Where we walk the dogs, La Moraine

La Moraine

And this is where we walk with the dogs, every morning and every evening. It's a commitment to them. We could leave to ski earlier if I didn't in the morning (or I could get up earlier), but the dogs, two Labrador retrievers, one 12 and the other 18 months old, are good enough to be patient -- and not destroy anything at all -- in the hotel room while we are up on the mountain, and so I feel they deserve their time outdoors for what they love: a long walk in the forest at the foot of the mountain on the groomed walking trails.

Fia, anyway. Rapide would much prefer that I leave her at home to lie on her cushion and prepare for her final days, in some 2 or 3 years time.

We also need to tire them out, so they will sleep peacefully while we are out. This favors the préservation des lieux. At 5 months, we could leave Fia alone in our room all day, without a single mishap. She is Not Marley.

We have decided that Rapide is *perverse. Sam does not entirely agree with this somewhat pessimistic view of her behavior of my husband's, but I do believe that I sort of have to myself. I lean that way, anyhow. Let's start with the moment I approach her in the morning with the leash. She is lying on her side on her blue cushion, and as I bend down to attach the leash to the D-ring on her collar (note that I bend down; she does not stand up), she turns to show me her stomach for a scratch.

No. We are going for a walk. Fia is already wearing her leash and ready to go. You would think that Rapide might find motivation in the possibility of relieving her bladder. I think she would chose to hold it until she died. Possibly of a major urinary infection.

Leash secured, we move toward the door. Fia is out like a jack in the box. Rapide staggers toward the opening, letting the door hit her butt on her way out.

Then, there is the walk through the village to the forest. If I am alone, as I am in the morning, I have one dog out in front of me a distance equal to that of the other dog behind me, a distance equivalent to the length of the two identical leashes. Both leashes are taught. I leave you to guess, to divine who is out front, eager to go, and who is lagging woefully, and somewhat peevishly, behind. Ah, youth.

Enter the forest. The first morning, I asked Fia to sit, as usual, told her to stay until released to bolt off and unattached her leash. I then removed Rapide's leash and turned to follow Fia, who had disappeared around the corner and up past Baccarat's tree. I know that if you turn and look at Rapide, she ceases her lumbering movement and sits. If you continue walking, and then glance back out of the very corner of your eye, so imperceptibly as to insure that it escapes her notice, you will see her trotting along like a much younger dog.

An aside, Sam did not believe me the first evening, and he was inclined to worry about her ability to keep up.

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"I think Rapide can't keep up. Look, she keeps sitting down, and she limps when she walks."

"Don't worry. She's faking. She just wants us to turn around and go straight home. Don't pay attention to her. Just keep walking and she'll catch up. Trust me."

Some little distance further along the trail, Fia scampering about me, darting in and out of the trees in the deeper snow, rushing forward and racing back, I hear Sam again.

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"Really. I think she can't."

"She can."

"Are you sure?"

"Wait until we turn back and she knows we're on our way to her food bowl. She's fine. Just keep on walking, and she'll catch up."

Incidentally, she did.

The very next morning, well accustomed to this behavior, I turned my head 2° and slid my eyeballs as far to the left as they would go, allowing me a view of the trail behind.

Nothing. No limping Labrador. Nada. I walked a little further on, thinking "Go ahead. Follow your own advice" before I slid my eyeballs to the left again, in case she had gotten within a distance to be able to catch me looking. Nothing. No dog. I called her. I walked a few more steps. I turned. I called her again, and then I called Fia, and we went off to search for her. Baccarat had done this to me some years before, and I was panicked then. She was there, though, when I got back. Sam had found her lying outside the room door on the 3rd floor. She knew her way home, and the automatic sliding door to the hotel makes a great luxury dog door for the independent dog.

"Maybe," I thought, "Rapide is a lot smarter than my husband thinks."

I was disappointed. No Rapide when I returned to the hotel. I headed to the car, fed Fia, crossed paths with Sam on his way from the boulangerie to go pick up ski boots, stopped to speak with another hotel guest and pet her dog, and then I saw Sam gesture to me, looking up the road to the forest. Rapide. He took off up the street and returned a few minutes later, an unrepentant Labrador retriever in tow by her collar.

I was chastised. She did know her way back. So, where on earth had she been all that time? Who knows where she had, or had not, been looking for me and Fia.

On the second morning, I had another plan: keep Rapide on leash until well into the forest, after her point of no return. Triumph. She was tricked into her walk in the Moraine.



And know this, Rapide plays. Yes. She plays with other dogs, and she is most particularly motivated by male dogs.

She was a breeding dog, after all.

Here are Fia and Rapide, and a few of their old (Artisan) and new (Sago, Celia and Spetten) winter friends in Argentière. I missed getting them with the Australian Collie and the two other black Labrador retrievers, Clara and Lucy. Please note Rapide's intentional involvement and liveliness.




I told you. And, you should see the 14-year-old Lab who prances right along on leash next to her mistress, an American living in Geneva with a chalet in Argentière.

What did I do wrong? I mean about Rapide and my relationship to money and wealth.

At least my dogs are contented, even if Rapide would rather I not notice.
....

*Pervers, -erse, adj. et subst.
2. PSYCHOPATHOL. Qui caratérise un pervers constitutionnel (v. infra). Disposition perverse. Du point de vie médico-légal, (...) il convient d'apprécier dans quelle mesure un act pervers est le résultat dans l'intention de mal faire, d'une libération volontaire des tendances mauvaises de la naure, ou l'effet malfaisant d'une détérioration pathologique de la personnalité morale (Porot1960)

Where we ski, Les Grands Montets

The Mont Blanc and Chamonix from Bochard, alt 2765 m

This is where we ski, Les Grands Montets in Argentière in the Chamonix-Mont Blanc Valley, and this has been an incredible start to this year's ski vacation, our 13th or 14th here. I have finally stopped counting.

We began to come here in 1999, making the trip from Greenwich, Connecticut, a single mother and architect and her 7-year-old son. Or, maybe it was 2000.

I marvel that I can begin to forget these things.

Single mothers who practice architecture for a living, and who do not have trust funds into which to dip, are not as a rule who you find on the slopes of any of Chamonix's four principal stations, Brévent, La Flégère, Les Grands Montets, and Tours, but I had my priorities in order: food, shelter, clothing, transportation and skiing. It was a decision I had to make as my son came frighteningly close to passing an honorable age at which to learn to ski, especially for a mother who can still recall her first pair of skis.

They were wood slats with a toe clip and springs that wrapped from the front of the boot around the backs of the heels and held my tiny winter boots in place, the heels free to lift, like a telemarker's. The poles consisted of wooden dowels, pointed at the end that went in the snow, with red-painted disks of wood to keep them from sinking forever into the snow that never stopped falling in Central New York State. I was 2, and my father was pulling me through the snow in the side yard. The next year, I graduated to something more sophisticated than wooden toys, and my father installed me between his knees and the J-bar towed us up the bunny slope at Song Mountain for my first slightly vertical ski experiences.

It took.

I lived to ski, whatever the weather, and weather we had, being in the path of the Lake Effect, the Canadian winters blowing down from the northwest across Lakes Superior and Huron before achieving their full glory, sweeping across Lake Ontario and straight through our region. I skied with sharp snow stinging my cheeks and couldn't have been happier. Nothing was more beautiful than the trees covered in inches of snow and the ski lodge, the wooden floorboards beaten and sodden from dripping ski boots, the kind that were made of leather and laced up with no thermal qualities whatsoever, benches covered in jackets, mittens, hats and the behinds of skiers drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows and soup from the steaming lidded vats.

My little sister, however, had other ideas. On one of the worst weather days that Canada to the north could sling at us, my 5-year-old sister walked out the ski lodge, felt the sharp, frozen needles pierce her face and made the simplest declaration of independence in the history of human volition.

"No," she said. "I am not skiing ever again," and turned and marched back into the ski lodge. She has held good to her word, only recently fixing a snowboard to her feet.

I assume that someone, like our mother, for instance, was there to look after her because my father and I put our skis on and headed for the chairlift. Then again, it was 1969, his last year with us, although we didn't realize that yet, and a time before childnapping and molestation was a national preoccupation, and it's possible that my sister was perfectly fine with a supply of hot chocolate and a spot on a bench at the long wooden tables, while we skied. In fact, I think I remember him getting her a foam cup of the stuff. I am not sure leaving her there caused our father a lot of parental anxiety. She certainly was happier.

At some point, my mother faded from the ski trips, too. Her sister borrowed her seldom-used skis, and that was the end of that. I think my mother only ever minded in principal that she never saw those black Head skis again. 

Song Mountain Ski Resort, Tully, NY

Those gentle, wide hillside slopes are a far cry and a long way away from the pistes we ski now at Les Grands Montets, considered the most challenging and the highest altitude skiing in Europe. My son's first ski experiences were on similar gentle hills, grandiosely called "mountain" at Song Mountain, at Mount Southington, only somewhat more modestly named. I decided that my fondest memories were of weekend afternoons and evenings after school skiing with my father, in the years before he was with his other family, when I'd wait from the time the school bus brought me home to the moment he walked through the door from work and said, "You ready? Let's go," and I determined that money to spend on skiing or no, we weren't going to miss out on that.

It began inauspiciously in the winter he was 7. He cried, and I thought all my time spent debating the issue was a loss. He'd move a few feet, fall down, get very upset with me, himself, and everyone in the world, and I'd stay calm -- this was really important to me--, pick him up and try to tell him that he was really just about to have a lot of fun.

He wasn't having any of it. I suggested lunch.

That did it. The afternoon went far better, and he wanted to come back and do it again. We were mother and son skiers. We graduated to trips to Gore Mountain in the Adirondacks, stopping at his grandparents' on the way up the night before, and then I'd drive back down after a day skiing, lids heavy behind the steering wheel in the dark. It was worth it, but everyone was talking about Colorado, the powder off-trail at Vail, and a friend was building a house in Beaver Creek. Fabled names that I had long known as way out of my league and reach, but the siren song was strong. I began to research ski trip budgets to Colorado, and then, somehow, France proposed itself.

"Why not Chamonix?" asked the woman on the other end of the phone, when I mentioned it.

Why not indeed? I compared the prices, adjusted for exchange rates, and the answer was obvious: Chamonix. Airfare to Geneva, ground transport, hotel, meals and ski passes in a world-class resort, home to World Cup downhill racing and the 1924 Winter Olympic Games, the first ones ever, came in at less than a trip to Colorado. Plus, I'd get to use my French, take my son back there, and drink good wine at reasonable prices with 3-course dinners.

One overreaching decision for a single mother architect became a love affair, in more senses than one, since on our second trip, I saw he man who would become my husband, an old friend, and, maybe, just possibly, something more, again for the first time in 6 years on February 22, 2001 (which he considers our true anniversary), when he came to see us in Chamonix, and it was the waiter at the hotel in which my son and I stayed who blurted out our last evening at table "Vous faites un si beau couple! Tout le staff le pense. Il doit y avoir un endroit l'où vous pourriez vivre entre New York et Paris!" and our fate, after many ridiculous years and a couple sorry stories, was sealed.

On the plane ride over, I said to Sam, "On this trip, you're going to meet an old friend of mine, and if things turn out the way I think they might, we might be moving to France."

"Cool," said Sam, and returned to The Hounds of Baskerville.

We married on September 28, 2002, only the waiter couldn't make it, and we live closer to Paris than to New York;  a lot closer to Chamonix, but not close enough.

Sam and I have since returned solo, mother and son skiers, since Chamonix overreaches my husband's ski skills, and is likely to continue to do so for the remainder of his natural life. Sam, on the other hand, sprang ahead of me in skill and courage, and I have been doing my level best to keep up, which is a very good thing. Today, my skills grew like the Grinch's heart on Christmas Eve, three sizes, as I flew somewhat less flamboyantly down the slopes and over the red jumps in the ski park after Sam. I must credit the conditions hors-piste over past the black trail, Remuaz, for some of that improvement.

The first two days were January snow with April temperatures, the sun warming the restaurant terrace at 1972 meters to 18° C and the top of the "eggs" at Bochard, altitude 2765 meters, to 14.1° C, but the plummeting temperatures the second night froze the snow rock hard, leaving the bumps covered with snow "stones" that roll under your skis and on down the 60+° face of the mountain in some places, places we ski. We tried once, and swore off until today, when we thought it might have warmed up enough to give it a go.

We ought to have taken the absolute absence of skiers as our first clue.

We did not, needless to say, and skied on down through the first bumps to a rock outcropping and then down into a narrow bowl of bumps at an angle that matched the steepest inclinations of my architectural triangles, back before CAD. I slid along, perpendicular to the descent, and came to a stop, several meters behind and below Sam, who was up on another outcropping.

"Sam?" I said in my very calmest and most controlled voice. He turned to look at me, sitting, fatally, against the mountain on a very precipitous perch.

"Yeah?"

"I am a little scared. It's mental. I mean, I know I can get up and move. I know I can make it down, but, I'm a bit scared right now. My head isn't quite ready to accept that I can do this."

I looked around me at the sea of hard-crusted, rock-solid bumps, and wondered if I believed myself. Sam slid back down toward me, turned and negotiated a few of those mini-hillsides, coming to a rest some 20 meters below me and fell over sideways.

"That wasn't very reassuring, Sam."

"Just get up," he said, "You can do it. Then turn, and ski back across. You'll make it."

He said it very kindly, I have to say. He's seen me in these predicaments over the years. He was in nearly a worse one just the day before, so perhaps he was thinking of that, too.

"I know. I know I will, but I'm just a little bit blocked; I'm afraid that if I try to stand, I'll start to slide down and backwards, and I don't really know how far I'll go and how much speed I'll pick up over those bumps," I said.

He looked at up me where I sat, talking. If I talked enough and calmly enough, I would surely become calm and manage to get down off the mountain and see my dogs and husband again.

"Just push yourself up. You'll be alright."

"Yes, but I don't really have any purchase here where I am, like you have there. I mean, my ski could slide, and I'm a bit blocked mentally. I'll get over it. I will."

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"You can do it."

"I know."

I looked at the beauty of the mountains around me and my son below me, and I steeled myself to stand.

"The worst that can happen is that you fall, like I did."

That didn't seem like the worst. Not to me. I took a breath, tried several places to put my hands and poles, and pushed myself up. I did not slide. I stood there, leaning into the mountain, my tips pointed, unfortunately for me, uphill.

"I don't think I can turn."

"You can."

"No, I don't think I want to," I said, adding hastily so he wouldn't, "but I know I have to."

"You can just ski a little forward and then turn, there, where it's a little flat."

"My tips are pointing up the mountain, I said."

"Then slide back." I did. He waited, patiently. I stood there, helplessly. "Just count to three, and on three, do it."

It sounded so simple. I searched for the alternatives, and there were, sadly, none. I looked at him, counted and pushed forward to turn, and the next thing I knew, I was facing in the other direction, my downhill ski had held! I was moving across the bowl of bumps in the other direction; I could turn again, and again, and I could make it back to the groomed black trail, and when I did, what had seemed a challenge the day before was child's play. I had made it down from my own little hell on the face of the mountain, and suddenly everything was an hundred, a thousand times easier.

I was liberated. I flew like the Grinch in his sleigh down to Whoville and got the chairlift back up with Sam.

"Thanks," I told him before we skied back down to the village later in the day. "I think I made a breakthrough today, thanks to you for being there and teaching me. It was like play today, more fun than it's been since I was little."

It was true. I had begun skiing again after many years too poor to ski, too far from skiing in my mind to make it back to the slopes, and I had started again for my son. Meanwhile, the equipment had changed, the techniques had evolved, the destinations had made an exponential leap in difficulty, and I was not 18, but 37, and now older still. If I had coped with a morning of tears, Sam had tolerated years of a mother, finally struggling to keep up with him, offering criticism, advice, and encouragement. I watched him ski, and I realized that I didn't want to one day look back and think, "Too bad I never tried that."

That's what I thought at the top of the snow park, looking down at the red jumps. I had tried the blue ones. I could do them; nothing fancy; no tricks, but I could land them.

"Sam, do you want to do the red jumps," I asked him. "I think I want to try them."

He nodded, and took off for the first one, executing a decent iron cross. I watched him reappear beyond the jump and pushed off, slowed myself a little, approaching the point of no return, felt myself go airborne and then bump to the ground on my right hip, my left ski coming to a halt two or three meters above me in the middle of the backside of the jump. That was the only time I didn't land a jump on the reds.

"Did you see that, Sam?! Did you see that last jump?" I asked, coming to a stop next to where he was waiting for me. "I got some decent air! How far above the ground was I?"

"Not that high. Maybe 20 or 30 centimeters, though."

"That's fine with me," I said, feeling awfully proud of myself.

"Yeah, and I don't see that many moms doing the jumps, either."

"I think I'd like to try the blacks before we leave." He looked askance at me and drew his eyebrows together.

"You travel pretty far in the air before you land them, you know," he cautioned.

"We'll see," I said, gazing back at them. "I wouldn't like to not try."

The black, red and blue jumps,
Snow Park, Les Grands Montets

And these are my most precious memories with my son. I know that I have made the chain from the best thing my father could offer to me to my son, and I know that he will make that commitment to his own children. Already, he points the little ones with "swagger" out to me, and marvels at their ease and ability.

I like to imagine that he is seeing his children, one day.

Tonight, my knees hurt, just a little bit.
....

Violets and crocuses, together

Survivor Violet on February 16

This is what my eye spied, walking back up the garden stairs with my dogs and the plastic bin filled with the day's wood for the stove. A single, lovely violet bloom below the yellow chamomile that finally ceased producing flowers of its own during the sudden freeze in February. Somehow, it provides enough shelter, together with the yew just to the side, to allow this naturally sown violet to go on, even as everything else that isn't supposed to flower in the winter has finally succumbed to winter's late, brief appearance.

I have looked for the common crocus, and I have seen nothing, though. It occurs to me as I write that this could very well be due to the deep layer of linden leaves I never cleared out of the planting beds. I shall have a look under them and see if there are crocuses in valiant but obscured flower.

I am back, and there are.

Nasty, vulgar Dutch crocus

I will never be so lazy in the fall again as to fail completely to rake. I did, however, have some sort of notion that if I left the fallen leaves in the flower beds, they would make some sort of mulch to turn into the ground in the early spring, once I chopped them all up. A lot of work, if you ask me, and not very practical since there are so many bulbs in among the perennials. They shouldn't be, but someone put them there a long time ago before I ever thought to come here, and I haven't had the heart to remove them.

Or, I have just been lazy about that, too, because I could have put them in the lawn and let them naturalize.

Or, I could have were there still a lawn to speak of, not having raked last fall.

This year, it would be "common, nasty Dutch yellow crocuses", as someone on Twitter called them the other day, in the dirt where the lawn formerly was. Actually, @plantmadnige, or  self-described "UK based garden writer & journalist, naturalist, photographer, traveller [sic], film buff, Wagnerite and angry old man" Nigel Colburn said "Nasty, vulgar, frowned-upon Dutch yellow crocus in my garden. I love every cell in their gorgeous egg-yolk bodies."

I stopped a little further down the terrace, on the other side, and picked some damp leaves up off what was sprouting below. Blades of another sort of crocus' leaves pierced the leaves closest to the soil, which I hoped were sending nutrients down into it in their earliest stages of decomposition.

The condition of my back today, however, reminds me that I had a very good reason, or at least an excuse, for not doing the raking. I had forgotten all about it, until I returned to the wood stove with another bin of firewood from down in the bottom garden and turned the top half of myself to the right to begin to bend and place it on a chair. The Fourth of July, Bastille Day, and Guy Fawkes Night fireworks went off simultaneously in my lumber region, accompanied by a nasty noise. I gasped and thought "Shit! Chamonix!"

My son and I are leaving on Thursday for our annual trip to Argentière to ski les Grands Montets, and I am not sure I will survive the car ride now, let alone ski anything, let alone walk our two Labrador retrievers, Rapide, who understands my suffering and empathizes, now that I am approaching her in age in dog years (we were contemporaries when we got her), and Fia in the La Moraine forest, if this doesn't go away. Fast. Skiing is still probably a bad idea, even if I do it on painkillers and with my teeth gritted, which sort of defeats the purpose and takes away all the pleasure.

I hate myself now for all those years of hauling heavy stuff up and down the garden stairs, to the car and the dump. I was foolish in my later youth of 40-something. God help me and my garden. My dog is doing better, but she's smarter.

On my way back from photographing the crocus, I happened to look at the little Aztec Pearl choysia plant in a pot on the stairs, and there was another violet, in bloom. Despite the plummeting temperatures Sunday night, after the warmer weather last week.

It fascinates me, because the larger plants in the pots on the landing at the living room French door disappeared in the frigid temperatures, while these, which planted themselves there from their seeds, born by the wind and the birds, are thriving, even under the sparsely branched and leaved choysia plant. I will never fully understand, but Nature never fails to enthrall and impress, even in my garden, and it is nearly impossible to kill anything, but grass, as hard as you might unwittingly try.

You'll just have to pay with the extra clean-up for the effort.

Update: Katie Sayers-Raschdorf, a former colleague and landscape architect, now with the New York City Parks and Recreation department, and the person to whom I can directly trace the origin of my blog, when the emails that began "Dear Katie, what do I do now?" as I worked in my garden in the earliest period became my "Dear Katie Garden Updates", as in "Dear Katie, look what I did today!" and, finally, The Sisyphus Journals, burst my bubble.

Here is how she did it: a Facebook comment, and here is what it said:

"They like is cold. Are you getting snow? Maybe throw something over them so the snow doesn't sit on top, but other than that, they will be fine in the cold. And if they do get snapped, deadhead them and they will come back around."

She is always right. Like when she says that all you have to understand, if you are an architect not prefaced by "landscape", or a plain old garden variety one (couldn't resist the pun), is that you plant trees with the leaves up. The violets that have bloomed could not receive a blanket of snow, protected by the plants above, while those that withered were in pots, covered in mounds of the stuff.

So, there is no magic in that; it's just the way of the violets, but, Dear Katie, how do you deadhead a brown and withered plant? I'm guessing it will come back from the roots.
....

A Surrey Storm rolled into Cagnes-sur-Mer

Strictly Rhythm and Fabien Lefebvre
Cagnes sur Mer, Feb 2, 2012

What did you say? What's that you say?

Milly ran a good race today?

Yes, Strictly. She did. Your stablemate acquitted herself with aplomb and stuck a peg in the wall and drew herself up closer to the mark set by her illustrious lineage. Papa Montjeu aurait eu un oeil larmoyant pour sa fifille, la petite filly Milly. The Fleet Fairy (my nickname for her; she belongs to a group of three others) had made herself worthy of her eponymous paternal great grandmother, dam to her sire's father, Sadler's Wells, Fairy Bridge's pride this time, feet flying over the fiber sand.

Well, I'll be.

And so will I, Strictly. So will I.

Milly, as she's known in trainer Gina Rarick's yard in Maisons-Laffitte, drew the inside spot on the rail. She made a good break from the starting gate, and Fabien let her out, working into her stride into third and then fourth on the backstretch, along the Mediterranean seaside drive. The horses were stretched out and she was on the camera side, affording a good view of her work. She looked lovely. With nice action, fluid, she made it look easy. She was holding her own, but they would head into the far turn on this 2000 meter race, and then things would start to get serious coming out of the last turn to the backstretch. 

I was on an important phone call. I realized I had dialed at the wrong time only after my director answered. I had to continue the discussion and pretend my mind was fully on the issue, and I lost track of her between the turns. Then, there she was, in the sudden traffic jam that's the jockeying for position (now you know from where that phrase comes) for the homestretch, still near the rail, but the horses behind were surging, making their bid. I held my breath and listened to my director talk, dying to call out to Milly. 

C'mon, girl! C'mon! Don't stop; don't let up! 

I listened to my director, my eyes on the screen, my breath sucked in and held. Milly. The pack was beginning to stretch across the track, several abreast. The lead horses had a clear path to the post. Would Milly not give up only to get stuck? There was a hole, a safe hole. Fabien raised his crop and brought it down on her withers. I held my breath.

The surge around her continued; it was chaos, my director spoke, and I willed myself to concentrate better on two wholly separate and simultaneous things; Fabien brought the crop down again against her withers, and I swore I could see Milly, Surrey Storm, make a decision.

Once more, and she was clear, running, head down and stretched forward up the homestretch. I was answering my director, willing Milly, she was there with another horse, just behind the leaders, and then another horse drew up along the outside in the last 100 meters. She wasn't slowing down; she was running harder, if anything. It almost looked like she would pass the post in clear fourth position. 

Milly! I cried to the horse on the TV. I spoke to my director on the phone.

The horse on the outside, it had to have been the number 6 horse Tangoka -- I'd have known, if only I could have paid proper and full attention -- was pulling ahead and still Milly was leaning into her bit, giving up nothing, giving everything she had, and they crossed the post. I listened to my director, speaking now, and I was certain I had seen her in fourth position, just a nose ahead of Tangoka. I typed "4TH" to one of her owners in California and hit send. It was 5:30 am there. Then, Equidia posted the results: 1 - 2 - 5 - 6 FF 7.  I typed "FF" and hit send. And then the last two numbers reversed. Milly was officially fifth, a half a nostril behind Tangoka, and within two lengths of the winner, IX Elle, ridden by Ioritz Mendizabal. I typed "5TH" and hit enter and finished my conversation. 

I had a race report to write for one of her owner's, his eyes en France devant le téléviseur, when I cannot be at the track.

"Looks like we have us a race horse" came the reply.

Looks like it. It does indeed.

....

Milly with exercise jockey, Agata
Maisons-Laffitte, Nov 26, 2012

Maybe Milly, and morning work

Fabrien Lefebvre with Strictly, Cagnes-sur-Mer February 2

In about a half hour, Milly, as Montjeu filly Surrey Storm is known around trainer Gina Rarick's yard, will run again. Her first race since she decided a leisurely pace up the home stretch suited her just fine in her last time out at Cagnes. I stopped counting how many horses passed her. It was easier to count how many were still behind her, which was exceptionally exasperating, since she has magnificent papers and her music in 2011, her débutante season, was 8p 3p 3p 4p, placing in 3 of 4 starts.

Maybe Milly doesn't like France? Oh!, but this is nonsense, considering that Papa is French and won the 2000 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at Longchamps, France's, and Europe's, most prestigious race. Cela ne peut être!

Carla O'Halloran -- and don't be mistaken by her name, Carla is Spanish and Irish, but she speaks French with the best of them, and probably is --, who has been riding Milly in her morning work, will be up, and Gina is looking for her to give Milly a little lesson in how you run a race, not necessarily to win nor to place, but to work all the way to the finish line up the home stretch, and to get in a training gallop in race conditions. Information about her condition and her reactions for her future training and the races in which to enter her will come from this outing, and that is sometimes the most important thing. She'll be talking to Carla, who will be listening, closely, and Carla will be talking to her. Everyone will be happy if she makes progress, learns a little and comes back happy and hungry.

Odd that this could be necessary, really, when you recall her performances in 2011, but horses are athletes, and they have their good moments tout comme leurs coups de mou; no one is on all the time, and the trainer's work is to know how to reply and bring the horse, like the athlete, back to top form. And, like athletes, they come into their own in their own good time. Some horses are precocious, others take longer to reach their full race stride; Milly gave a glimpse of her potential and her promise in her first races, and now I'll lay a wager that she is growing up and preparing to fulfill it.

Carla on Milly, Cagnes-sur-Mer February 2

It's 10 minutes to post time. I leave you with the photos from the backside, the morning work, and jockeys Fabien Lefebvre and Carla O'Halloran at Cagnes-sur-Mer, the morning Elbow Beach placed 4th in her first race on le sol français.


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First race, a place for Elbow Beach

Elbow Beach after the race at Cagnes, Feb 2

It has been almost a week since the first race horse in which I have a couple of legs ran her first race in France and came in 4th at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the Prix de l'Ile Sainte Marguérite. Turfoo had given her 5th place. Our trainer Gina Rarick didn't expect her to place. She was short on work. Very short on work.

Elbow had spent a week or so in mid-transport from her trainer's in England, Dr. Jon Scargill's Red House Stables in Newmarket, Suffolk, at a stud closer to the English Channel, walking and trotting in a horse walker after being off training since November and placing 10th in her last race, a 1400 meter race in Salisbury on October 10. The weather had turned bad, the seas were heavy with strong gusts of wind, and the ports were closed. Elbow would have to cool her heals and put off seeing France until things quieted.

Looking at her race history alone does not give a prospective owner, or part owner, the chair

Snow dog

Fia, a dog, a stick, and some snow

Among the joys of true, snow-covered winter is watching the dogs play in the snow. Not that it's really any different than watching them play in the grass, but the contrast of lustrous black dog on pristine white snow is certainly stronger, and snow flies up dramatically from under those powerful paws, and gets to fall again. Pure energy.

She's warming up for Argentière in the Chamonix-Mont Blanc valley in two or three weeks, a year after we placed Baccarat's ashes above the glacier on the backside of les Grands Montets and at the roots of a giant fir in the forest of the Moraine.

And, to own the truth, it's not "dogs", anymore, but "the dog", Fia, my "dark angel". One plays, the other tries to avoid her and to sit on the steps out of harm's and impact's way. At 12 in one month from today, I can understand Rapide. It's getting harder to make it back up the long middle stair of the garden, with it's 28 steps. She takes them one at a time.

One day, she'll not return, but for now, I am relieved when I see her pick her pace up into a trot as she rounds the fish-pond-in-a-(former)-fountain.

So, who wants to come play? Xander? Ramona and Hudson? I know you're all too far, and, Hudson, you'd probably rather sit on the sidelines with Rapide, although I think you'd find the climate in harmony with your ancestral memory.

Samantha? Do you want to come to France and play in the snow?



Perhaps as soon as those crazy but lovable and funny people with whom she shares her home start acting like humans and let her out the damn door. Sheesh.

Scooby Doo? Coco?

Coco, training center Maisons-Laffitte, Jan 13

Prof, you can sit on the steps with Rapide and watch the young ones romp.

Prof, "du dos", with Rapide and Fia

I'll join you two, with my camera, and then just as soon as Gina and the horses are back from Cagnes-sur-Mer, Rapide, we'll head to Maisons-Laffitte for another late afternoon play date in the Rond Poniatowski.
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Bookends

Eric Tabarly roses, February 5

I didn't believe the weather report, or, more truthfully, I didn't really take it seriously. Snow was mentioned for Saturday night, but there hadn't been a flake all winter. The temperatures had dropped, yes, but snow? I took the dogs out for the last time with rock hard soil and crisp blades of grass and fallen Canadian oak leaves underfoot, and in the morning, the shutters still closed, my husband walked out the door of our bedroom and said, "It snowed!" I was on his heel on the landing in a heartbeat. 

I love snow. I cannot tell you how much I love snow. I love snow more than sand; I love snow more than green grass; and, I certainly love snow more than I love what has replaced the green grass, the bare earth, as a consequence of my fall from gardening grace this autumn with my absolute failure to rake up the linden tree leaves, which then covered the grass in a thick blanket of damp for many weeks and killed all the green. 

So, there was no one to warn the roses of their likely fate. Or the violets. They are frozen and discolored, like lettuce in a refrigerator turned up too high. 

It was snowing lightly when we woke up Monday morning, too, and it covered the roads as I drove to the train station to go watch the qualifiers for the 20th Open GDF Suez in Paris at Coubertin, my Christmas-birthday present from my son, which returns me to Coubertin for the quarter-finals Friday. I followed my neighbor, driving his used Jeep Cherokee, in our soon to be dumped Fiat Uno, and I wished his bulk left the room to pass him; I was going to miss my train if he didn't hit the gas a little more.

What's the point of driving your Jeep 4X4 to work in the snow if it's not to drive like there wasn't snow, especially when my little Fiat 2X0 was having no problem? I made the train by 30 seconds. The conductor made an effort to look stern and tell me that it was my responsibility to come looking for him when, in my rush, I forgot to have my ticket punched by the machine on the tracks; I apologized, feeling genuinely grateful that I wasn't going to get a 30€ fine, saying that was why I took the step toward him. He looked at me from under his lowered brow, and made a note on my ticket.

"Oh, vous voulez dire que j'aurais du venir vous chercher dans le train?" I asked, gesturing vaguely toward the space beyond, the cars ahead, closer already to Paris. He nodded, c'est ça, now you've got it. 

I didn't bother explaining what had to seem obvious, that I had no idea which way to head in my effort to find him, and he headed off toward the rear of the train, not looking at anyone's tickets. I could have gotten away with my forgetfulness, although, surely he would have heard my guilty heart beat as he passed close by where I stood on the crowded train. I tried not to feel badly about my honesty and concentrated on the snow-covered landscape between the train and the highway and the Seine beyond, watching the stations pass the direct to Saint Lazare. 

And today, the snow remains on the ground, although I can see the water dripping from the balcony through the panes of the living room window. The afternoon sun, my enemy, is doing its best to rid us of my winter pleasure, the thing that finally removed the constantly present harsh and critical voice in my brain, nagging and nagging: the blanket of lovely snow. Winter, I realized, when it comes properly, is a relief to the gardener. It is soothing. 

It's alright, it says, you may stop now and take a break. 

You have deserved it. 

When the snow does not come, there is no respite, no sense that you should not be doing something to clean up and ready your garden for spring (especially if you never made the slightest effort in the fall). The season drags on, it has no bookends. We are not given permission to move onto other things and return once the snow thaws for the last time, and the winter ends, leaving us to discover what has been germinating under that snug white coverlet. 

I can only hope for the clouds to return and bring more snow, while the calendar still says winter.

Of course, Gertrude Jekyll would just have gotten her work done.

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