Frost

Frost-sugared rose

I cannot imagine how the fish comprehend winter. It is a miracle of the minor order to see them below the thin layer of ice that gradually thickens if the weather comes from the east and is not slowly warmed again by the Gulfstream's most northeastern tip, the North Atlantic Drift, as they swim about, very, very slowly. They have no warm coats.

We are, right now, feeling the ebb of the Drift and the grip of the polar temperatures, freezing everything from Finland to Moosesucks, which is a hopeful sign, since I just confirmed the reservation for the hotel in Argentière for January and spent an hour or two yesterday researching collapsible, lightweight and relatively inexpensive travel containers for dogs. Baccarat was 2 months older when she made her first hotel stay at l'Hôtel de la Couronne, and the armchair legs felt her teeth despite her Kongs; the hotel instituted a per diem charge for dogs the next year, although they were still more than welcome. We paid, despite her behaving better than most other visitors and restricting her misbehavior to sleeping on Sam's bed while we were on the slopes. Fia will be just 5 months old, and I will be a wreck if I don't find a way to insure that she cannot inflict damage while we are out, which quite ruins the point of the trip and makes the expense of tolls, gas, hotel and lift tickets an additional gall.

It had occurred to me to make her a bed in the bath or the toilet, but in the case of the bath, she'd very possibly set herself to scratching the door and crying or barking to get out and join Rapide. Besides, housekeeping will want to clean the bath, and they'd have to get her back in again. Not difficult, but I'd have to talk with them, and, besides, why should they have to deal with that? The toilet is out. I read somewhere that small, high-ceiling places make dogs crazy. And, how nice is it to spend your morning and afternoon curled up around the porcelain God?

So, I Googled "crate training" and lazily perused various posts. I also wanted to see if everyone agreed that you really have to shut them up for as long as 4 hours at this age. I miss her.

In one, there was a photograph of just such a travel kennel. Encouraged by my new knowledge that such a thing exists, and not wanting a huge, unwieldy wire cage or plastic Vari Kennel I have no idea where I will store once home, I clicked on the ZooPlus.fr icon on my toolbar and went looking. Et voilà, there they were, at the bottom of the page, under all the dog houses, two collapsible, not terribly expensive travel kennels. I got the tape measure to determine the length of a sleeping, full-grown Lab (Thank you, Rapide), and found that I would need the size L of the more expensive one, the size L of the less expensive one being inadequate. Not that she will actually need it full-grown, but what's the use of buying something I will only ever use a very few times when I travel with the very few puppies I will ever have at my age (Fia will likely pass after my 60th birthday. Isn't that a happy thought?)? Now, I just need to find the courage to order it, and the AC adapter from Dell for my laptop to replace the one Fia bit through a few weeks back.

I am sure she did not do it on purpose.

Dogs are not an inexpensive pleasure for the responsible mistress. Either they fly with you (poor dog), get kenneled (poor, poor dog), or you reduce your luggage to make room for them in the car, having the appropriate vehicle for their size and number, and get everything necessary to insure their comfort and your peace of mind (poorer owner). We like them to have the chance to run and play in the snow, too. Labrador Retrievers might be famous for being water dogs, but snow is another passion. They come, after all, from Newfoundland, and unlike the fish, they do have warm coats to protect them from the cold in the water and the snow. They are, after all, not cold-blooded.

Such a concept. Nature is truly worthy of our amazement.

Happily, I do have warm coats so that I can do the work in the garden I ought to have done when the ground was still in the mud state, and not the frozen state. The real problem is the fingers, which freeze stiff when grasping the scissors to finish the pruning of the lavender, and the pruning sheers for all the shaggy bushes to which I still have not gotten. Ski socks in Wellies are quite effective for warding off frost-bitten toes. Log-splitting may be done in minimal clothing year-round, as it warms you up in a jiffy.

You can see how motivated I am to get the drawings done so that we can get on with our various renovation and construction projects, when I'd rather dress like Charlie Brown and get out in the garden in order to feel I have been of some use, and those projects -- at least one, anyway, have become urgent, if not for my sense of self, then to keep the water out of the "petite maison", which the roof, despite the presence of the construction sheeting, is no longer able to do in the least.

Not to mention the water that has been seeping into a corner of the Summer Room (nice name for a sorry room) and soaking the new sisal floor covering and plaster, ruining both. I discovered that the elbow at the end of the downspout had fallen off, directing the water from the gutter directly at this corner of the building. I had been telling my husband for years that the thing ought to be torn to the ground and rebuilt for all it is weatherproof and solid, but as long as he sees four walls and a roof containing space that presently serves a purpose, he cannot abide demolishing the (inadequate) structure and replacing it with (correct) new construction. This is beyond depressing for an architect or builder who knows anything about building.

Here, imagine this. The original part of the structure in question was a small garage, whose walls are made of a single row of brick.

"Mais la brique c'est un matériel de construction. Il y a plein de bâtiments faits de brique," he complains, when I suggest that it is depressing to think of tearing the roof off the petite maison and bearing a new roof structure on walls that aren't even sturdy enough to carry it.

"Oui," I allow, "mais jamais un seul rang de brique pour soutenir non seulement son propre poids mais aussi celui de la toiture et le poids qu'il doit pouvoir supporter."

In other words, walls may be made of brick as a structural material (in the old days; we'd never do it now), but they were composed of more than one row of bricks, and the bricks were laid in both directions, interlocking, to provide strength and stability. Our wall enclosing the garage is composed of a single row of bricks, laid lengthwise along the direction of the wall. The inside is covered with some sort of cement mix, used like plaster, causing the hopeful to not actually see the truth.

He looks at me doubtfully. I know I have not won. I do not know how to carry the argument, except to tear the whole thing down with my own hands one day, while he is at work -- or on duty at the hospital so that I get the benefit of two --, and suffer the consequences later.

There is also the question, though, of the slab. You can be sure that it is not haunched, and building appropriate walls and a roof structure directly on it, as is presently the case, would be unwise.

And, then there is the garage we must have. This morning, my motorcycle failed to start, and then so did his, when he tried it afterwards, and he ended up driving a car to work, leaving late and knowing he'd suffer the snaking traffic all the way to the hospital because the battery on my bike can't stand the cold and the damp. I'd kissed him goodbye and started the coffee machine when he reappeared, putting one set of keys on the wainscoting ledge and taking another.

"Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?" I knew.

"Ta moto ne démarre pas," he said from inside his helmet. I knew he hadn't left the lights on again; I saw the bike when I returned from walking Rapide just minutes after he had gotten home. "Je vais essayer la mienne."

So, you ask, why didn't he take his in the first place, and why had he taken mine the day before? Because that's another horrendous expense in waiting. His clutch is going and needs replacing. Besides, my bike at half the weight and cylinder is better than his in freezing conditions, where you can take the black ice like Casey Stoner entering a curve. He'd be on his side on the ground with his.

Neither of us seriously thought his would start, either, after several days at rest in the bottom garden in sub-freezing temperatures, but he headed off with the keys, only to return and start the bouilloire for some hot water.

"C'est pour quoi ça?" I asked. I knew this already, too.

"Le neiman ne tourne pas."

The starter. It was frozen. I gave him a kid's plastic cup he could leave down below in the event the hot water worked. Neither of us believed it would. I took my cup of coffee and followed him out into the garden to watch from the edge of the top terrace. He poured the hot water on the starter, got on the bike, turned the key and hit the starter. It cleared its throat. He waited, one-two-three, and I heard it strain again. Silence. I counted, one-two-three, and I heard it go once more, and then nothing. He reached for the shredded scooter cover he uses to protect the seats and controls, and I watched his silver helmet bob across the bottom garden and rise up the steps, praying I had remembered to clean up any dog poop Rapide might have left down there. At least, I thought, it would be frozen, which helps.

"On a vraiment besoin d'un garage," he put me on notice.

"Je sais, mais on ne peut pas faire un garage clos et chauffé," I defended, to which he made a sound of deprecation somewhere in this throat. "My ass," he'd have said, had he spoken in English. As it were, I heard that, even though he said something quite different, like "Attends voir," or You just wait and see.

"Au moins ça protégera les motos de l'humidité," he grumbled, seeming now to accept that really, we couldn't build a proper garage with the possibility of even minimal heat. Do they make electric blankets for motorcycles? "On va revendre la tienne," he added.

This did not upset me. I have been saying it for more than a year. It is the world's most undependable motorcycle. The battery fails more often than it functions, and you usually need to hit the electric starter two or three times to get it to turn over, going a long way each time to drain the battery, which then doesn't have adequate time to recharge if you are only going so far as to the hospital for the day. Add freezing weather and damp, and you are screwed.

"T'as pensé à la coupe circuit?" I asked. I never think of the button that shuts the motor off when I am in a temper, either. Especially given the track record of this motorcycle and batteries.

"Ah, je n'y ai pas pensé." He headed back out toward my bike, where he had left it the night before, up by the telephone booth (how quaint) next to our gate, turning his head to see what was behind him as he stepped onto the slab where the new entry pavement is supposed to be installed, and still hasn't been because the new entry has not been built (are you surprised?). He hadn't expected me to follow. I thought he could use the encouragement.

"Quel est le button encore?" I pointed to the red one by the accelerator. "Oh." He hit it, turned the key -- not a light lit up. Dead. I followed him back into the house, where he reached for a set of car keys.

"Tu as besoin de rouler aujourd'hui?" he asked. No, I didn't need to drive any longer distances today. The Fiat would be fine. Besides, I thought, it has a better radio to sooth the savage beast in the traffic he was about to hit.

"Prendre la BM," I said, and closed the door behind his silver, unhelmeted head, watching it cross the lawn again to the gate.

"J'ai du être à l'hôpital il y a 25 minutes déjà," he muttered, not grumpily at all and not turning his head. Merely stating the fact that a garage would be the best way to insure that no one had to wait for the doctor, or that he'd be forced to start the day in the worst possible of ways: behind schedule.

I knew this already, too.

It's time to pick a project, any project.


....

Praise with elation

Morning has broken, beautiful

finally

And, I have nearly finished with a guest room suitable to receive a visitor. My half-sister. My father's last child. Another story I haven't told because it's one that might not stop. I haven't seen her since the day her mother asked my father to have us come for the afternoon and dinner to tell us that there would be nothing for us, my sister and I, my father's first children. We never saw him again, not on purpose. I saw him once more across a crowded Greyhound station in Syracuse, NY about a year later. I wasn't sure it was him. He looked so much older. "Dad?" I called, not very loudly. I didn't want to be wrong in front of all those people. He didn't hear. I continued to walk towards him, carefully, and called a little louder, "Dad?" He heard. His head made a sudden movement toward me, his eyes looking at the faces around him.

"Dad." They found me.

"Jackie?" He looked uncertain. I nodded. Yes, it's I. He walked over to me. Did he hug me? I don't know. "What are you doing here?"

"I just got back from visiting my cousin Kathy at North Adams. Mom's waiting for me out in the car." He nodded. We said good-bye, and I never saw him again. I called from college over the years, but he was detached. Drifting like a space lab with a broken arm. I wanted him to talk; I wanted him to sound proud of me. Once, he told me that he had been in NYC with his wife, to see the doctors at Columbia Presbyterian. She had already seen the best neurologists in Syracuse, but she wanted a physical cause for her searing headaches, not a suggestion that she see a therapist when they found none. She asked for the best, and they referred her to Columbia.

"Why," I asked him from my dorm room, "didn't you call me? It's only a couple of miles from me." I knew the answer. I wanted only to ask the question. I had to ask. He didn't answer. He told me about the doctors in Syracuse, the doctors in NYC, the pain.

"They found nothing," he said. "They suggested she see a therapist, too, for possible emotional causes. She refused." I listened. "They said the only way to make the pain go away is to cut the nerves to the left side of her face, which would leave her paralyzed, like a stroke victim. That, or try seeing a therapist."

"So, what is she going to do?" I knew the answer.

"She asked for the surgery." He sounded flat. Worn out. Disbelieving. He didn't get it, but he couldn't decide for her.

There were so many things I ought to have said rather than leave his bubble intact. I didn't know. You can't change a man. Remember, that, Jackie. You can't ever change a man. My mother had told me that so many times, not that she ever stopped trying herself. It's hard, I suppose, not to want to try. I let my dad be. I think I was wrong now. There are things one should say if the other can't.

I called him the last time in the early summer of 1983, 4 years after I saw him for the last time in the Greyhound waiting room, when he didn't try to talk to me longer. Didn't offer me a Coke or offer to tell me why he was there himself. Didn't come out to see my mom and tell her he'd bring me home, that he'd call and come to get me soon to spend some time together. He let me go.

I called to ask him to sign the adoption papers.

"I always knew," he said, sounding empty, "that I would never see you or your sister again." Why? "I passed out in the kitchen the other day."

"What did the doctor say?" He hesitated.

"You did see a doctor, didn't you?"

"I --," he stopped.

"You didn't see a doctor?"

"No. It doesn't matter. I am going to die soon anyway." He let me go, and he was killing himself. Three packs of unfiltered Pall Malls a day for 30 years should do it. Eventually. There were things I should have asked, but, I must have thought, Why? He had made a choice. He made it the day his wife put her hands on his shoulders from behind his easy chair in their split-level ranch and said, "Bob, you have something to say to your daughters, don't you?" and he turned white. As white as his shirt. He looked trapped.

"Bob, you had something to say to them, didn't you? she prompted again. He continued to look at us on the sofa with the comics spread on our knees, our half-sister playing on the floor between us, his wife's daughter looking on, and no sound came from him. He was frozen.

"Well, then, girls, the reason we called you here today is to tell you that there will be nothing from us for school, or anything." She had dared to say it. Dared to say what my father couldn't, and she knew he couldn't. We listened, quietly. Me, 16. My sister 3 years younger. I nodded politely. Our father sat perfectly still, perfectly white. She couldn't see what we saw from where she stood behind him, her hands resting on his shoulders. He didn't love her. He wasn't anymore. If he were to love her, then he had to become another man, one who couldn't know us. "Dinner's ready. Come to the table," she finished. We stood up, and we walked to the table. I didn't ask him to drive us home. Right now. I was polite.

Always polite.

He sat at the head of the table on my right, facing his wife, my sister on my left, facing, our step-sister, our four-year-old half-sister to her left. At dessert, our stepmother said to her older daughter, a year younger than I, "Why don't you go upstairs and get all the nice clothes your dad bought for you to show the girls?" I looked at my father. He was paler still. Absolutely silent. Where had he gone inside himself? Why, I asked myself, doesn't he stop this? It was a set-up. She had planned it all out. A theater piece to show my sister and I who his children were, and who they were not. We had nothing. I bought my clothes, paid for my lessons -- everything -- with my babysitting and waitressing money, and I was saving for college. He sent nothing. Once, I asked for $20 for track shoes because I wanted to join the high school team. He offered me one of my savings bonds. I thanked him and bought them for myself.

She stood from her place, and went upstairs to return with shoes dripping from her fingers, a pile of blouses, skirts, pants draped across her forearms, as though she were offering them to us. That was it. She didn't show us each one, or how they went together, how many outfits she could make from them and how nice they looked on her.

"It's time to take the girls home now, Bob." He let us go.

That was 32 years ago.

I found my half-sister, Jennifer, in January, and she asked to come here. She looked like me when she was a baby. She looks like our father's mother now.

"Tu vas la reconnaître à l'aéroport?" my husband asked last evening.

"Bien sur. C'est le visage de ma grandmère, comment pourrais-je ne pas la reconnaître?" He smiled.

"Et elle, elle va te reconnaître, tu penses?"

"Je ne sais pas. Elle n'a vu qu'une photo de moi, et pas très récente, à moins que notre soeur lui a montré l'une des siennes. Horribles, d'ailleurs." I am not photogenic. My mother always said so, You're not photogenic. You're telegenic. The problem is that people don't watch me on television, and there are only a handful of photos that actually look like me, or the way I see myself when I look in a mirror, which I don't do often, if I can help it.

"I only ever saw our father cry twice," Jennifer told me. The first time was when our stepsister's father called to say he could adopt his daughter, if he wanted; he didn't want her. The second time was when I called to ask him to sign the adoption papers. "He went outside and dropped onto a lawnchair and sobbed. He wouldn't talk to anyone." He had done what he couldn't believe any father could.

"Don't think," my sister told her, "that she wanted that when she called. Dad could have said no. She wanted Dad to say no." But, he let us go. He replaced us with his wife's children and led the life we had with him, were supposed to continue to have with him, until he died just 6 years later. Longer, I imagine, than he had hoped.

Tomorrow Jennifer will be here, and I will see him again, in the photos she will bring of him and in her face. How do you prepare yourself for that? He taught her to ski moguls, he left me before I was ready. He left off with me, and continued with her. The skiing, the summers in South Wellfleet, the dances at the weddings. He left her with his flag, to cry for his loss. I think that flag will travel here, and Dad will be there, here in the French countryside in Moosesucks with us.

I am left to wonder about his masters in psychology and the love he developed for photography.

"Did he still hunt?" I asked Jennifer?

"Oh, yes! Right up until he died, although in his last years he'd just have soon have taken his camera as his rifle." And my son, who has inherited my need to photograph what I see. From my father? I knew about the obsession with a perfect lawn. He carried, she told me, his dandelion lifter in his back pocket, just in case he came across one. I asked her to bring me one to replace the only one I ever saw here and lost, somewhere in the garden. I probably threw it away with a bunch of dandelions, before I learned that spraying and soil care is a lot easier than bending down to jam the dandelion thing into the ground and pry them out, one by one.

Somehow, he also learned to live while he was letting go of us, and of life. Why didn't he call us? Perhaps the space lab had just drifted too far, the arm grown too broken to reach back out. If he thought to repair it with the tools he sought in psychology, he certainly also thought it was too late, that we wanted things this way, that that is what I had asked for when I called to ask him to sign the papers, when it didn't occur to me to add, "unless you want to be our father," rather than waiting for him to say, "No, I am your father, and I am coming to see you."

I must go and finish preparing her room. I imagine he knows that I am doing that for her, for him, and I can't even count the number of spiders who gave their lives in the effort.

The white door and trim on the orange walls are about to go Meteorite, too. It was my first idea -- a little more "modern", to go with the pared down simplicity (ahem) of the room --, but it was easy to do the white first and see. Audouin says orange, and I have to agree.

Forever orange.

My arms are killing me, right along with my hands and upper back. Audouin looked at me last evening, folding laundry at 11:30 pm and said, "Tu n'as pas arreté toute la journée."

"C'est comme ça depuis 2 semaines." In case he hadn't noticed.

I exaggerate. It's been like that for 2 days, although I have worked pretty hard for all of the last 2 weeks on this room. And I thought I'd get both rooms done on time. I edit constantly while I zip around like the Tasmanian devil through the multitude of things I feel I have to do, prioritizing on the run, the phrase, "Remember ladies, lower your expectations," running through my mind.

Things I have had to decide to live with:

1. It's the smaller room that will be ready.
2. The sea grass floor covering will not be installed because of the various leaks in the bathroom.
3. The house will not be House & Garden quality.
4. The pool is still a swamp because I haven't received the estimate I want from the fourth electrician with the middle price and the cheap one hasn't called as he said he would.
5. The furnace continues to emit foul-smelling smoke, choking and offending us.
6. The garden is not perfectly House & Garden quality, either, but it's not that bad. I've gotten to most of it, and made a Herculean effort -- ha, get it? Sisyphe making a Herculean effort? -- to clean up after the disappeared workers (another story I haven't had time to tell) and weed some more.

Oh! Did I mention the asbestos the roofer found?

I have to get going. IKEA waits for me, I must finish mowing the lawns (sounds grandiose, n'est-ce pas?), and I have the house to vacuum, the chair covers to decatfur, dry cleaning to pick up, and the list goes on.

I should make a list.

I am too tired to make a list.

I don't even want to stand up. It's 11:45, the clouds have gathered, and I meant to have left nearly three hours ago for IKEA. Time to lower my expectations another notch.


....

Still orange

Audouin hasn't come home, fallen down in shock and dismay and asked me to paint it anything but orange yet. I thought about disappearing to *Leroy Merlin to see if they have canvas shades for the window and French door so that I wouldn't have to see his face when he first sees it, but it's too late; they close at 8 pm.

Sam likes it.

The Facebook crowd likes it. Then again, there are two lovers of orange, someone from the 'Cuse (Go Orangemen!) and another from the University of Illinois -- vive les oranges et bleus! --, and we all know why Florida would pick orange for UF. Hell-o!

I like it.

I just keep seeing all the little things I need to do better, and I do have to do a second coat. If only I could have the sea grass floor covering right away. Now I have to scrub the spots of plaster filler and paint off the terracotta tile. I'll never get the paint from when the workers were attempting to paint the metal shutters off it. The Jackson Pollack effect wasn't at all limited to the plastic sheeting they laid out.

And if the Marbre reminded me of sails and sneakers, the addition of the tarp on the roof over my head as I work, flapping in the breeze, makes me feel like I am on a sailboat. I only need close my eyes.

Hopefully she's watertight (enough) for now. Now I need to add roof details for a toit végétalisé to my "to do" list.

* Leroy Merlin is basically like Home Depot, although I think we have that here, too. I forget what's it called, but it has the same little guy in overalls on the signs.

Funny enough, the name means the King and Merlin, but it's supposedly the real, actual last names of the two men who started the chain. I'll have to see if that is apocryphal.
....