Scenes from the longest way home

The fishing pond

This is a countryside across which Monet traveled and set up his easel to paint the fields and the stands of trees, the village and the church of Vétheuil. An easy ride from his home in Giverny, on the other bank of the Seine, just a bit farther along the Seine towards Normandy.

This evening, my object was to ride and take advantage of a rare moment without rain, but I took my camera. Just in case.

It was lovely, riding along in the dimming evening light. Quiet but for the laughter and the voices carrying across the water of the nearby "base de loisirs" in the clear summer air, chilly for early August, but the sounds of vacationers enjoying themselves regardless of the need for fleece jackets and sweaters, and a campfire by the little lake brought a little summer back. So does riding my bicycle along roads I normally travel by car, or scarcely ever take, as close as they are to home, the same roads Monet took, when they were probably nothing more than lanes.

It was the very same light that brought Money here to paint, and urges me to bring my camera wherever I go. I could well have taken many more photographs, but I will leave them for another time. I keep telling myself I will paint again.

Right after I finish renovating the house.

....

Looking for my motivation

It was sunny when I woke up. But, as they say, if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes.

Paris is off in the distance behind the hills on the other side of the trees and the Seine. I know because I remember it and how to get there. The map tells me that it is about 70 km to the southwest. I could follow the Seine, but that would add many kilometers with it's meanderings. The highway is faster. There is also a train. I have taken it before. Or my motorcycle, but it's battery keeps dying.

Come to think of it, my motorcycle and I share a similar energy level, only I can take it to the garage and hopefully it will get better right away. I don't know what it will take for me.

It's been almost two months since I have gone into the city. I used to walk all over it and love doing that, stopping at a café. I feel I am too busy now. Now I zoom in and out, accomplishing my objective and leaving that fast. It's a good thing that I need to get my hair cut again soon. Maybe I will stop by MORA and see if cast iron skillets for Tarte Tatin count as baking supplies.

Too busy? Too busy as I sit here and don't do everything I'd be so delighted to have done? No. It's not too busy. It's not too busy at all. It's too under the influence of the effect of isolation and the the continuously gray skies that find it in themselves to pour water down upon us every day for a period of time between moments of diffuse light cutting across the landscape, making the leaves glow for a brief instant. I need to rake and mow the scruffy lawn -- or what's left of it since the workers criss-crossed it with scaffolding and wheelbarrows of stucco and cement for months on end --, but I know that I will hear chuckling as soon as I have my rubber boots on, and my gloved hands hold the rake: the rain will begin to fall again. It's much harder to rake and burn sodden leaves. This has not been crisp fall weather. For once, the summer crisped everything.

I got one coat of sealer on the balcony planks on an afternoon when it didn't rain long enough to go from one end to the other, not having to squeegee the puddles first. I worried the planks were too damp, and since the bottoms are not treated, I hoped that the humidity could escape from the bottom. However, under the beaded up water are saturation marks in the planks. I need to do another coat, fast.

There are the windows I have not yet done. They depress me.

Three is also the little problem of the Paris Bercy Masters 1000. It's day 4.

Now I know, anyway, why they hold the Blues festival in Mantes, Blues sur Seine, in November.

I have, however, looked into getting a wood stove installed in the cold, unused fireplace, and to my credit, I have nearly finished my end of the work. Dispatched that in a couple of afternoons.

It was relatively easy. I knew what models interested me, and I knew the constraints of our fireplace and conduit.

"Madame, auriez-vous la possibilité de venir visiter notre showroom?" Yes, I replied, I would have the possibility of coming to visit your "showroom", but only after I have determined that any of the some 400 models you carry will work in my home. I prefer to do this by Internet. I can see what they look like perfectly well, merci, and I know how they work. I just need to know which, if any, will work here.

That's when I launch into my architect routine. I tell them that our house dates from 1865 (I always hear an indrawn breath of the dawning of comprehension) and that the fireplace does not work, has not, in fact, ever worked to our knowledge. Without drawing breath, I explain that I stuck my head into the grate, lying on my back, and saw two 150 mm metal pipes leading up through the bearing wall. The fireplace, I go on, was an afterthought, the consequence of a flight of imagination from -- most probably -- the cinema producer, who is said to have bought the house to spend his weekends in the countryside (he couldn't have been very successful, I always think, looking around me at this small house), and who preferred something more dramatique et imposant than the sort of insert common in the 19th century, such as can be seen at the house of Monet and the salle at L'Hôtel Baudy in Giverny.

..

..

"C'est un décor de scène," I finish with a flourish, leaving my interlocuteur impressed with my understanding of the situation. I know they are nodding their heads in agreement.

"Oui, oui, Madame. C'est sur. Les maisons du 19ème ne sont pas de tout adaptées aux normes d'aujourd'hui." I can feel their great sympathy with my plight.

"Mais, il y a quelque chose qu'on peut faire installer, non?" Here I explain that someone else, a vague someone else who might very well be their competition, told me that there are smaller poêles with conduits that can work in the hollow space in the wall.

"Ah, oui!" I am assured. They have one. It's exactly not what would work, but I have to have the information to get the information, or talk to exactly the right person first by great good fortune because I have had several different, contradictory, replies to that question. I decided I trusted most the guy -- the first guy -- who told me that he would not want to sell me the Shaker at more than 3,000 euros (plus conduit and installation), but one that cost 1,000 euros less, the Morso, the only one in their line of Danish design wood stoves with the smaller 120 mm conduit.

"Il y a les normes d'aujourd'hui et je suis responsable comme installateur -- comprenez?" Yes, I understood. I want someone who respects the current building standards. I want my wood stove to work and my house to remain standing.

There was the guy, very nice and from Brittany, Douarnenez to be as specific as he was, who told me, "Mais, Madame! On peut toujours réduire tous nos poêles!" I didn't like the sound of that, although my husband thought it made sense when I told him. I explained that another guy was happier to lose the profit on an extra 1,000 in sales rather than propose such a thing, and he seemed pretty convinced by that. Then I showed him the picture.

"J'aime bien celui-là. C'est bien."

"Laisse-moi te montrer celui que j'ai beaucoup aimé." I scrolled and clicked and the picture of the Shaker came up, "C'est ça, mais sans le banc."

"Je préfère l'autre. Celui-là fait un peu," he hesitated, "araignée." It was "arachnid". I could see his point. I was a little worried about its longish Shaker-style legs inside our fireplace, too. The fire might look like a robot with his head on fire, staring helplessly out of the fireplace at us. Besides, we have some city friends who are terrified of spiders, but they come out here anyway, expecting us to rid the premises of everything with eight legs, especially the ones with thick and hairy legs and bodies. I am referring to the spiders, of course. Those are the really impressive ones.

If we order the poêle by the 15th of the month, we can still work out a way to benefit from the 40% tax credit for the wood stove and conduit, significantly reducing its cost to us. I might try one other dealer to see if they can quote us a lower installation price.

By January, we should be enjoying the radiant warmth and atmosphere provided by a wood stove in our hearth.
....

The end of sentimentalism

A red hat

It was my third hat of the week. Melanoma has a way of making hats more attractive, even if they do ruin your hair.

Along with the straw hats not dissimilar to that worn by the master in the over-sized photograph of him that dominates the gardener's corner of the gift shop, the ones that unfortunately bear the imprint of La Fondation Claude Monet à Giverny on their ribbons, there were the real gardening hats; the ones that will stay on your head, protecting it and absorbing your perspiration from your brow over the years. The one that first caught my eye recalled Indiana Jones, had he been an intrepid gardener. I put it on my head and looked at myself in the mirror. It's the one I'd wear around town instead of the one I bought in Les Andelys last week -- the one that made Audouin smile and say, "Tu as l'aire de la mère de la mariée dans ce chapeau." -- were I bolder.

The mother of the bride. That will never be the case for me as I shall be the mother of the groom, and I shall wear a suitably feminine version of this hat. Perhaps the light green, somewhat heathered one, with a brown and écru ribbon. There's even a matching bag. I'll take the gardening tools out and carry mouchoirs and rose petals in their place.

I took off the caramel colored one and placed the red one with the khaki inside and border on my head. The red surprised me.

I took it off and placed first the heathered green one in its place. I felt older than my years. Really suitable for my son's wedding, to which I will bring the flowers, having pruned them wearing it.

I took it off and placed its heathered brown version on my head. Like the caramel one, there was a masculine aspect to this hat. A sort of daring that the heathered green couldn't reach, while not bold like the red, or intrepid like the caramel. I was helped by the fact that all the mediums fit like smalls, squeezing my brow, and would cause me to pass out in the heat of the sun, and the mediums fit like large and would blow away in the merest breeze, making me nervous about bending over to do anything lest it fall in my work. I thought I had decided on the green. The display was the green pattern. Am I so easily swayed? I longed for the caramel; I returned and put the red back on my head.

Bold. I'd start with bold. I'll return for the heathered green for cutting flowers. The caramel for whacking at overgrown things. Audouin saw it on the table when he came home last night and put it on my head.

"C'est pas mal ça," he smiled. "C'est quoi?"

"Un chapeau de jardinage. Je l'ai acheté ce matin à Giverny."

"C'est bien. Ca te va bien." I took it off. "Tu devrais le garder. Ca te va vraiment bien." He smiled again. We have been so much kinder to one another since he thought he really could lose me. Don't try that at home. Just know it.

"C'est mon chapeau rouge. Je vais prendre un autre plus feminin pour couper les fleurs et en faire des bouquets, et puis celui qui fait 'Indiana Jones'," (I did my best swashbuckling gardener) "si Indy était jardinier intrépide et pas archéologue." He smiled. It's really a very nice smile.

Melanoma also has a way of making you playful in the face of the joy of a narrow and lucky escape.

It also goes, sort of, with the gardening gloves my half-sister brought me, along with a reproduction depression era tablecloth she made me and the CD of photos of our father. They, like the heathered green hat, are more suited to the activity and the image of the gardener as cut flower gatherer, which distinction I have not yet earned in my perpetually improving, but not yet improved, garden, but they were a thoughtful gift, a percentage going to breast cancer research.

I have gotten you nothing; memories, I hope, will become heirlooms, I said to her, meaning it.

They already have, she answered. I think, after a week with me -- a week in which I surely said too much of what I have thought and felt, believeing, perhaps wrongly, that anything else was not enough, that any other sort of relationship would not be worth as much --, that she might see them more like I see the photos of our father now, an uncomfortable reminder, something you keep because you can't throw them away, but not something that makes you happy.

I don't think I will feel like crying anymore when I think of our father. For years, my eyes were perfectly dry thinking of him, but I had a way of thinking of him that made a victim of him, a shrew of his wife. Not that they weren't, but I suspect he was something else again. When your memories end in childhood, they have a way of being kind. Probably too kind. It's easier to be hard on those who remain, while they at least deserve the credit for the courage they exhibit in so doing, my father having exhibited none towards me.

"C'est drôle," said my husband, looking at the photos of my father taken from babyhood, through soldiering and salesman, fisherman, huntsman and fatherhood, and back into uniform in his last years, "mais on voit un lâche. Quelqu'un qui ne fut pas un acteur dans sa vie. Il a un drôle de posture, toujours les mains dans les poches, les jambes écartées. Toujours la même."

"Know one thing about our father," she said to me before leaving to ride the escalator to her plane back home, no promises made for the future that can't be kept, "he was a man who was respected by many and admired by all by the end of his life." I could have spoken with her, so expected were the parting words. I know she believes them, but I cannot.

Believe what you choose. Believe what you need. My husband is right. It's what I always knew: my father was not an actor in his own life for certain things, maybe the most important things, but he was for others, and not the best, and he only is responsible for his life, a life I am glad I was spared. I owe him a sorry thanks for that. How much are the empty words in obituaries written by men who hardly knew him and what he carried in his soul, the things he chose to conceal, when he always looked out for himself first, to be buried with full honors for a soldier's life led with no heroism finally worth?

Reading the New York Times today, I came across an article about the letters Donna Reed received from soldiers during World War II that she saved, 314 letters in a shoe box in a trunk in the garage, of which she never spoke, soldiers who "often wrote to her as if to a sister or the girl next door, confiding moments of homesickness, loneliness, privation and anxiety."

Cpl. Bob Bowie wrote of how seeing Ms. Reed in “The Human Comedy” made him long to be back home in Los Angeles and wishing “I could see my Mom.” He added: “I don’t know how it affected the other fellows, we never discuss our feelings with one another.”

If the men and women serving with him at the base knew, then they could answer, but he never discussed his feelings with them. He never told them what he didn't want them to know, what would not have won him praise for loyalty and goodness. They can't answer, and I won't.

Heroes are injured and die in wars, live with their pain and work to help others with what they have, not what they take from their family, not what they conceal of their family, of themselves, and not from personal honor and dignity, but from fear and shame. These are the men and women deserving of honor guards and F16's overhead at their funerals. I won't be found uttering platitudes of respect and admiration.

And I won't feel my eyes sting with tears ever again when I think of him. I will never again feel the slightest regret for the fractures and the resentments and rejections in my family. Let them do that. Let them believe what they will of what they know nothing and judge and punish accordingly. It doesn't touch me anymore.

For years, I have longed to feel as though I had risen from the valley to the top of the mountain, from where I could look out and see everything about me to a far, far horizon, unobstructed, free. For years, I thought it was about work and my success. It is about the soul. Knowing makes you free.

I hope you got what you wanted out of this visit. The words sounded innocent, conveying hope for a wish, but they could have as easily carried the implication, the charge of selfishness. I hope you got what you wanted. It wasn't about what I wanted.

You must be careful, I was warned. You can't start this for selfish reasons; she is a person. But we all walk into relationships vulnerable, and who we are is what takes care us of as we risk; what the relationship will become is up to no one. You can't know before you meet and know one another.

I got what I needed from this visit. I learned who my half-sister is and what she believes. I learned about the later and the last years of my father's life, the part he didn't share with my sister and I. I learned I was better off for it, as hard as anything I ever lived without him was. I could say that my soul and who I am were forged in that crucible, and I would say that I am glad for it. I learned to be grateful and to be glad for myself. My confidence is great. My strength is greater. My world is vaster, my dreams able to carry others and fulfill parts of their own.

You can't protect anyone. You can try to be kind. You must be honest, or nothing is worth a thing, and now, watching her disappear, s'évanouir, in the escalator taking her to her plane back to her home town, a place I left years and years ago, I knew better what many things are worth. I wish her well, and better.

Good-bye, Dad. I don't miss you.
....

Lilies!

Another reason to love June

Version française suivra très bientôt...

I have been so... absent of late. It's simple. The weather has been overcast. Gray. I operate on solar power.

All it takes is for Audouin to get up and say, "It's a beautiful, sunny day," and I am out in the garden, lickety-split. Another reason for the plants to like the sun... they get attention.

This morning, the sun did justice to the lilies that have been in bloom for a few days, along with everything else. I took our my camera, tools, and what little planting soil I have left (time for a run to Florosny to restock) and tore out a bunch of mint to plant a Potentilla fruticosa 'Abbotswood', or Abbotswood Potentilla, that I have been trying hard to kill off in its pot, and two Euphorbia characias ssp. wulfenii 'Lambrook Gold', better known as spurge, to which I have been doing the same. One went on each side of the steps down to the second terrace, and the Abbotswood Potentilla got squeezed in between the spurge to the right and a Veronica longifolia, or long-leafed veronica plant. I fully expect the potentilla to make as full a recovery... as I... fully expect.

A fuchsia got shifted to make a better place for the spurge to the left. I have learned that I can transplant just about anything anytime, if I water enough afterward and give the plant lots and lots of nice planting soil. You must use good dirt.

Listen. I will say it once again, since it bears emphasizing.

You must use good planting soil.

....

Giverny, the non-existant generation gap

Gardening, taking pictures and tapping on my keyboard must come to an end for now because I am supposed to pick up my young friend from motorcycle school days, Katia. I am the same age my mother was when I was Katia's age. I love motorcycles; they collapse all differences, since we are still a minority, we riders of our motorcicles.

Katia's moving back to her native country in France, the Lozère, on Friday, and I am taking her to see Giverny before she goes. We are painting her apartment Thursday. I do it partially in remembrance and in honor of my sister Elizabeth's grueling efforts the day I moved out of our apartment in Greenwich to come here, late June 2002. In return, she is teaching me how to knock a pétanque ball out of play.

....

Franco-American relations

Victor has landed.

He actually ran into a friend from Versailles at Roissy, who was also "deplaning" in Philadelphia, the friend en route to Newport, Rhode Island. They made it through immigrations and passport control together (Victor said the guy talked so fast he couldn't understand a word and only spoke faster every time they tried to make him understand that they were French and not English speakers!), baggage claim and customs right to where they were supposed to be. Elizabeth was there waiting for Victor, who was in great high spirits when I got him on the phone on the highway heading to Lansdale a little afterwards. So much for nerves.

Looks like the French and the Americans were made for each other like hand in gant en soie.

Pas de soucie!

I have got to go!!!
....