first house on the right with the satellite dish was ours. Just as Bob said, that’s how we’d be able to identify the house.

I could see that Le Bouix consisted of about ten buildings. Definitely a hamlet. Certainly not a village. On the other side of the lane from our front door was another medieval home. It was adjacent to a chicken coop and a duck pen. The lane was too narrow for parking, so I followed Bob’s point and pulled into a small grassy space on the side of the house, just below the TV dish and about fifty feet from a likely source of fresh eggs and foie gras.

Linnea and Beau tumbled out of the car, still stiff from the long drive out of Paris. Beau peed right away, which seemed like a good idea to me. Lucky Beau. I’d have to wait. Bob walked us to the front door. On the threshold, Lorraine stepped out to greet us. She’s a Brit and her accent left no doubt of that. She was robust, warm in her greeting, and friendly, with a smiling countenance as lovable as the proverbial girl next door. Within seconds we felt like we were calling on old friends, except that we were walking into our rental home. Lorraine put out a platter of appetizers for us on the kitchen table, with a bottle of wine. Once we all had a chance to savor the reality of our arrival, no time was wasted in getting the inaugural tour from its owners. They knew how tired Linnea and I were. Beau, on the other hand, was a ball of energy that was difficult to contain.

My first impression is positive. It looks like a house we can live in. It looks like the photos we saw on the internet. Originally a barn, the three hundred year old structure was converted into a three story home defined mostly by a large cozy kitchen and spacious living room on the ground floor. The latter had windows on three walls so it felt like a wonderfully open space despite the low ceilings. Just overhead, within my reach, ran a network of ancient oak beams. One of them, a big wavy monster of oak dipped to a point as low as six feet off the floor where the two rooms are divided. I made a mental note to buy a helmet next chance I get. It has some real head-cracking potential. I think it’s frightening when I look at it, knowing that I’ll be its next victim. I’ll have to find a way to minimize the risk it poses.

The tour continued to the upstairs. A climb up a very narrow and steep staircase reveals that there are two bedrooms and two baths on the second floor. The bigger of the two bedrooms will be our bedroom. It has an en suite. Its fifteen foot high, vaulted ceiling has several twenty foot, gnarly, oak beams joined in an overhead network that provides the support structure for the roof. They are the defining architectural element in the room. Another steep and narrow staircase takes us up to the attic bedroom, a gabled space that is just big enough to accommodate two single beds. Once we reached the top floor, we could see that the climb down the two flights of stairs is actually scary unless both hands grip the railings. We won’t be going up there very often.

Throughout the house, the wood flooring from local oak made the place seem warm and cozy. Aesthetically, it works with the ceiling beams to give the house true rustic charm. A roaring fire in the living room’s fire box sent heat waves emanating into the rooms, a nice contrast from the cool October air surrounding the house. The fire was a nice touch. It helped us begin to see this place as a nice little house in a hamlet, somewhere on a hillside, somewhere in southwestern France, that we could call home.

The First Days in Shock

We are jet lagged, no doubt. And will be for the week, surely. It seems to us that we view everything differently as residents than tourists. We say this to each other many times in our conversations. Things are different, maybe because we feel we are more a part of them. Maybe because we have to interpret our surroundings differently because they are likely to affect us beyond the limitations of vacation time. They will affect us for quite some time, probably years. Same with the people we meet. The baker, the storeowner, the check-out person at the supermarket. All these people will be seeing us again and again. They might even know us by name after a few months of living here. They will notice our fluency with French, notably the lack of it at the start.

The surrounding countryside is so numbingly beautiful that we are drawn into it to feel it, to experience it, to convince ourselves that it’s all real. Like kids spinning on their heels in the middle of a warehouse full of toys. Initially, our walks in the first few days up and down the lanes were out to some place and back again on the same route. We can already see that the lanes must be connected. The future is promising for exploring the network that will take us into the different hamlets. Spending an hour to two hours on foot is liberating. It provides many answers to the questions we have about where exactly it is that we live. Beyond map coordinates.

Around our hamlet, the land is a rolling patchwork of very small pastures, fields, orchards, and wooded lots, dotted with abandoned huts and residential buildings, all connected by paved lanes and intersected by streams, gullies, and tractor paths that run across the fields, often with no apparent discipline. The orchards are mostly walnut, with trees laid out row after row, like you’d expect to see in a landscape painting. Some of the trees running alongside the roads drop a hail storm of walnuts, ripe for eating. There are apple orchards, too. Many trees have branches reaching out into the space above the sparsely trafficked lanes. Our walks expose us to fig trees as well, and quince, and persimmons, too. All of this fruit, we are told, is free for the taking as long as it hangs into the public space.

All the pastures are corralled by a single fine wire, which is often electrified, as we discovered by accident. Me first, right in the elbow, like a hot nail into my funny bone. As it turns out, a week later Beau discovered the same by accident as well. Judging from his yelp, the discovery was a much more unpleasant experience for him. I don’t think he understood where the first shock happened because he still runs fearlessly under the wires. He often stands perilously close to the wires, if not just under them, to eat the longest grass he can find. It is verdant everywhere, but the longest grass is along the fencing. Munching on it there doesn’t seem to be risky business. It’s probably a nice vegetarian supplement to his dinners of raw chicken and beef. His tummy doesn’t seem to mind. The pastures are blanketed in the greenest grass I have ever seen, maybe because of the season. It’s the rainy season, I guess. Bob said there’s been a lot of rain lately. It is so wonderfully lush. We wonder if it is a special kind of grass.

A couple of the pastures have massive, brown cows in them, anywhere from fifteen to thirty. They move very slowly, if at all. Some are only a foot our two from the wires. Clearly, they know about the wires. They are usually grazing in a jumble of females and, nearby, there are four to five calves along with a bull or two. The French like it that way. I am guessing the cows do, too. Animals have family units, too, and with all the beautiful grass it is easy for one to believe that these are the most contented cows in the world. They sure look happy. Nothing shocking about that.

On our daily walks through the maze of lanes, I pick up an apple or two when the chance arises. There’s always a good one for every four or five wormy ones. I find one for myself and one for Beau. The one for Beau gets gently crushed under my foot, making it juicy and easier for him to eat. He’s a spoiled dog. I like doing that for him. Besides the green grass, he likes apples, too. I can tell he appreciates my effort. He’ll stop and hover over the crushed apple, munching it piece by piece until it’s gone, and then catch up with me to continue our walk together.

I noticed a lot of salamander road-kill on my walks. Black with yellow spots, about eight inches long head to tail. Beau didn’t give them a second sniff, if a sniff at all. I expected him to roll in the first one we came across, but nothing came of it. Not interested, I guess, or not smelly enough. Don’t know. Over the course of a mile, I’d come across as many as five. Each time, I hoped they weren’t rare because clearly their population was taking a hit. When I got home I googled a site for salamander identification and entered black with yellow spots and got a name. The slaughtered critters were appropriately named, the name for them was Black and Yellow salamander. Could have guessed that one! I was expecting a more exotic name, something like the Yellow Spotted Suicidal Salamander or the Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini Salamander. Much better names, if you ask me.

Walking could turn up a bounty of snack foods. We already have a big bowl of walnuts on the kitchen counter. Most of them are good to eat. The few that aren’t, get tossed, of course. I’ve picked a fig or two in the first two days, but so have other people. Finding a ripe one on a branch intruding into the public space hasn’t been nearly as easy collecting walnuts and apples. I think the jet lag dissipates with each walk. I marvel over the fact that I am here, on a walk, in rural France. I think the reality that our status here is not based on the limitations of a three month tourist visa is sinking in. We’re here for a year, at least. Maybe years.

In my first conversation with my neighbor Tim, a Brit, who is building a house about a thousand meters down the lane and into the woods, I learned that a fox had absconded with one of his chickens at the building site. And left a couple dead in his wake. Could have been a hawk, had it been one chicken. I thought of that predator, only because I had seen a really big one on the other side of the trees from his site. Of course, Tim knew what he was talking about, but I had wondered how a bird, as big as the one I saw, could get enough food for himself just by living off field mice. A chicken sure looked like it’d be a good meal for just about anyone, especially a hawk. I let it ride. Tim told me that a fox will kill several chickens at a time. That’s how Tim knows it’s a fox. Roosters ran around too. I could hear them every morning at dawn. And at two, three, and four in the morning as well. All of this is part of the fabric of country life. As long as I embraced country life, I never heard another rooster crow before dawn. In fact, after the third day, I stopped hearing the wakeup call at dawn as well.

Anastasia

On the fifth day. Linnea and I walked Beau to La Garnie. La Garnie is the hamlet next door, about a half mile up the lane. We could see a little old lady, standing just off the road, picking up sticks, probably for kindling. She couldn’t have been five feet tall, maybe closer to four. Beau was off-leash. Before we could grab him, he ran right up to her. He’s harmless, but she didn’t know that, of course. She saw him coming and gestured a greeting to him, which he accepted with a wildly wagging tail. We called out to her with a simple, Bonjour Madame! She returned our greeting and said something to us that I didn’t understand. We paused, decided to engage with a determination to understand with every bit of pleasantness that we, as newcomers to the neighborhood, could put out there. We exchanged smiles and with my very weak understanding of French, we were able to have a petite conversation. We told her that we were new residents in Le Bouix. A minute later, we were pleasantly surprised by the old woman’s invitation to tea in her home. We gladly accepted. She led the way with a slow walk one might expect, gesturing to her home, a mere one hundred feet away. She introduced herself as Anastasia Giraud or simply, Ana, the name she preferred.

On the lintel of her front door was the inscribed year of 1884. We passed over the threshold, which took us right into a true, old-fashioned country kitchen. It was located in the center of the house, the hub of family life in the country. I say old-fashioned because there wasn’t anything modern about it. Before we could sit down, Ana gestured to us to follow her. She surprised us with a quick tour of the house. She lived on one floor, though clearly the house had another floor above us. We walked through five or six rooms on the perimeter around the kitchen. The rooms were small, as I imagine they were in every centuries-old country house. They made me feel like I was stepping back in time. Definitely not tidy, but she was fearless in presenting her home, regardless, capped with an unmade bed as well. This was an event for us that few foreigners, I’ve was later told, could ever experience, a very personal tour of a French person’s home. I thought it was very sweet of her and not a surprise to me, really, for she was entirely likable in every way.

Upon returning to the kitchen, Ana gestured to the kitchen table. We sat on a bench alongside the long wooden table in the center of the room. It was a marvelous room, dominated by an old stone fireplace behind us. The brick structure must have been the original. It was lined with streaks of suet stains over bricks that looked as old as the house. The stone and bricked structure was quite grand. It was easily big enough for me to walk into, had I the inclination. That it was no longer a working fireplace was obvious by the placement of a wood burning firebox in the center of it. My eyes searched the room for another heating source and quickly spied an electrical wall unit, much like the one in our rental house. Ana must have read my mind, because she commented that the heating was quite good on cold winter days.

The tea was delicious, but not as delicious as the sweetness of Ana’s hospitality. It was quite easy to see that she was a remarkable woman and not simply because she was ninety-two. Linnea and I both found it somewhat unbelievable that she was a nonagenarian. She was perky and youthful in spirit. Ana didn’t think being ninety-two was all that remarkable. After all, according to her, a neighbor down the lane celebrated a 107th birthday in the previous week. For sure, I am thinking we are the new kids on the block. And maybe the youngest around here.

All this time, Beau waits patiently just outside the open door. It’s a beautiful day, and comfortable for all of us as the sunlight washed the floor at the entrance where the door was propped open. Beau, already down on all fours at the doorstep, would have been happy to join us upon receiving any one of many gestures from me that indicated he could enter. He is a very well behaved dog, though he can have his moments.

The most amazing thing about the very enjoyable hour passed in Ana’s kitchen was the non-stop conversation among a French speaking woman and two Americans, one who could not speak French at all, other than having an ability to recognize a few words and the other, c’est moi, who barely got through two years of high school French forty years ago. Remarkably, comprehension was a consequence of each person’s skills at charades, pantomime, and an aching desire to understand each other. We even broke into song with my mention of Avignon, a town Linnea and I had visited last summer. I burst out with the lyrics of that famous French song, Sur le pont d’Avignon, actually singing all the lyrics I knew, which weren’t many, Sur le pont d’Avignon l’on y dans l’on y dans… and Ana picked it up where I left off because she was the only one in the room who knew the song in its entirety. In my pigeon French, I asked her if she knew that, originally, the song was written as sous le pont, which means under the bridge as opposed to the current lyrics that state on the bridge. I recently learned that in some article about interesting things about French culture. Apparently, in another century, a lot of wild stuff in society happened under the bridge. A century later, the town fathers changed the lyrics from sous to sur to upgrade the town’s image. I don’t know if she understood everything I said. I assume she understood most. We followed her lead the best we could with singing another round of the song, but this time with sous instead of sur. We all roared with laughter afterwards, happy to be in some kind of communication with each other. I think it was a magical moment for me. I know Linnea enjoyed it immensely, too. Recalling it makes me smile. Beau surely thought we were all cuckoo. He stayed outside.

Our time together in the kitchen passed quickly, but our time together was not over. Ana offered to show us La Garnie’s nine hundred year old chapel just around the corner from her house. We gladly accepted the invitation. We rose from the table, collected Beau, left the house, and walked up the lane to the chapel around the corner. Linnea and I listened as Ana told us a little history, including the fact that she got married in that chapel seventy years ago.

The chapel was every bit of nine hundred years old. I could feel it in my bones. And I could see it in its bones. I also could see the date on a plaque just inside the door. Tiny, but overwhelming in its own way. It had undoubtedly played a vital role for countless generations of townspeople as the epicenter of La Garnie’s social and religious life. These days, Ana explained, it was locked up, except for very special occasions and holiday services. We left the chapel in a silent and respectful awe, stepped into the sunshine, and parted ways with the warmest merci beaucoup we could say to Ana. She turned up the lane to return to her house, turned briefly to wave goodbye, and walked away, through the shadow of the chapel. We turned the other way and headed back to our house in tiny Le Bouix, marveling over a most remarkable experience and a great pleasure in discovering our first French friend. The next day we left a pot of purple violets and a note on her doorstep. The note was written in my school boy French expressing our gratitude for her hospitality. We hoped we’d see her again in the very near future.

We Settled In

Jet lag left us after a week. Our daily walks helped a lot. So did the daily trip to the Boulangerie to buy a baguette and pastry. like pain au chocolat. When we walked in, we were looking forward to a petite conversation. When you order a baguette, you say something like this, Bonjour Madame. Je voudrais une baguette, s’il vous plait. That was good enough for the first few days. Smiling helps a lot. Also, it’s helpful for us to remember that as soon as we opened our mouths it was clear we weren’t French. Nobody was fooled. For that matter, as soon as we walked in, it was clear we weren’t French. So far, every French person has been very nice to us. I am thinking that is true because the first word out of our mouths is a French word. Had it been English, I think we’d see that side of coolness that other Americans see when they don’t try speaking the language. Somewhere I heard, too, that it’s a good idea to put a Madame or Monsieur behind every Bonjour. The French are much more formal with strangers. You’d never go into a boulangerie and say to the person behind the counter, Hey whassup? Rather, we learned that a Bonjour! is a good beginning. At some point, after a few months of purchases, you might say, Ca va? but I’m not sure about that. That’s similar to our, How’s it going?

We found the area’s supermarket. It’s the Intermarché, on the far side of Beaulieu-Sur-Dordogne, just beyond the edge of town. We were ready to take on the challenges of grocery shopping. We didn’t think they’d be significant. They weren’t. We figured out how to get a shopping cart by putting a euro into the slot to release the lock. The euro would pop out when we clipped the cart’s chain back into the mechanism once we finished our shopping. At checkout, we had to purchase a few heavy duty plastic bags to carry our purchases. In France, stores don’t provide bags. You will never hear the question, Paper or plastic? Happily for us, the produce section was very impressive. The heads of lettuce were the largest we’ve ever seen, which is an observation that makes vegetarians very happy. The choice of cheeses was nearly overwhelming. We made some random picks of local camembert and, because Linnea loves it, picked up some Swiss cheese too. We purchased enough raw chicken to take care of Beau for three days. He likes the full leg, which is the drumstick and thigh.

My credit card didn’t work at first, because the card couldn’t be swiped in the slot without interfering with the metal frame surrounding the slot. My credit card is acceptable in France, but using it can be a bit of a challenge. Here, the mounted metal slider box for using cards is designed for a vertical insert, not a horizontal swipe. My cards require a horizontal swipe. After ten attempts and a line behind us that was getting longer by the second, a manager came over to help me. The framework had a slot for a horizontal swipe, but it wasn’t very accommodating. We could both see the problem. He solved it. He yanked the framework out of the way to save the day. I swiped, signed, and left the store, red-faced, carrying the two bags that Linnea had filled while I fiddled. This event sounds like a tiny insignificant deal, but it is funny how self-conscious we felt about our bungling, while not knowing much French to get us past that awkward moment. Several exclamations of excusez-moi and merci beaucoup seemed to mollify the people waiting in line. Most of those people simply smiled at us when we walked out. Silly stuff like that gets easily magnified into a moment of great embarrassment. It will not be the first time. We are sure of that. Had we caused a delay like that in Los Angeles, well, no telling what would have happened, but it would have been ugly. Probably a head of lettuce to the head. My head.

Driving to Maison Lavande in Arnac de Varen

Late into the third week, we took a bit of a drive. It was a gray, drizzly day. We had a two and a half hour drive ahead of us, bound for the tiny town of Arnac de Varen, to the south of us. We were driving to meet our landlords Bob and Lorraine at Maison Lavande, their two-room bed & breakfast. We would be staying with them for the weekend. They invited us down, with the rooms gratis, to see their part of France and enjoy a weekend of getting to know each other better. We liked them from the start and gladly accepted their invitation.

At this point in our French experience, everything we do is an adventure. Driving to Arnac was an adventure in itself. Prior to the trip, Bob laid it all out for us with the simple admonition to follow the roundabout signs in an orderly string of cities and towns. Sounds easy when you believe that every roundabout will point you in the right direction. Surely, the major towns of the area will be found on one of the signs in the roundabout. You’d think that is true, but it isn’t.

Our southern course was set for the sizable towns of Figeac and then Villefranche and then,