Koï, where art thou?

Saxafrage

"L'électricien est passé ce matin," said my husband, as casually as can be, at lunch out under the linden tree. I turned to face him so quickly that I nearly got whiplash.

"Quoi? L'électricien est venu?" I started, just about to add And you didn't tell me? He read my thoughts. I'll bet it wasn't hard.

"Non, non. Il est passé dans sa camionette. Devant la maison. Je l'ai vu." Oh. He merely drove by the house this morning. My husband saw him. "Et je te jure qu'il a accéléré quand il passait devant la maison." I swear, he said, that he hit the accelerator when he passed the house.

It wouldn't surprise me if he had. I have been suspecting that he is avoiding me, since I really wasn't so sure, as I have mentioned, that he found my reluctance to embrace his pinning all of France's (and the civilized, ahem, world's) problems on immigration. A quasi-polite way to express one's most closely held racist views. Of course, he really wasn't trying to be oblique in his racial propos. He seemed rather proud of them, actually.

It would, also, of course, be unfair to suggest that it his is an uncommon point of view. He has a lot of company these days.

If he ever did not.

I mentioned this to my husband, "Tu sais, je me demande vraiment s'il m'évite maintenant qu'il soupçonne que je ne suis pas une enthousiaste de son point de vue." My husband said the French equivalent of "Nah".

"Non. Il est juste comme tous les autres. Ils commencent, et puis il ne reviennent plus jamais." Not that he was writing off his bigotry. Only my lack of it being his reason for not returning.

"Mais," I pointed out, "Il nous a même pas facturé. Il ne veut pas donc être payé?" You'd think he'd hurry up and return so he can bill us. We'd be thrilled to pay for work done. My husband merely shook his head.

Je sais: he will return when he needs us, or has nothing better to do one morning or afternoon. They don't call back, either. Not, anyway, until they actually know approximately when they think they might really have a chance at a shot at a possibility of an opening in their over-booked schedules.

"Je vais connecter en parallèle à ce qu'il a fait et ça serait fait."

I always knew we'd end up doing this part of the work ourselves, too. Just how big an idiot can I feel like for being endlessly optimistic? I already felt terrible today, hovering around the basin like a lovesick wallflower in the school hallway, hoping for a glimpse of the three missing koï and the missing shubunkin, one of which koï and the shubunkin I had just bought last week for -- oh -- some 60-something euros, hoping for a glimpse of even one of them like the biggest jerk of a jock at his locker. Or a worried parent after curfew.

That's a lot for a heron's breakfast, or shy fish.

I googled "koi hiding" and "disappearing koi", and I read about water temperatures, character traits and individual dispositions, raccoons and herons, the shock of coming home from the store in a plastic bag removing their slime cover and making them vulnerable to bacteria (but the store that analyzed our water said it was perfect on the bacterial front, and two of the missing fish have been happy residents of the basin since last spring, and no one is visibly sick). End parenthesis.

I cheered up a little when I read one thread that began on a May 3rd with two koï gone missing just after their introduction to someone's pond, one of which showed up a few days later, with the second making its appearance May 30th in time for Memorial Day weekend festivities, if it actually coincided with the 31st that year. Maybe, I thought, heading back out to kneel by the basin and peer into the water, mine will show up again, too. They are surely simply hiding out under the stone sink in their safe place.

I just don't believe (can't accept that) we have herons snacking on our fish, although two fish disappeared last year and were never, ever seen again. We don't like to talk about that.

Meanwhile, we need to decide if we initiate a lawsuit against the company who contracted to do the exterior of the house. We'll have to send the whole damn thing to a contract attorney for their opinion and make a decision. In the mind of those who have been counseling us, and mine, it's the only thing that will ever get them to show up again, and we can always decide to drop the suit.

My fear? Even if they come, the work will be so god awful that we'll only regret it. And then we'll have to go ahead with non-payment on what is left on the contract and move to protect ourselves there.

So, what would I rather? A guy who works like a charm and respects his work, but doesn't necessarily show when he sincerely (really and truly) hopes to be able to (I am talking about the mason, not the electrician), or -- or what?

Nothing.

This photograph (below) is NOT photoshopped.
....

There ain't no sunshine

Buggley eyes

or something like that

We're at a standstill. I have called the mason. I left a message.

I have called the electrician. I left a message.

I called Georges. Voicemail answered and failed halfway through. I called again.

"Allo?"

"Georges."

"Oui."

"C'est Madame Sisyphe."

"Ah, oui." Silence. It sounds the same in English as in French.

"Ca vous surprend que je vous appelle, Georges?" More silence.

"Ah, non." He wasn't offering a thing. It felt like calling a guy who promised to call after your last date, and never did. Not that I was yearning for him, or anything like that. No fucking way. It's more like when you want to see just how big a weasel he is and how little courage he has so you can gloat in his misery, but not completely like that either. I just want my damn house finished, and I am so upset with my husband for paying them that 50% on the final contract before they finished the work in it that I could scream. For once, he is not defending his decision because we are basically screuxed of half our money because even if they do ever show up again, they will only do the very shittiest job they can for the sheer pleasure of getting away with it. My husband sees that now.

The lessons hard-learned.

"Georges," I went on, "ça fait une semaine que j'attends votre rappelle et ça fait bientôt deux mois depuis que vous êtes parti dissant que vous seriez ici à nouveau pour finir dès que vous auriez reçu la brique." I did not say that I know the brick has not been ordered. "Je veux savoir quand vous venez satisfaire votre contrat."

"Ah -- je peux vous rappeler? D'ici un quart d'heure... 20 minutes?" Like hell he was going to call back.

"J'espère que cela ne changera pas votre réponse," knowing full well that whatever he would do in the next quarter hour or 20 minutes would absolutely change his response, if it weren't just a way to get me off the phone and buy him a few more days behind which to hide. "J'attends votre coup de fil." I hung up.

Of course, he hasn't called back in the three hours that have passed since I called. I did alert our attorney.

Of course, the electrician hasn't called back. He might suspect me of being too liberal for his tastes, but let us hope it is not that. He let me know a little more about his politics than I cared to know, and I just might not have been quite adamant enough in my (lack of) enthusiasm for them. I did try to show the sort of empathy Barack Obama might while listening to a Tea Partier, though.

Of course, the mason is working like mad on someone else's job. He is nothing short of the most hard-working and efficient person I have ever come across, with the exception of one architect who worked with me, who will know exactly who I am talking about if she reads this. (Thank you.)

So, I am reduced to exchanging long gazes with the frogs, that or treating the roses and other flowering plants against the various evils that threaten them: black leaf, insects, Japanese Beetles, that powdery white stuff on the buds. I'd oil the teak furniture, but mon mari bought deck oil (no wonder it was so expensive), not teak oil for furniture, and he has the receipt to return it for the right stuff.

I could make drawings for the wood casings, cabinets and other woodwork in the "petit salon", but I am obsessed with the floor I cannot get done.

I am also obsessed with the misery of all the things weighing on me that more properly belong in the fiction I am not writing. Today, it all feels like too many drinks in a room with too much smoke the day after, and the sun has gone away for the first time in three weeks.

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone.
It's not warm when she's away.
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And she's always gone too long anytime she goes away.

How can I be reduced to thinking of my subs when I think of those lyrics, or of turning them around and thinking of my husband's toxic waste of a superlatively manipulative and narcissistic (the first goes without saying when you mention the second) ex when I turn them into her negative image presence in our lives?

The Clematis 'Daniel Deronda' bloomed today in its sad spot behind the stoop, waiting in its little store pot to be planted. It's a miracle it survived the year this way. Two others did not.

Murder in the garden.

Anyway, in answer to one reader, I can't go back on the solid oak flooring, no matter how tempting the finished concrete sounds right now. My husband would never listen to me again if I were to change my mind after all this. Besides, it's bought and paid for and been sitting in the "petit salon" waiting since March 24. I am also a stickler for solid wood, at least on floors.

When they aren't going to be beautiful finished concrete.
....

Fastening sleepers

From the kitchen window, today

the Wisteria blooms

Renovation work is incompatible with writing.

No, wait. What's that? I have been writing about renovation work? That's my principle subject matter? Oh. Well, then something has gone wrong because it's starting to feel like they don't go very well together, or I'm at wit's end and nothing goes with anything, except a headache and a foul mood.

It was all supposed to be so easy. In my mind's eye, it went humming along, everything falling into place. In reality, I can't even drag it along. If we are having subcontractors do things, they don't show when they say they will, but somewhere in the same month, or nearly in the same calendar week, if we are lucky. They sometimes call to say when they will come, or won't be here, but not always. If we are doing it by ourselves, we know very well when we will be here, but either the tools are inadequate, or the patience blows. Usually both, with an accompanying rise in cranial pressure and a sense of marital displeasure.

I cut the sleepers for the oak floor last week. Someone had to do it, and I discovered that I could. I lay them out, a little farther spaced than I'd like, but tough. So far, so good.

I even felt a sense of accomplishment.



It didn't last the week. When the mason didn't show Friday or Saturday to drill the holes he promised in the sleepers, since contrary to what he says should work just fine, we have destroyed several drill bits intended for concrete and the hardest stone using a 500 Watt drill making a very few holes in his slab to secure the metal framing system, I felt deflated. I started to want to drill them myself. My husband signed up for the job.

I knew where that was headed, and it went right there.

"J'ai pensée à quelque chose," he began. He'd had an idea, and the drill had been whining only a quarter hour.

"Hm," I grunted, trying to make it not sound like a question.

"Pourquoi on ne peut pas fixer les lambourdes en place avec des bouts de bois perpendiculaires?" He was suggesting a sort of framework of wood, with bits of wood leftover from his other projects wedged between the long sleepers, perpendicular to them. That was a lot of work, too, and unnecessary. Using sleepers is an old system, and a dumb one, if you ask me now. I am very aggravated with myself for not just nailing 3/4" plywood to the damn slab for a nailing surface and calling it a day. It was the guy at the wood place who talked about sleepers.

Sleepers with a nailing surface of 3/4" plywood would have been better, probably.

What's more, I realized afterwards, we tend to overlap and stagger the sleepers of random lengths, made from ripped 2x4's. These are just run the length of the room in single lengths.

Inshallah.

Anyway, you can just set the sleepers in asphalt mastic (hot poured or cold cut) and call it a day.

I launched into some explanation about changes in humidity causing the wood to swell or to shrink and how it could move under the nailing points. What gets into me? All I had to say was, "On peut faire plus simple," even if we have been accepted advice that makes it more complicated and difficult.

He went back to drilling, stopping every now and then to ask, again, why he couldn't just make a framework.

"Parce qu'on n'a pas besoin de faire ça. Laisse tomber."

"Mais," and he'd launch into the explanation all over again.

"Non," I'd say, and he'd return to drilling again, while I dreamed of cold cut mastic.

"Où est la scie de métal?" he asked as I headed upstairs with a cup of green tea.

"Sur ta table," I replied, not stopping. Then, I stopped short. "Pourquoi?" Why did he need the metal saw? I knew. I knew he as going to cut down the length of the concrete nylon nail anchors. I knew it because I know him.

"Laisse tomber," Never mind, he called back to me. He knew it was better not to explain, or risk a diatribe.

I swore to myself and continued on upstairs to return to my plank lay-out. Using AutoCAD, I had made rectangles of each length of oak flooring and copied them to make 20 of each of the 9 lengths. Then, I was laying them out over a copy of the floor plan of the "petit salon" to make sure that we used it in a way that made sure that the end joints in two adjacent rows were not closer than 6", and to make sure that the pattern of lengths was (sort of) balanced.

It took forever, and the drill whined on, despite begging him to stop and let the mason deal with it. If he had made a slab into which we couldn't drill with masonry drill bits deep enough to attach our sleepers according to practice, then it was for him to see that this was so.

Then, the drill stopped. I listened. I waited. It didn't start again. I heard his feet on the stairs.

"J'ai laissé tomber. De toute façon, je ne peux pas." I didn't say I told you so. I thought it, though.

Tomorrow I'll call the mason again, first thing. If I can't get him here right away, then it's asphalt mastic and that's that.

I also need more vapor barrier to lay over the sleepers and under the oak flooring. They didn't say I need it, but I don't feel secure.

I also have to call the electrician, who burned me the week before, and let's not even talk about the workers for the contract on the exterior renovation on the house. My head hurts badly enough. I hate this.
....

Fish fry Fryday!

My beautiful baby ghost

I knew there had to be hatchlings -- "fry" in English, or "alevins" in French -- in there, since I have seen the females swollen with eggs and the males chasing them around, nudging their sides to get them to release those riches in future spawn, and I just saw the first set of eyeballs on an eyelash (I didn't make that up myself) darting from the algae at the edge of the basin toward the middle.



Which deepens my suspicion of what the fish have really been doing these last few days: gathering around the groups of fertilized eggs, eating the fry as they emerge.

The Annual Homeowners' Association Fish Fry!

Now I know how I am going to spend way too much of my time today, wearing my Indiana Jones red gardening hat against the sun: watching my fish-pond-in-a-fountain's answer to Survivor. It's a Darwinian life.


....

Stressed

The absence of fish

If I said Not me, my fish, that would be 50% true. We're all stressed, but my fish can't do yoga.

Not that I do yoga, although I should do yoga, but there isn't a yoga class here. Or, someone told me there is, once, but I don't know now. I can think about yoga, though.

That helps.

A little.

It happened quite suddenly. They went to their condo and wouldn't come out. I could see them peeking out from the edges, sometimes, but from one day to the next, they had amscrayed from sight. It was puzzling.

I went to see the experts at Truffaut, and I described what I saw: no fish, lots of fast-forming algae, and sunshine. Sunshine increases the alkalinity of water, which, in turn, favors the formation and growth of algae, which absorbs the carbon dioxide released by the fish through respiration and, so, the water becomes more alkaline still.

It was the algae that puzzled Audouin and I. We had had a lot more since the fall, and the recent stretch of uninterrupted sunny weather couldn't explain that. Anyway.

I went home with a product to lower the pH, and the fish jumped and swam for joy. For about a day, anyway, and then the pH was right back up there a little "too high" and the fish were back in their condo, the old, flat stone sink set on concrete blocks, the cells forming 9 amply-sized studio apartments with a stunning view into their own watery, internal courtyard set against the roots of the clump of reeds. What did I do? Why, I bought three more (rather expensive) fish and brought them home.

They didn't seem to mind.

Until today. And, then, I did a little Googling, using various combinations of search words, including pH, goldfish, water, sunshine, and so on. One source that came up linked an increase in the pH of water to concrete dust. Bing!

What had we been doing this week? Sawing concrete, that's what.



Yes, the mason was able to get to us this week, after having to put us off twice since he thought he'd make it here last Thursday. It's always exciting to see something that has previously only existed on paper, and in your mind's eye, start to take form. This time, it's preparing the old entry stoops for brick paving like the entry court, the new paths from it to these doors and on past them to the terrace in front of the guest rooms in the "petit mason" (no, not that the mason is small, but the mason, as in "house") will be.

Once the renovation company returns. If they return. I doubt it. I think they will move on to playing a game of chicken with us, preferring to lose the remaining 50% on the final contract sum to returning to finish and be paid, and betting that we won't really sue them.

It makes me so mad I could spit. Particularly the bit about not being able to apply the patina they swore up and down they could, and which was written into the final contract, which Georges feigned surprise about, as in "Mais! Ce n'est pas possible, Madame!"

"Alors, pour quoi votre cousin nous l'a juré depuis que vous avez fait la chaux qu'il pouvait et pour quoi donc vous avez signé un contrat disant que celui-ci serait fait?" He had no answer other than his you-caught-me idiot grin. I've seen it too many times before not to recognize it.

That was the same day they installed the old mail box from 1868 back into the street wall with natural color chaux, and I asked them why they hadn't mixed the pigment into it to make the ocher color.

"Ce ne pose pas un problème, Madame. On mettra la patine et vous ne verez pas de différence." I had accepted his reassurance that once they applied the ocher patina all would be well with mistrust. There was nothing they had been doing that had been anything other than un peu pas très bien. Voir pas bien de tout.

When I pointed out that they had specifically agreed to applying the ocher patina all around the house to deepen the color on the walls that had come out too pipi yellow, he answered, "Mais! Vous l'avez vu autour de la boite aux lettres? C'est un massacre!"

It wasn't until after they left that I went to look. It was a massacre.

They weren't supposed to apply it to the natural chaux. They were supposed to use the pigment in the chaux, and then add more in the patina. If necessary. But, it wasn't only that. It was the way it was applied. Un massacre, and we might have to live with it, or try to get someone else to fix their work.

So, Tuesday, the concrete dust flew. And it was Tuesday that I went to Truffaut with my aunt. We bought the stuff specifically for fish ponds to bring down the pH, and it seemed to make the fish very happy. By the next day, it was sailing up there, somewhere above 8 again. Only, there is a flaw in my reasoning. They had stopped being active and retired to their "hiding" place in the condominium before the weekend. It wasn't the first time they had done this. When it happens, it is as though some chief fish acting as the president of the homeowners' association gives the order and they scoot off at once and make themselves scarce for a lengthy meeting. I imagine them sitting around tables with little bottles of perfectly pH balanced water and laptops with Excel spreadsheets glowing on their screens in the watery board room. Some of them are very bored.

Anyway, it was making my aunt nervous.

Which was making me more nervous than I ordinarily am about their disappearances. I have tested the pH at least 10 times a day every day since Tuesday, and it stays up there, on the alkaline side, stressing the fish. The concrete dust settling on the surface of the water and dissolving there can't be helping, but the real culprit is more likely the nearly endless stretch of sunny weather we have been having.

This evening, they were out. Including the new veiled shubunkin and the veiled white koï carp. I call him "the ghost". There is also a larger koï, who is a beautiful, beautiful blue (a very prized color for koï and shubunkins, which you can tell from the price, ack!) with orange spots near his head.


....

House afire!

The trim and wainscoting burn

Well, not really. Just parts of the house. Having gained two more days before guests arrive for the week, owing to the SNCF union Rail Sud, which has been striking since Tuesday and wreaking havoc on travel to points south from Paris, and which strike prevented us from taking our TGV to Toulon yesterday for a wedding this weekend (after we got to the station and spent an afternoon waiting, story at 11), I made trips to the dump to clear out all the stuff I tore out of the petit salon.

My husband said it looked like a dump. He wasn't wrong.

Meanwhile, he continued framing out the room for the sheetrock (and we're doing the ceiling now, too. Or at least I think I want to), while the fish mated (story at 11).

Big day around here.

I like burning things. It's kind of the radical approach, but it is like purifying. The only thing was that I got a little teary-eyed, and not from the smoke, when the flames started to lick the posts of the big section of the original small balcony.

When you burn, you can't go back. It's gone. Another part of the house that someone spent time making is irretrievable, along with the wood from some tree we never saw. Well, as they say in French, "Out with the old, in with the new."

Just kidding. It's like they say in English, "C'est la vie."
....

Billowy curtains in the summer room

The summer room in spring

My grandmother would not have shrunk them, even if she washed them exactly the same way.

Neither would they have a spot on them, let alone stains. Wisp doesn't mind, do you, Wisp?

It's almost ready for guests.
....

Understanding Rapide

"Eric Tabarly" bud

I don't know why I didn't notice until this morning that the incredibly thriving "Eric Tabarly" rose closest to the door -- and I say "incredibly thriving" because it has been sitting in a largish plastic pot for about 1 1/2 years, ever since the workers had me dig them up to start on the garden façade -- has produced many first buds, since I study it closely most days, but it might have to do with the fact that I think I understand what ailed Rapide better, having spent a day lying in bed with my laptop on my stomach, unable to move. The French call it, ever so quaintly for their "best in the world" medical system, a lumbago. It sounds like a dance.

It isn't. I assure you.

Not unless you consider using your hands and knees to get out of bed or stand up straight a dance.

It also makes me a little hungry for something I can't quite make out, sounding like some dish, too.

Oh, look! We use it too!

lumbago

[lumbā′gō]

Etymology: L, lumbus, loin

pain in the lumbar region caused by a muscle strain, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, or a herniated intervertebral disk. Ischemic lumbago, characterized by pain in the lower back and buttocks, is caused by vascular insufficiency, as in terminal aortic occlusion. See also low back pain.

Mosby's Medical Dictionary, 8th edition. © 2009, Elsevier.

Actually, it sounds almost exactly like what Rapide was probably suffering, although my breeder friend called it cauda equina, also known as lumbosacral stenosis, and a bunch of other names. It's also a form of arthritism or a slipped disc or pinched nerve in the lumbar-sacral acrea, and after the last two days, I can completely relate to the whelps and whimpers every time I asked her to get up and walk, and even when she was just lying there. It "came and went" pretty much as suddenly for me as it appeared to for her, too. At least what pain remains is tolerable.

It's not the first time I have suffered this, but it was the worst time. It's no wonder, either, with what I put myself through, with the various tools I wield in the garden and the house, from shovels to pickaxes, and then the tons of rock and masonry debris I haul to the dump; I guess you could say that I'm asking for it, but poor Rapide?

Like mistress, like dog.

The first rosebuds probably appeared while I was whimpering in my bed.

And it wasn't due only to the back pain, either. No, it was also due to the pain of having to sit still and figure out what I want to do with the petit salon that my husband would also want done with this tiny little room. You'd think that would be easy, after all, I do know what he thinks the room should be. The problem is that I haven't been able to make up my mind in these long 8 years.

I alternate between a sitting room for reading, perhaps watching a proportionately tiny television, listening to and, now that the piano is about to come, playing music and an office outfitted with a piano. That seems selfish. To take one room of valuable real estate and make it about my work when I can do that at the kitchen/entry/living room table, or put a desk out in the summer room just seems selfish.

I opted for my husband's vision, and one that seems to go best with the piano.



"C'est beau," said my husband, after I gave him a tour of the future contents of the shallow storage closets that replaced the bookshelves I had had all around the door into the room from the entry (hall seems to great a word for the little space, off of which are this room, a narrow stair to the end bedroom and a WC, sans lavabo). I explained all about how they would be perfect to house the ironing board, iron, and other stuff that gets dumped into that room like an oversized utility closet.

I am all about having places to put things in a house that offers no place to put things, other than into the garbage as the radical solution.

"On dirait un château," he added, turning his eyes from the computer screen to me, "avec ce -- au fait, c'est quoi, une fenêtre?" He was talking about the oriole window above the door.

"Bon, ça peut être ça ou juste un cadre pour une autre porte cachée."

"Non, non, ça serait très joli," he hastened to say.

He liked it. He wasn't even complaining about the work it would, sans doute, involve. Or the expense. But my reply to that every time is, "Oh! We'll do that ourselves!," which rather adds to the burden of the first issue.

Of course, I could just do the room absolutely plainly. Plaster the walls right down to simple baseboards, but...

I want wainscoting.

And sometimes, when you use a lot of lines in a small room, you create, bizarrely, I know, the illusion of more space, while a very simple small room is "what it is," all apparent at once and small. I don't want it to be une chambre de moines, or a monk's room, but a little jewel box for the beautiful, beautiful piano, our books and photos. Maybe some new art work.

I get to choose it.

Now, where are those damn masons? They were "aiming" for 8 am. It's lunchtime, and the frogs just started calling.

If you'll excuse me, I have to go iron curtains and prepare the guest rooms for next week. Tomorrow, we leave on the TGV for a family wedding in Toulon, and our guests arrive next week right on our heels. Monday, I make boeuf bourguignon so I won't have to cook one night, but mostly so the house will smell good.

French, too, for our American guest. Even American houses can smell like Labrador Retrievers.

Sisyphe nods sagely.
....

Light

Shadow

That's her name.

I looked out the door, leaving my morning inspection of the petit salon and trying to clear my head enough to prepare to go see the guy at the wood shop to talk wood blocking for the wainscoting and built-ins (my husband fears the worst), and I saw this.



The kind of light that makes you want to become part of it.

Yellow, F.M., is the color of spring.

I believe, by the way, that the fish are mating. The very large, very orange one from the original group, and a smaller male, very gold, also from the original group, I believe. The others are probably too young, and those born last year certainly are. I'll be watching for alevins.
....

Standards of womanliness

Framing around the old door frame
(it's cemented into the wall)

There is one good thing about vacuuming: I can't hear my husband muttering and swearing at the lengths of metal framing over the motor. The sounds of the sawing become more violent, however, as the afternoon wore on into evening, and the evening darkened into night.

I vacuumed and dusted harder.

So, it turns out that framing out the walls for the insulation and sheetrocking really aren't a job for two at all, at least not if one of them is doing it for the first time and wants to take charge. In that case, it is better for the other to steer clear and demonstrate the willingness to work equally hard in another area completely.

I chose the kitchen pantry and plate cupboards. I threw away old foodstuffs and cleaned the dust and food particles accumulated stickily in the corners with abandon and commitment rarely seen before, and never in my grandmother's kitchen, oh, to pick an example entirely at random, because my grandmother never let anything in her house get that dirty. I remember a day when I was about 15 or 16. I was visiting in the summer, and I had decided to go out for a run. Somehow, I took a misstep and landed hard on my hands and knees in the gravel of the decaying "Old Road" that ran along the newer highway, paralleling the Saint Lawrence "Seaway", which was once a plain old river, until it was "improved" for cargo ships heading from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes during the time of my mother's youth. I knelt there on the broken pavement, ready to never get up.

The pain hadn't come yet. My knees were frozen stiff. When the pain did come, it was intense. Irrational, I wondered if anyone had ever died on the Old Road from a running accident. Would a passing car see me, kneeling there -- lying there, eventually --, and come to my rescue, while I, barely conscious, would tell them in the faintest of voices where to take me? Where I belonged, temporarily, that summer? I shook my head. That would never do. Only I could get myself home. That, or appear even more ridiculous than I already did with bits of gravel embedded in my knees, blood starting to trickle down toward my shins. The heels of my hands weren't in much better shape, but I used them to push myself up very gingerly and gradually. I made it to a standing position. Still no car had stopped over there on the faster road, just to my left and a little higher up across a strip of grass that made an embankment and a tree or two.

I took a step. I didn't fall down. I did this the remaining quarter mile to the house my grandfather built for my grandmother and my mother, a baby, in 1938, the year someone built the addition with the petit salon and entry on this old house, and on up the long gravel driveway to the garage, where my uncle was working on someone's car. He took one look at my face and dropped his eyes to my knees and led me into the house, straight past where my grandmother was fussing in the kitchen. I believe it was already after The Guiding Light, and she was back to business; my grandfather would be home on the stroke of 5 pm, the horn over at the state hospital sounding just before we'd sit down to dinner. My grandmother was up, frowning over the stove by 7 every morning, fully dressed in her girdle, nylons and a dress.

"Ladies do not wear slacks", said my grandmother, not until my aunt convinced her that pantsuits were perfectly ladylike in the 1970's, when she was approaching 60, anyway, and then coordinating sweater and slacks sets in the 1980's when she was ready for greater comfort still at going on 70 . She never did wear a pair of jeans.

I watched her cook eggs and bacon and Cream of Wheat on that white electric stove from my chair at the kitchen table, and I studied the different colored lights. There were red ones and blue ones, and there might have been yellow ones, too. I also worried sometimes.

"Why are you frowning, Grandma?," I asked. "Smile, Grandma. Grandmothers are supposed to smile," I added. I had ideas about these things. I read books. She turned to look at me and smile a real smile.

"I'm not frowning," she told me. She had been. I was sure of that.

Years later, in high school, someone watching me backstage where I was waiting at the ropes for the next scenery change asked, "Is something wrong? Are you unhappy?"

"No, I'm not unhappy, why do you ask?"

"You were frowning. You frown often." We don't escape our genes easily.

I worried about kisses, too, especially when my grandmother kissed me, which she did often.

"Grandma, you'd better be careful. You might run out of kisses," I told her. She smiled again. Maybe I said these things just to see her smile. I might have.

"Why no!" she exclaimed. "It's like love. The more you love, the more love you have. You can never run out of kisses." She gave me one, just to show me, and all was settled and good.

But that day, Grandma wasn't kissing her son or me as we headed through her spanking clean, white kitchen to the shiny, white bathroom, its floor suitable for serving tea. No, she didn't kiss either of us. She followed us straight to the bathroom door, her face as white as her appliances and trembling, but not for fear over my well-being. Oh my goodness gracious no! It was for fear that I'd bleed all over her clean bathroom that she shook.

"You're not going to go getting blood and mud all over my nice clean --" she began. My uncle reached behind him, and in one deft movement of his arm, my grandmother found herself staring at the hallway side of the immaculate white painted door.

Silence.

I already worshipped him, only 6 1/2 years older than I was, and the best uncle a girl without an older brother could have, and in that moment, my heart clutched tight (not just from pain) as he set about removing gravel and bandaging up my leg, dripping blood and mud all over her nice clean bathroom floor.

I was sure. I loved my uncle.

But, Grandma, the kitchen is a little cleaner for my aunt's arrival. She'll be stepping around a big pile of sheetrock and rolls of insulation, but at least the plates will be in the cupboard my husband insists they should be.

I gave in.


....

Contest of wills

"quarante-heuriste" ou "anti-quarante-heuriste"

The line of confrontation was drawn: a small segment of rail fixed to the ceiling. Symbol of everything that can be contested in a marriage.

"Mais que c'est ça?" I breathed, having come to see what the relative quiet coming from the petit salon had produced since we had left the dinner table, at well past 11 pm. Rather than installing a wall-to-wall length of the ceiling rail to receive the uprights, to which the sheetrock is eventually screwed, there was a 15 cm bit, fixed at a slight angle with respect to the wall, causing a larger and larger face of the front of the upright to show from where I stood to the side.

"J'essaye de voir quelque chose. Ca doit marcher aussi bien." I saw my frustration and fury in Technicolor behind my retinas.

"C'est un système particulièrement conçu par des spécialistes dans l'isolation thermique et l'installation de plaque à plâtre, peut-être on peut leur faire confiance et suivre les documents au lieu d'inventer des solutions individuelles," et bidonnes, I added in the raging silence of my own head.

"Ca va aller. Tu me permets de voir?"

"Ce n'est pas droit. Si tu mets toute une longueur, on peut être sûr que chaque vertical soit aligné avec ses voisins. Si tu mets que des bouts, un pour chaque vertical, il se peut forcément que chaque vertical fait un peut comme il veut, malgré que tu les vérifies avec ton niveau. Déjà, je vois d'ici que celui là est peut-être dans le vertical, mais il est tordu."

Which means to say that the fourrure verticale was twisted. Using little bits of the horizontal railing that receives the vertical elements at the ceiling at each vertical element only means that each one is oriented in function of the bit of railing. It might be vertical, checked by the level, but it might be twisted. I could see from where I stood that this first one was. If you use a wall-to-wall length, in which you insert each vertical along the length of wall, then their faces are sure to be aligned with one another. Additionally, there is a small back-up support at the tops of the panels of sheetrock other than at their limits, although the documentation does not call for screwing the sheetrock to the top and bottom horizontal rails, I'll grant you that.

"Tu me laisses faire, si t'il plait? Tu n'en sais rien du système. C'est moi qui en sais quelque chose."

This is where I get completely nuts. I don't know about the system. No, this is where I spent several years working on construction sites watching the subs work, learning from them and making sure they were doing what we wanted. I am far from an expert in everything, and what's more, next to nothing is the same here, but I get the principals, and I know that it is generally better to respect the integrity of systems than to cave in to frustration and do it your own way.

"Je peux toujours le refaire," he added, "si ça ne marche pas."

"Tu ne vas pas le refaire une fois que tu l'aurais fait!" I shot back, adding a few thoughts about the state of my contentment in our marriage, and returned to the living room. He followed. I was not talking.

Sometimes it is best not to continue negotiations with the adversary.

I did recognize, however, that he was the one suffering through the cutting and attaching of the system, but I was not going to feel sorry for him if he were trying to do a professional job with a bricoleur's equipment. The mason said as much when I called him to say that my husband couldn't drill holes of sufficient depth for the 4-5 cm concrete nails and plastic anchors (cheville à frapper) to fix the horizontal rail to the slab he had poured. I suspected that we were encountering the (what appeared large to me) aggregate stone too soon in this fairly shallow slab, but he said that he never has problems installing chevilles à frapper in his slabs with his equipment.

"Il utilise un matériel de bricoleur," suggested the mason.

"Je ne sais pas," I sighed over the sound of my husband clattering around and swearing. "C'est un Skil à 550 watts et des mèches en carbure de tungsten d'une qualité dite professionnelle."

Really, my husband meant "forets". These are drill bits for concrete and stone, where "mèches" are for wood. The term "mèche" is used en parlance for both, unless you mean to be very precis.

"Ah bon? Ca devrait aller alors," said the mason. "Puisque vous êtes gentils, je le ferai pour vous si vous pouvez attendre jeudi."

"Je ne sais pas. Mon mari est très tétu." I looked over at my stubborn husband, like a frustrated bull in his pen, surrounded with building materials he was knocking about, this way and that.

"Ah, alors s'il est tétu --" he chuckled. I leaned against the wall and tried to keep my sense of perspective.

"On verra. Je lui dirai que vous le feriez jeudi. A jeudi, Monsieur, et merci."

"A jeudi."

I addressed my husband, "Il dit qu'il le fera jeudi, si tu veux juste marquer les trous qu'on veut." He muttered something. He returned to sawing off the ends of his chevilles à frapper, to make them fit into the shallow holes he could pierce in the concrete with his forets intended for concrete, marble, granite and other very hard stone. "Il semble vouloir dire que ta perceuse doit marcher, mais peut-être elle est fatiguée par l'usage?" I suggested. He muttered again.

I left him to his self-imposed enfer. If you want a job done, not only should you do it yourself, you should also equip yourself with the correct equipment in top condition. I'd have done this myself, except he preferred to saw the metal framing members by hand rather than invest in an electric saw, specifically for this type of work.

I could have resold it on eBay.

And, we were already saving thousands of euros in labor by doing it ourselves.

But, I had given up reasoning and the hostilities. The worst about the French (excusez-moi), is that they are persuaded of their ultimate rationality and reasonableness (see Descartes), when they are in fact Mediterraneans in warm clothing who really wish they were as rational and reasonable as they can imagine themselves to be.

I turned the page again on that newspaper stapled along the edge of the board with the print of the woman in the bonnet that told me of the tragic deaths, under the wheels of the "rapid" train from Dieppe to Paris on August 25, 1938, of Mesdesmoiselles Renée and Marcelle Ruë, the elder of whom felt unable to continue to live, condemned as she felt herself to be by the doctors' lack of optimism for her crushing "anémie mentale", and the younger of whom could not imagine her life without her sister, and I found what I knew had to be there it if were the end of the summer of 1938.

The headline was torn, but the second line read:

et la DEFENSE NATIONALE
le comité de rassemblement
populaire s'est déclaré
prêt à parer aux nécessités de l'heure

IL APPARAIT DONC COMME CERTAIN QUE
les industries de guerre pourront très prochaine-
ment produire à une cadence accélérée

AUJOURD'HUI:
Réunion de groupes,
meetings et délibérata-
tion de la déléga-
tion des gauches


DEMAIN MATIN:
M. Edouard Daladier
recevra une délégation
du rassemblement
populaire

The article follows. It goes on to recount that:

The misunderstanding apparent between the politicians and the unions -- misunderstanding that we were the first to report -- after the M. Edouard Daladier's speech and in particular by the subsequent ministerial reorganization that it occasioned, is fading away.

There is reason for all French to heartily congratulate themselves. It is not at the moment when the international situation gives reason for maximal concern to those who, in absolute agreement with the British government, are looking for solutions that will maintain the peace that the discussions, the conflicts should fragment the diverse elements of national opinion.

The situation, certainly, is not tragic, but it is serious. It seems to us, then, an absolute necessity that the French people unite behind their government. The work of the government will be made easier. It must not be lost from sight that a political crisis would favor certain businesses. M. Edouard Daladier's talk before the executive committee of the radical party and radical socialist party has given reason to reflect to those who thought that we could unburden ourselves of the management of national politics without unfortunate consequences.

The political parties and the groups that met the day before yesterday and yesterday have understood perfectly the danger four our country that could result from discussions that risk dividing us and pitting factions the one against the other.

It is signed Charles MORICE and continues on page 2. I think you get a sense of the article's intent.

Below, there is a photo of the Third Reich's troops, parading in Berlin, with the headline:

HORTHY CHEZ HITLER

Horthy having by 1938 become the leader of the first nationalist dictatorship in Europe after Work War I in Hungary.

The news pertaining to the growing tensions with Germany and the apprehension of coming war is accompanied by a "Pour et Contre", or weighing of the arguments for and against.

It reads:

We can be assured that our friends and adversaries are observing us with great attention.

M. Daladier, with an authority no one would think to question, declares that it is indispensable to proceed with changes to the law of forty hours, so that France will be able to respond to the imperatives of the hour.

What to do?... Ought one prefer that the principle of the law pass ahead of the vital interests of our country? Ought we sacrifice national defense and our currency to the principle of a law?

Assuredly not! No one in France thinks so. Those who show themselves to be worried or reserved upon the announcement of this change to the law, nonetheless know well, under the present circumstances, find themselves with the overriding obligation to act immediately.

The law must be be put into effect under conditions of loyalty, probity, sincerity, giving no reason for material or moral damages. It is a national and social question that must be resolved in the national sense, the social sense, in good faith, in good will, with good sense and good humor.

What would be without sense -- and which will not happen -- would be to see the law of forty hours become a torch of discord at the very same hour that Hitler is maneuvering one million men who don't know when they will be free.

What would be without sense would be to make the analysis of this law a matter of simple and calculating politics, a matter of party politics. We would dispute among ourselves in the house of deputies, and in the cafés, and in the family, about this change that is yet to be realized!

We would be "for the forty hours" or "against the forty hours" with passion, with anger, with intransigence.

We would not want to make ourselves ridiculous in front of the entire world that is watching us.

It is signed by Maurice Prax, born in 1881 in Tours, died in 1962. He was a writer and journalist with Le Petit Parisien, the paper in which this article appeared on August 25, 1938. He was the son of General Léon Prax and the grandson of General Jean-Louis Prax.

The forty hours in question refer to the legally mandated work-week.

Her blue eyes gaze out from a century before, unseeing the news that would see Rommel install the Nazi HQ 5 kilometers across the boucle and the Seine in La Roche-Guyon, and himself in the Vacherie, German officers lodged in the houses that lined the narrow village street in which we live.

I will follow my sister's advice and seal her, and the paper, back under the stair, witness for the next to come along and decide the house is no longer to their taste.

This morning, I looked into the petit salon. The small strip of rail at the ceiling had been replaced with one the length of the wall.
....

This is the story of us

Steel on plaster and a ladder

This is not a project for two. If it is said that a couple that survives installing curtain rods will survive any épreuve together, then the bar has been set too low, or no one imagined my husband. I exited stage right and remained there, fingers in my ears. Which wasn't enough. I can hear him anyway.

"Je ne suis pas énervé," he tells me, after swearing a streak bleu. "C'est ma soupape. Si je rale, je ne m'énerve pas."

Non, I explain to him. A soupape does not open to relieve pressure if there is none to release. If there is pressure, then you are énervé already and you are en train de raler, meaning manifester verbalement son mécontentement, sa mauvaise humeur.

C'est comme ça.

Today, I didn't even bother. It would only m'énerver plus to hear him say it. It already makes me nuts to know what he would say, possibly more than to listen to him raler.

We cannot even say that he ralôte. Non, it is decidedly not doux.

"If you love him," said my friend, "tell yourself it is part of him, or part of what you love about him.

My friend is deluded. Perhaps right, but certainly à côté de la plaque. He is also a guy.

Love me, love my faults.

Mm -- non.

And so I stayed in the living room and worked on the plans, feeling worse and worse, more and more doubtful, less and less secure. I googled an old boyfriend, and I saw his face looking back out from the screen of my computer. His corporate biography photo. Senior vice president. Soon, he will accomplish his objective, the one he announced to me after I had destroyed love for him, too. I remembered when those eyes looked directly into my own, and I was unafraid, happy. He hadn't changed since the last time I saw him, when we wanted to see each other, but ought not have.

I have.

I looked at the wedding photos of a couple I don't even know, and then I looked at their blog.

This is the story of us.

This is the story of how we fell in love, and we thank you for sharing in our life.

This is a blog about a lot of things – from fashion, bicycles, food & drink, life as a couple, pop culture to our dreams for the future.

-- Our dreams for the future.

I had to get up, find an excuse to leave my computer. Go to the toilet. I had dreams for the future, too, and I forgot to become someone. We never had dreams for our future, just an idea that we had one and that it would reveal itself to us.

Once I was loved by a very young man who solved problems with a joke, a brilliant idea, as though no problem could ever be one, until I broke up with him, when I started my French adventure, years ago. The adventure that led me to my husband, who had nothing to do with his broken heart, but maybe something to do with mine. Some days. Problems didn't used to be problems for me, either. I solved them in the due course of things, with bonne humeur. I looked forward to the future, and had dreams for one. Now I am loved by a man who sees problems in everything.

I have lost mon humeur, along with mes rêves.

I tell my son, Love is simple. It hits you right between the eyes, and I point to the spot between my eyes. Don't go looking to make sure. Don't go looking for love after love, 'just in case'. Love is simple, and it is joyous and it is playful, and when you pile too many of them up behind you, it isn't anymore. It can't be anymore. When you are happy in love, it is good enough.

I learned the hard way, when it was too late for me, after we had each piled too much up and tried to bring it all into our future together. We had no plan.

Our present was hard enough.

"Combien font tes boiseries," asked my husband. "Your" woodwork, not "the" woodwork. This is subtle, but it is significant. How far do your wainscoting and bookshelves stick out, was what he was asking.

"Pour quoi?" He wants bookshelves, too.

"Parce que, déjà avec ce système de merde," everything he uses, from tools to products, is "de la merde", his soupape, at least until he gets the hang of it, "on perde tout cet espace. La pièce va être toute petite."

"La pièce est déjà toute petite." I said, civilly. The house is already toute petite.

This is the story of us.

This is the story of how I gradually fell out of love, and I thank you for being so considerate as to keep it to yourself.

This is a blog about a lot of things – from working in the garden, motorcycles, renovations, life as a couple, French versus American culture to coming to terms with the reality of those dreams of our future.
....

The woman in a bonnet

Et les soeurs institutrices de Dieppe

I knew there had to be a clue somewhere in the room, something that would tell me when the addition on the old house was built, and yesterday, I found it. Not that I was looking or anything. I was up on my ladder, merely tearing away the rest of what is in the way of the sheetrock we will install on the underside of the staircase up to the third bedroom at this end of the house. It was also the opportunity to clean out the old dust and cobwebs, and discover any problems that might be hidden under those thin boards.

I pried off the first one, let it fall between the ladder and the sawing table and sawhorses supporting the largest segment of the small balcony, and attacked the second board. It was more stubborn. I worked at loosening the grip of the nails, holding it to the carriage of the staircase, until I could pull it away in one piece rather than a few dozen splinters. Up on my ladder again, I grasped it in my two hands and pulled downwards. It gave way, hanging, still attached by the lowest set of nails, and I realized that a pair of blue eyes below the brim of an old-fashioned summer bonnet were gazing at me.

My startle reflex kicked in, and I blinked.

I had already discovered that the stairs themselves were built from sawed up Singer Sewing Machine shipping crates, an example of mid-twentieth century recycling (nothing was allowed to go to waste after the Great War, and it's still true here), and now I was discovering that the second thin board used to cover the underside of the risers and treads was actually the backing to a print of a woman that had probably hung in the house before, no longer interesting to the residents and discarded by then. Were they new occupants, who didn't quite share the taste of the previous owners, or had their tastes simply changed? It occurred to me to look at the first board I had let drop. I started down the stair to turn it over, but I stopped mid-step. The board had fallen with the hidden face up, and I had not even noticed. It was a hand painted sign for the 7th "salon" of "real independents", held from November 1-15, 1934.

I carried it outside and leaned it against the low wall of the entrance steps. Part of it was missing. I found one bit among the various shards of wood scattered around the ladder, and took it out to fit into the sign. A piece was still missing. I found it and carried it and the board with the lady, edged in folded yellowed newspaper out to set against the wall, as well. The second bit fit above the first, part of the field of darker beige. I set them on the wall and squatted in front of the woman in the bonnet, carefully unfolding the newspaper, looking for a date.

There was an article about Lord Halifax, a mention of Argentinian soldiers parading at the base of the Arc de Triomphe, and a photo of the just deceased Russian writer Alexandre Kouprine. All I had to do was Google him to find the date of his death, and I would know the date of the newspaper to within a day, and, most importantly, the year. From the wire dates of the other articles, the paper seemed to be from August 25. According to Wikipedia, Kouprine, dubbed "the Russian Kipling" by Vladimir Nabakov, died in Leningrad August 25, 1938.

Next to his photo, there was a headline of sorts, more literary than newslike:

Près de Dieppe, Un mot d'adieu dans un sac à main,
"Rennée, condamnée par les médecins,
a déclaré vouloir en finir avec la vie.
Moi aussi. Marcelle"
Et les deux soeurs institutrices
se jettent sous un train

The train in question was the "rapid" that left Dieppe at 15 h 56 on August 25, carrying passengers arriving from London to Paris.

At the edge of this city, at the train crossing at the avenue de Bréauté, the mechanic Grosvallet [I believe, here there is a small hole from one of the nails holding the board in place under our stairs], who was driving the train, saw on the right of the train, coming from the route de Rouxmesnil, two young women, who, having passed the gate, had already walked 3 meters toward the train tracks. The locomotive was then about 10 meters from the young women.

"I had the impression," said the mechanic, "that one tried at the last moment to resist the other, who pulled her toward the train, and toward death."

The story was continued on page 2, the top of which is missing. At the torn edge, I can piece together that Marcelle and Renée Juë were 25 and 33 years old.

The elder was responsible for the the second class [the eleventh grade] at the Florian school, the younger taught the sixth class [the sixth grade]. This young woman, Renée, blond haired and of sweet disposition, taught her classes until the summer vacation, but she felt exhausted by the "anémie mentale" to which she saw no end. She showed sadness.

In a handbag, M. Le Roux found a piece of paper on which were written these words, "Rennée, condemned by the doctors, has declared to wish to finish with her life. I, as well. Marcelle."

The mother, widow these long years, lives in Neuville-les-Dieppe.

Devoted teachers, Mesdesmoiselles Renée et Marcelle Juë, very well known in Dieppe, where they studied at the School For Young Girls, were held in high regard by the families of their students. Their tragic death has caused tremendous emotion.

Some days later, unless they hoarded newspapers, which I tend to regard as a contemporary malady, people having been much more business-like and tidy in the mid twentieth century, someone folded this page from Le Petit Parisien and affixed it to the edge of the board with the face of the woman in the bonnet, set it in place, and nailed this news of Mlles. Renée and Marcelle Juë, along with the blue eyes, gazing from beneath the broad brim of the old-fashioned bonnet with the matching blue ribbon, leaving them to look upon the underside of our stairs for the next 71 and 1/2 years.

The salon, "Le Salon des Vrais Indépendants", appears to have been a salon for artists, possibly artists wishing to declare themselves even more "independent" than those who had participated in the Salon des Indépendants organized by the Société des Artistes Indépendants founded in the summer of 1894 in Paris by Albert Dubois-Pillet, Odilon Redon, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, among others, to offer the opportunity for "independent artists" of little fame or fortune to exhibit "sans jury, sans prime" ("No jury nor awards"). The first salon was held in 1928, and I have been able to establish that Spanish painter Francisco Bores exhibited in that first salon, along with Hungarian artist Józsa Járitz, while Gabriel Zendel (whose work you can purchase here on eBay) exhibited there from 1929-1931.

Their offices are given as being at 68, rue d'Assas, near the Luxenbourg Gardens in the 6th arrondissement. From the look of the building presently in this location, I'd say the one that housed their offices no longer exists.

In the mid-1970's, my husband did his prépa studies in math on the rue d'Assas, and in 2010, my son would give his right arm to begin his university studies in law at Assas.

Could this be -- could it be? -- a sign?

(No pun intended.)

God knows I need one. A sign of good augur for my son, that is. If you have been following, you know l'école in France has not been a réussite pour mon fils, to put it mildly.


....