How many times have I passed this old oak, caressed its craggy bark and velvet moss, wondered what it would feel like – to be this tree. For a day, a year, a century. From fragile young shoot vulnerable to pests, to struggling sapling prey to deer, to vigorous adolescent invincible and insouciant, to robust young adult casting the next generation, to wise old one, to ancient one… To be inside and feel my feet become roots and explore the soil, to feel my arms become branches, leaves, limbs, a crown. To feel my bark develop armour […]
Spirit of the Place
26 posts
My favourite gardening magazine provides a handy “to do” list for each month: when to prepare the soil for the vegetable garden, when to cut the specimens for tree grafting, when to distill the slurry of stinging nettles… In September we add the frenzy of harvest and in October the frenzy of the fermenting wine. Some years ago, when the November magazine arrived, I hesitated to open it. The malolactic fermentation had finally finished; the wine was “done” and pronounced good – a big relief after the usual weeks of worry. What I certainly didn’t need that […]
In June, on the other side of the year, we focus west – the vineyard, the wine, the buzz and push of summer life. And this particular summer, pushing hard to get through a complicated year above water. In December we focus east, where nights wear thick velvet ear muffs. 7 pm. A covid-winter night is a silent night. Quiet magnifies the song of church bells rising from the valley. I step out into the frosty air to hear Vesper chimes. Their prayer of thanks pierces the dark. I’m glad to live in a place where old customs […]
Each September, the same struggles: make Time stop, bottle the end of summer light. This year I’m holding back the flow just long enough to chronicle a new undercurrent. Baby in the house. It has been a summer of babies. And youth who were once babies – we knew them fondly – passing under this roof, through the Taverne, in the vines… adding their stories of life journeys to my memory bank. They return to this place altered by their trajectories, and I try to map their seedling selves to the adults before me. […]
Season’s end. John’s hands are stained from pumpovers and “brassage des lies.” Fermentation finished. A relief – fermentation is finicky business. And now we see the extra work in the vineyard paid off; the vintage shows promise. A few worries ticked off the list. October mornings: newly crisp air and fog wisps above the valley. Afternoons: cold water swim and last caress of summer sun. Night fall: early. John on the tanks – brassage des lies Season’s end brings changes to our nightly walk. First the winery, to bed down the wine. Embrace each tank, […]
It’s high summer. The time of first fruits from the garden, long sunny days, kayaks on the water, cool starry nights, village fêtes, music rising from parties all along the river… Lavender time. When we planted the first row several years ago, I didn’t fully realize that lavender is much more than a flower. We knew of the medicinal properties against insect stings, and also hoped to deter some mosquitoes. But now, several plantings later, the spectacle of evening lavender has become central to the setting of high summer. Just before sunset is best. I sit on a broken old […]
I turned away from last week’s Economist, with its haunting cover of Trump’s lipstick kiss on Putin’s cheek, to page 10 of our local newspaper, Le Resistant. Unlike most of today’s news outlets, Le Resistant doesn’t live on bad news. Of course there are the usual reports of burglaries, fires and accidents, but most of the stories are about people who don’t groan much about the world because they’re busy doing something about it. Like the tiny village down the hill, where the mayor sponsored a drive to set up a young woman in her own vegetable growing business; 200 […]
Nothing makes me feel as safe and secure as the ritual of summer linen. Even the word linen calms my breath, conjuring up a daily life when real linen was a household staple for everyday use; an era when things moved more slowly. Linen is heavy and wrinkles terribly and must be ironed to regain its wonderful skin-caressing, cool smoothness. To care for linen, one must have time. Today I’m preparing summer linen for the arrival of family and guests. I recall what my friend Helen said the first time she visited: “I fell into bed last night and thought – […]
Millions of years ago the Dordogne carved a series of caves into the rock cliff under our house. The village historian told me they were the site of Druidic rituals, later appropriated by the Romans for their own gods. Since it’s the Summer Solstice, I took myself down to the caves this morning looking for the wisp of a Druid or two. The spot is somewhat difficult to access, and hidden most of the year by the shadows of thickets and tress. But in late June at sunrise, the caves present several niches of warm and inviting nooks. […]
Every land needs a protective spirit. But where do they come from? Are they settled in a place depuis la nuit des temps? Do they migrate in search of suitable territory, like pollinators looking for a place where they can thrive? A few years ago we found our protective spirit hovering near the grotto in the woods. The place was wild, hidden by thorn bushes, inaccessible except to forest animals, asleep for decades. Here the water flows right out of the rock cliff wall, filtered by fronds and moss and ferns, sweet and delicious. Our spirit is an adolescent […]
John has been complaining about his hands lately. They’re cracked and irritated and purpled with wine stains. Made worse when we filled our first oak barrels to age 1200 bottles. It was a bit of a circus, as always when we do something for the first time. He gripped a fancy nozzle to feed the barrels and yelled to keep me alert on the pump. We assumed there would be some kind of signal indicating almost full, like when you fill up your car. No such luck. No signal, just an exploding geyser of purple, gushing into the air, all […]
A kind reader pointed out that “Move to the Farm” needed an ending – a glimpse of the house at Stone’s Edge. So I shyly submit…
It has taken three years and we’re far from finished. But lock, stock and barrels, we have now officially moved to the farm. A hundred years ago John’s great-uncle bought this land on a hilltop, with its enchanting chateau on the river below. It was handed down to successive generations, and during the lifetime of his parents, family life in the big house made sense. When they died that logic seemed to evaporate. Some of the current descendents are separated by an ocean and the joint maintenance of a far-away petit chateau turned out to be more than blood alone […]
We always called her the Big House. The locals called it Le Chateau. As of this week it is the house that belongs to that nice family with two cute little boys. So I’ve taken my last look from the window. The children have walked the creaky floorboards, breathed in the reassuring aroma of our old room, closed up the iconic red portail for the last time. We’ve bid farewell to the fair lady. And tried to come to closure. It’s one thing to say goodbye to the stones and mortar one has loved and lived. Parting with the ephemera […]
Over the past century France has acquired the veneer of a rather secular country. But deep in the veins of the rural places there is a quiet yet undeniable veneration of the land, and with it an ancient connection to the Mother of Them All. Those latecomers, the Christians, often built female deity shrines on the sites of Roman female deity shrines; they in turn often built theirs on Druidic earth goddess sites. Some say there is a magnetic energy in these places. August 15th 2014. Here on the hilltop it was the Feast day of the Blessed Mother. A […]
The English cousin called it a golden thread. The filament that brings them all back each year, to this place, to each other. They’ve known each other since they were toddlers. Our children, the neighbors from Carbonneau, scattered friends, the English cousins… They’ve been playing Marco Polo in the deep end of the pool since they could swim. Years of kayak rides down the Dordogne, croquet in the afternoons, “Deux-Cent-Un” around the old trees at dusk… Now in their twenties, they bring along girlfriends and boyfriends to play, toasting après-game with a glass of wine on the terrace. All year long […]
Honey Bees in the Attic Photos by Michele Marechal In the days when the children were children it was the perfect secret hideout. Secluded, silent, untrammeled. A place for scary stories and hatching plots among menacing gargoyles and doors nailed shut for decades. But no one goes up into the tower much anymore. Perhaps that’s why the honey bees took over. The colony had multiplied quickly by the time the beekeeper arrived. We were expecting armored suits and masks from ghostbusters, but were greeted instead by the gentle and wiry Monsieur Labaye (yes, pronounced just like “abeille” – honey bee) […]
Every June we’re brought to our senses by the ubiquitous perfume of the Linden Trees. A hot Sunday afternoon, time out from chores, we sit under their massive boughs and synch into the hum of hundreds of bees. Someone is dozing in the hammock there, dreaming of Linden Flower honey. Under the soporific spell Henri toys with a flower and asks his Tata Claire if she knows how to make Linden Tea. Nap time ends abruptly. First, John saws off several low branches that beg for pruning. We perch inside a fragrant heap of leaves and flowers teeming with insects […]
One day after a harvest, they laid down their tools and never returned. Entering the old winery always makes me think of stepping into the home of an aged and accomplished man, the last of his line, who has had a heart attack in the middle of a solitary dinner. A neighbor locks up the house, leaving everything as it was: clothes hanging on hooks, shoes by the bed, wine glass and bottle on the table. Closed up in the dark, preserved in dust. The old winery had become a sort of no man’s land, more like a haunted house […]
It was a long and sleepy winter for the House. Dust collected under the beds. Spider webs embroidered the windows. The indefinable perfume of centuries’ old terra cotta tiles, wood beams and hand made chaux appropriated the air. The only sound on that sunny, end of winter afternoon when I was making my weekly rounds was the occasional squeak of a floor board or perhaps a cornerstone, as if the house was sighing and settling into a deeper position. Our room was warm, heated by sunlight. The bed was always clean and made up, just in case. I opened the […]
It was midnight. The man and I sat on the river terrace and stared mutely at the façade. Only one light came through the darkness, our son’s bedroom. The other occupants had retired for the night. The locals call the house “le chateau” as they have for hundreds of years. But although I’ve adopted their nomenclature, to me she is a fragile lady – as in lords and ladies, ladies in lace hats and white gloves, ladies who keep linen in lavender be-ribboned cupboards, ladies who dress for dinner and ring a silver bell between courses, ladies who write up […]
In that time on the edge, we asked one of our sons to watch over his grandparents during our absence. Here is what he wrote. Queen Lear by Julien Sandifer I asked Grandmere why she threw my copy of King Lear in the washing machine. “Because it was dirty of course!” Then she went tottering off to chop some rose heads in her garden. Well, that’s her, my Grandmere. Eighty six years old, losing her eyesight and her memory and various other brain cells, plus she can hardly walk. But she still lives in this chateau on the vineyard she […]
It’s a peculiar thing to live in an old chateau. The walls that envelop us are far older than the generations we can still picture in our memories. Everything – paintings, sculptures, furniture, clocks, tapestries… are impregnated with the dust and fingerprints, tastes and whims of people whose names we have lost. Some of their portraits dress the halls – the lady coiffed in a high oblong gossamer bonnet with the face of a fish wife, whose eyes followed the children so she was banished to the bibliotheque, (we recently discovered she had been guillotined) the gregarious fellow in diaphanous […]
Spirit of the Place – Part 2 The man first came to this place when he was thirteen. The chateau and vineyards had been muddling through a period of benign neglect since the death of his great uncle a decade prior, and now the buildings, lawns, flower beds, gardens, woods, even the river’s cliff – all slept around him like characters under a hundred years’ spell. He planted himself on the terrace over the Dordogne, braced by the allée of centurion linden trees and looked down at the water. The neglect was oddly comforting. Like camouflage. Like a tarnished brooch, […]
Spirit of the Place With the wine settled into beauty rest, my thoughts turn to the great old house and surrounding land. They also seem to have nodded off for a long sleep. But “Vive le vent d’hiver,” the French children sing. When it’s all gone quiet, winter winds stir up other elements around here. They are shy things. Noise and bustle sends them into attic corners. Yes, I miss the warmth of summer, but I shiver gladly as we bring in the firewood. Winter is best for chance encounters with those who only venture forth under a “vent d’hiver.” […]