Quarter Year

When you eat a meal you eat a place.¹ Not only are you physically becoming part of the food and its soil, but you’re spiritually saturating your body with the terroir.²

This will blow your mind. Have you ever heard of camas or salal? Well, let me tell you about them, friend. Camas is a plant with an edible root that seems to be somewhere between an onion and a potato. (It has a bad-ass brother named, death camas, which isn’t nearly as fun to eat.) And salal is a low shrub that you’ve definitely seen around the NW if you’ve spent any time here. It lives under tall trees, near water and it makes little black-purple berries. You’ve definitely seen it.

Both these plants are native to the Pacific Northwest. Along with salmon they were the staple foods of the Northwest native peoples.

I have lived here my whole life. I wouldn’t say I know everything about Western Washington botany, but I pay as much attention as anyone else. Until a few months ago, I had never even heard of the two plants that were the pillars of people’s diets, right here, for the last 10,000 years. And it’s not like I’m six years old; I’m thirty! Over thirty!

So, what does this have to do with anything? I’m not really sure myself, I’m a little drunk.

I guess what I’m getting at is that Presence/Attention/Awareness is about more than just focusing on the moment, it’s also about engaging with this place where we are.³ Because we eat many times a day, we have many opportunities to engage with the terroir, to be sensually present in this physical Place and let the rain become our blood. We should eat food with which we share terroir, with which we have a common rhythm.

Salal and camas evolved here, so where are they in our diets? Maybe they taste bad, I don’t know, I’ll tell you this summer, but maybe they were pushed off our plates by cheap food from other places. If we are where we eat, then most of us are geographic Frankensteins.

Where it rains so much that there’s rain in my dreams and my knees can feel it and it narrates Sunday mornings, do I eat the onion that drank the rain that wet my hair weeks before?⁴

—

¹ “Terroir” technically refers only to food and drink (and the official distinction doesn’t even require that the food be organic), but I like to think of it as applying to other things as well – clothing and building materials immediately come to mind.

Art made with local materials is, I think, something different. Of course food and clothes and structures can be created with inspiration to become more than just necessities of survival – they can become expressions of place through person – but the timing of the creative process may or may not coincide with the need for food or shelter, and those two things are going to be taken care of regardless.

² Not to mention the spirit with which the farmer grows, treats and harvests the food.

³ Travel is, essentially, the experience of and engagement with Place. Which is why these food posts have a place on a travel blog.

⁴ This is what I thought about when praying before each meal in France, how our bodies mix with the earth and why I can taste Marguerite’s biceps in her wine.

When the animal is dead, the Mazzeri rolls it over and looks into its face. They recognize a person they know in the face of the animal, and the next morning, they announce to the town that the person they saw will die within a year. Even if it’s a family member, they are compelled – by Quellu Quassu, the Corsican “Some Thing” more vague than the Christian God – to hunt it and kill it, against their own will. The Mazzeri do not choose the person, they’re simply death’s messengers.

The hunt takes place in dreams, but Corsicans consider dreams to be a parallel and relevant world: the prophesied deaths occur within the year.^{1}

Of course, this tradition died out half a century ago.

I arrived on Corsica among the skeptical majority, the rational liberal who doesn’t necessarily believe in something he can’t see, like God or dream-hunters. To each his own, of course, but if I can’t see it, I don’t believe in it.

Then, in mountains that had been presented as ogre- and Mazzeri-filled, where dreams had been dangerous, we saw kids in Yankee baseball caps and Nike tennis shoes listening to 50 Cent.

We have lost something, I could see.

The world is poorer for the loss. Much poorer. What richness is steam-rolled by skeptical media, employment-focused education, the medical establishment and our science-centered faith? What creative force was extinguished by the Church or ignored by tv-addicted posterity? And how did MY money encourage it?

I wondered, “Really, what does it hurt to open myself to believing in dreams and magic? Am I skeptical only because I have so much pride that I think it matters that I be right or wrong?”

I chose to open myself to the possibility probability that there’s much more going on than what I can see. At the very least, it will make my world richer.

But science and money, the twin pillars of Modern religion, crush cultural niches, the pockets in which creative wealth can accumulate. The Corsican mountains are flat. The Snoqualmie run casinos. Modernism has its cellular talons in Africa.

Then we rolled into the valley of the Christian Back-to-the-Landers, and everything lit up. Nowhere else had I seen a cultural cauldron like this: the kids were singing songs to entertain themselves, they talked about natural phenomena, they believed in the supernatural, the Christian God, they believed that Mary was there and helping them. They had stories. They had a world that was immediate and rich, and legends of their own creation were growing in its garden.

I could see how this might be the kernel for a culture. It wouldn’t take many more generations, or like-minded families, for this to develop into a web of myths and practices that the world has never before seen.

So, what does this have to do with food?

Rugged independence persists in modern Corsica.

There are groups of people among us that are making an effort to live in this fashion. They don’t have TVs and don’t read the newspaper. They’re trying to live in a way that allows them and their kids to sharpen the impression of their characters^{2}, that the force of their creativity be unrestrained and untarnished by mass-commercialism, that they can channel their unblemished centers and create with its texture. And for their efforts our world will be richer.

These are the people we need to support with our money. Whether they’re making clothes or constructing homes with local materials or growing food, our money needs to go to those who are creating culture, not steamrolling it.

If we’re going to buy food, let’s buy it from these people, the farmers, the independents who are making this place richer. Let’s buy from the small stands at the farmers’ markets, to help the fragile ones nurse quiet lives.

And we need to stop supporting the steamrollers, the brand names – Coke, Safeway, Costco, Monsanto, Dole, and all the others. There is no spirit in money-centrism, and I’m tired of hearing their voices in humans’ mouths.

Money is the agent of the modern world’s evolution. Spend wisely.

—
^{1} Dorothy Carrington in Granite Island, describing the Corsican fishing community:

“A week he was missing with his boat and crew…. I heard only a single comment on the situation: ‘His wife came down to ask for news. You should have seen that woman! Her face was black; she has drunk the blood of his heart.’ Blessed are the illiterate, who can spontaneously express themselves in such apt and opulent imagery! But perhaps this was general in the days before universal education began mass-producing minds. I have often wondered how far the Elizabethan writers were indebted to the virile, vivid speech of an illiterate majority.”

She wrote about the Mazzeri and other Corsican folklore in The Dream Hunters of Corsica, in which she reinforces her point:
All this, one might say, belongs to the past. Rational French state education and materialistic values have discredited the evil spirits and reduced the legends to curiosities of folklore. The ogres have vanished; the Devil no longer roams among the rocks. Nor, indeed, does Saint Martin…

^{2} “The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character… Under all these screens {brands to which a person subscribes} I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”

– Ralph Waldo Emmerson

Reading Emerson makes me want to overturn cars.

The most unexpected part of holding the fowl was that it was warm. I guess I don’t know what I expected, but the feet felt like human fingers. It’s kinda like when you imagine kissing a person, but you forget to imagine saliva, and it totally changes everything.

City boys have written about killing their first chickens before, so I won’t go into it. It wasn’t an emotional experience for me. But as we were plucking the feathers I told Didier how amazing it was that I’d only killed my first fowl after 30 years.

“I got a good education in high school and college, I’m happy about what I learned and it was relevant for what it was… but it wasn’t…”

“…essential.” He offered.

“Yes.”

“The root of the word ‘essential’ is ‘essence’ or ‘truth.’ You weren’t educated about the truth…”

“… of how our bodies mix with the earth.” I said.

“Exactly.”

Didier and I were on the same page a lot, some of his rants could have come from my mouth. The ones about how companies have a stake in keeping their employees powerless, how it’s good for capitalism that people be vaguely afraid about the future, and so on.

When he taught us about the medicinal herbs in the garden I took tons of notes, but I had a hard time accessing what I’d been taught. I’d look at a plant and look closer at its leaves and compare it to my notes and would be too unsure to declare it Citronelle! or Lemon Pepper! or whatever. I said this time and again, and I’ll repeat it here:

“Learning to identify plants is like learning to read for the first time.”

People ask us often, “So, the kids could leave school at 15? How did he educate them?”

I was curious about this too. One day we went for a ride with Didier and his oldest son. They sat in the front seat, we sat in the back. As they drove, Didier pointed to the sky and talked about the movement of the clouds. He pointed to the hills and talked about the rock formations and the fossils. He talked about the fields that the neighbors were sowing. His son pointed to a sea gull that was out of place here. His son talked about the history of some old structures on their land. His son talked about planting by the moon and how it was a good guide but not the last word. His son talked about finding fennel by looking for a larger reed, because fennel grows at its feet.

Azure with her wild salad.

In other words, Didier taught his children about the land and the plants and the weather and the animals and natural systems and Catholicism. He taught them the things that he considered essential.

They might not know a lot of the academic stuff we consider foundations of knowledge, but they’ve learned how to have a relationship with the earth, and I think that’s fundamentally healthy.

Azure dancing in a field of shit.

Luckily, Azure and I were there to help shovel the chicken shit that fertilized the potato bed. We probably helped them catch up by a full day or two (it was a lot of shit – six inches deep over about 1000 square feet), and once the manure was on the ground they were ready to plant.

Azure also followed up to help cover the accidentally exposed potatoes.

Didier drove the tractor while the three oldest kids planted. The thing they were sitting on would split the row, the kids would drop the potato into a little shaft (all at the same time, so the rows would be neat), then another piece of the equipment would cover the row back up.

Leon covering the potatoes.

Because the manure was mixed with hay, sometimes the machine wasn’t able to push the soil back over the potatoes completely. Leon, one of the twins, followed behind and did quality control by hand.

They were pretty focused on this task. It’s important to do it right – Gabriel said they get 1.5 TONS of potatoes every year.

Riding.

Didier wants to get horses or oxen or something to pull the equipment so they don’t have to rely on oil to farm. The only opposition I have to large families is that there’s already too many people on this planet and our modern lives are already seriously straining the natural systems. But this family of ELEVEN – combined – puts a much smaller strain on the environment than even one person living in the modern fashion.

Alice always managed to find the sunlight.

When all was said & done, it didn’t take them long at all to do the actual planting – well under half a day. It was the manure that took the longest. Suzanne said that if it bothers you to work with manure then you can’t be a successful farmer – it’s the most important link in the cycle.

Ah, Johann.

So he set up a ladder that didn’t QUITE reach its intended destination, and he managed to reach to the low end of the beam and grab it, hands only, feet dangling. This was all part of the plan. He hung from the beam with the pulley system in one hand and a chronically bad shoulder attached to the other. He would walk, hand-over-hand, along the beam to the peak of the roof, hanging the whole time, then after the rope was attached he’d walk himself back down to the ladder. Right?

Wrong. It turns out he wasn’t as strong as he thought, in fact I don’t even think Siren from American Gladiators could have done it. His hands quickly gave out and he and the ropes crashed onto a lower beam and then crashed again to the ground, where he landed on his head and hip. There was blood everywhere. In shock, he got up and dragged his broken body to the house. Through the gate, past the table, he managed to open the door. He saw the family in the living room and explained, “!wosdln;lksir.”

Suzanne saw the blood and called the ambulance.

After a couple days of blissful country living, skirted children and dinner prayer songs, quiet family meals and hand-picked salads, quiet nights with talks about religion, a helicopter roared into the valley. A few sturdy-looking paramedics jumped to the ground with a stretcher in their hands and ran to the house, putting out their cigarettes on the way. In the meantime the well-endowed pilot hopped down from the cockpit wearing a single-pieced jumpsuit that unzipped from his neck to his thigh, and he lit up his own cigarette.

Fifteen minutes later they loaded Johann into the chopper. The neighbor took pictures. The family watched in unison as the helicopter rose into the air and took off for Montpelier. Didier prayed for his idiot son; in the helicopter’s downdraft the women’s skirts flapped at their ankles.

It was a culture shock. Azure was shaken out of the trance of this peaceful valley by one of the paramedics who looks like her cousin Todd. “These are our people,” she thought. What are we doing here pretending to be anything like the family when our lives are much more like those of the paramedics? And tonight they’ll go home and tell their wives or husbands, “You’ll never believe this weird place we went today…”

We decided to give the family some space, so we took off for the afternoon. It was a good excuse to check email in town.

The next day we had a little surprise: an ambulance pulled up to the chalet and unloaded a morphine-soaked Johann into our living room. It was unbelievable that he was out of the hospital so fast, let alone that he wasn’t still in ICU. And now here he was being wheeled into our little candle-lit bubble. Would he turn on the lights at night? OH NO! Would he bleed on our food? At first we thought he was going to take our room, and we balked, so instead he was carried into the neighboring room. He groaned as the paramedics – with help from the family – set him on the bed. The paramedics took off and we were left with a roommate who couldn’t move, who would need help going to the bathroom and whose head was partially shaved and sewn like the ass of a sick cat. But we all know what it’s like to fear we’re a burden, so I sucked it up and broke the ice with a smile, “If there’s anything you need…”

It turns out – miraculously, really – that he didn’t break any bones, not even his skull. They think he has a concussion, but if that’s the only chip in his enamel then he’s incredibly lucky.

We helped him walk that first afternoon. He couldn’t believe that this happened to him when he had so many horses to shoe the next day, not figuratively. He said he smokes 50 – FIFTY! – cigarettes a day, and now he’d gone two full days without.

“Every crisis is an opportunity,” I chirped.

He looked at me with knowing eyes. “It is, it really is.”

Johann cried in the hospital, apparently, he cried about his life and how nothing ever really seems to go right for him, how he screws up good things. His dad said, “Johann had everything here ten years ago – he had this farm, he had his horses, he had family and he had God, he had good food and a quiet life. But he wanted to ‘see the world’ so he threw it all away….”

(From their little paradise the outside world looks like a mess, it looks like an ocean of people who take comfort in other people’s weaknesses to justify their own addictions: identity, status and craving, not to mention the more obvious daily addictions of narcotics, processed foods and mindless spending.)

Anyway, Dad continued his thought: “In the ten years since he left the farm he’s gone from crisis to crisis, he’s crashed 22 cars. He’s no longer a practicing Christian, he’s lost.”

The night I said the crisis/opportunity thing, I popped into his room to ask him a question and then backed out quietly: his room was candle-lit and he was in the middle of the bed on his back, counting rosary beads on his chest with his eyes closed. His legs stretched thin and fragile under the sheet.

Later that night he sat with us at the table, slumped. “Do you know where my car is?” he asked.

“No, we haven’t seen it.”

“It was up on the road but when the paramedics came they parked it over by the horses, it’s a little white car,” he said. I could sense where this was going.

“Oh, really? No, I don’t think I’ve seen it.”

“I have two cigarettes in my backpack in the car. I just know that if I can get them I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

I changed the subject.

I was astonished to watch him find a pair of jeans and start to put them on. Then he scared up a pair of shoes and painfully fit his feet inside. He winced as he put on a jacket. This guy could hardly walk, he’d just been airlifted out of the valley, and here he was getting ready to drag his broken body into the unlit night just for two cigarettes. He limped across the room and opened the door.

“Wait!” I said.

He paused and looked over his shoulder as cold air tumbled in. I walked to within arm’s-length and handed him our flashlight.

Didier, the father, said, “I don’t want any part of this modern world,” which was amazing to hear because it’s almost a direct quote from Claude, the proprietor of the last farm we were on. I guess we find people who have something in common. He believes that when every Jew accepts Jesus as the lord, he’ll come back and create a heaven on earth for the believers. I think I got that right. For him it was like Christmas to have a Jew show up at his house who was eager to learn and listened to every word he said, even taking notes. A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to call people like him crazy, but I think that our job as travelers is not to paint with broad strokes, but to listen, to try to understand what are the core values of the people we meet and how do those values shape their lives. To them, their lives are consistent with their values. Everyone looks crazy to someone else. Frankly, I don’t see how their beliefs are any crazier than – say – someone buying their food at Safeway. :)

Enough of that.

We stayed in a little house on their property that’s reserved for guests, so we had an awesome bedroom, fireplace and kitchen, then a bathroom that didn’t have running water. We collected all the water we used doing dishes and used that to flush the toilet. To wash, we boiled some water and added it to a basin, then mixed cold water. I loved washing (my upper half) outside in the morning with the sun coming up through their olive trees, the guinea fowl squawking everywhere, the water steaming in the sunlight… I don’t think I got very clean, but whatever, I don’t have to smell myself. It was a wonderful way to start the day.

There’s so much to write about…

One day Gabriel, the 17 year-old, fired up the tractor and loaded five of us (me, Azure and three girls) and the family dog in the bucket. He drove us high into the hills. We hopped out, followed a path between bushes and up some rocks, then found what we’d come to collect: a wild-growing weed called Rocayrol – I believe it’s Shepherd’s Purse – that grew between the rocks on the south-facing slope. We each took butter knives and dug them up by their roots and tossed the whole plants into a basket. It was sunny, there was a breeze and there were old stone walls crossing the hillside. The girls sang songs from Church with tunes that reminded me of serious medieval music. The girls braid each other’s hair and wear ankle-length skirts.

We filled a basket with the salad then headed down the hill in the bucket of the tractor. On the way we passed a pine tree and the 11-year-old grabbed a branch and ate the little pine cones growing at the tips. We copied her : they were sweet but full of resin. At the bottom of the hill we got out and picked more wild greens that went into the salad, another plant that I wrote in my notes (which aren’t at hand now).

It’s a polyculture farm, which means that they grow many different things. This is opposed to monoculture, which is what you see on large for-profit farms. Their primary purpose in farming is to feed themselves, and they only sell something if there’s a surplus. He said several times, “We farm to be free.” They also practice permaculture, which is the idea that each thing they grow has multiple purposes and everything supports everything else. For example, the chickens are for eggs, their poop is for compost for the potatoes, the leftover potatoes are fed to the pigs and chickens, and so on. Of course everything is completely free from artificial pesticides and herbicides.

Each night Azure started the fire with old grape vines that had been pulled up and are sitting in heaps around the property (many vineyards here are switching crops because the wine prices are dropping). She’s a skilled fire starter – most nights she managed to start a full roaring fire with a strong core without even using matches or a lighter, just the leftover coals and some branches. At the same time I’d walk down to the garden and collect greens to flavor the salad – spectacular wild celery leaves (people: our whole lives we’ve been lied to about celery), tender fennel fronds, peppermint, lemon balm, lima bean leaves, thyme, comfry, cauliflower leaf, spinach, chard and so on. None of these were actually growing in the beds – they were the “voluntary” plants that grew between the beds.

We decided not to use any electricity at night, so we often found ourselves putting together the end of the meal by candle light. We sat on the couch in front of the fire in the dark, we read and wrote by candlelight and we went to sleep around 10pm – 9pm their time (they don’t change their clocks on the farm).

There are so many other interesting stories…. An older son (from another marriage) fell on his head from 25 feet and had to be airlifted out by helicopter; we killed guinea fowl for the market; we went to the cathedral on Sunday for Mass; we had a traditional Cassoulet; they sang before every meal… and so on.

Anyway, Azure has uploaded a bunch of pictures from this week – at our Flickr account.

1 – Use no electricity after sundown.
We found that we adjusted quickly to the rhythm of the day when we used candles for our light. The only exception we really made was when we had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, as it’s kinda important to see what you’re peeing on. (It’s hard for me to enjoy the day’s rhythm when I see how sad it makes Azure to clean up my pee.) We’d also make an exception if we cooked on an electric stove.

No electricity means no phone, no computer, no tv, no recorded music, no light bulbs. Let the night close your eyes, let the sun open them.

2 – Stop paying attention to the news.
The primary function of the news is to reinforce cultural myths, one of which is that we have something to fear. The news is a distraction from what’s real. It is an unnecessary injection of fear and mistrust into lives that are – in reality – pretty darn peaceful almost all of the time. Have you noticed how peaceful your life is? Any news worth knowing will come from another person’s mouth. Forget the news, except maybe tomorrow’s weather.

3 – Decide what you’re going to eat tomorrow night based on what you have today.
Look in your garden and build your meal around the ripe veggies that are begging to be eaten. Use tonight’s leftovers (and trimmings) as tomorrow’s flavor. Take out of the freezer what you’ve been saving and give it 24 hours to think about what it can become. Make a slow meal your day-long theme, and include your loved ones in its preparation.

(OK, since everyone is going to ask, that last picture is “Cassoulet,” a traditional dish in southwest France, as prepared by Didier. Duck meat is salted all night, then the next morning it’s cooked in its own fat. In the mean time they’re cooking white beans with carrots, onions, sage, laurel, sausage, bacon and sea salt. Then serve with brown rice and place the duck on top. Voila!)

The free haul!

We came here expecting meals that were pasta-heavy, or maybe collages of whatever they could scrounge together. Lettuce sandwiches for dinner, that kind of thing. But the truth is that I don’t know if I’ve been around a family that eats better, in all senses of the word. The food is fresh and free from chemicals. It’s very local. It’s cooked slowly. It’s eaten with the whole family. It’s appreciated. It’s often nurtured from seed to table. It’s balanced. And it’s DELICIOUS. Last night we had a sheep’s heart that was roasted in pork fat with an herb & red wine sauce. Sides were mashed potatoes, fresh salad with dijon dressing, cauliflower with champagne-cheese sauce, bread and wine and cheese and a yogurt-honey dessert. Much of this was food she actually produced herself. The pork fat & bones were left over from the night before, when we had pork ribs cooked in that same casserole. That pork was cooked in the chicken drippings from the night before (which was cooked in the same casserole). And so on.

Mom (an awesome American ex-pat from Shelton, of all places) has something on the burner all day. Despite spending no money on food, there’s always plenty, so much that they give food away to some needy neighbors (this experience calls into question the meaning of “poor” – is it someone with little money or someone who lacks what they need?). During the day she and her 3-year-old daughter work in the garden, feed the chickens, cook, preserve fruits & veggies, forage. Her husband works 18 hours a week, a full load for teachers here (and they assume another 18 hours will be worked at home grading papers, etc). State health care covers 85% of the medical bills, while supplemental private insurance (which costs $65 a year for the family) covers the last 15%.

After spending a couple weeks with Claude and Margarite on the olive farm, where they’re stingy with everything from heat to water to food, it was a shock to come somewhere where they’re even cheaper with the money but are so much more generous with everything else. We were invited to have all the homemade jam we want (including sour cherry and rose petal jam, orange-watermelon jam, fig chutney, etc), pickled veggies and salads from the garden. In fact she invited us to eat anything we find here – it all comes back to her somehow. We’re staying in their house for free, in exchange for what’s been very little work. They don’t just believe in abundance, they live the abundance.

Preserves!

Last year, through a storm that killed hundreds of people, I clung to the handles as snow slapped my face. Snow froze my hands, cold cramped my calves. I asked, “Is there anywhere you’d rather be?” And each time I asked it I still answered, “no.” Beauty can starve away pain.

This wall builder chooses warm shoes for wet mornings. He nurses weak embers in detailed notes. He sleeps with the sun and sows with the moon, then listens in bed for his pulse. He’ll talk in his sleep to the knocks of the rocks who keep knocking for most of the night. They measure the silence – he finds that it’s long – because presence is slow, almost stopped.

While pruning the vineyard I channeled the vision of walls that were weaving through woods. How much is it worth to work without sensing? I’d try to work in awe if I could.

I turned off my words, forgot about home, and abroad, and my story and plans.

I watched myself standing and noticed this grass and followed the arc of my hand.

I started to sense, as my vision got tighter, “I’m working with land just to eat, though my body is keeping my consciousness shining, it too will soon die and be meat.” I was dirt moving dirt, food moving food, earth moving earth, just to be. And as long as I work with the dirt and the food I’m letting the earth move in me.

In this place where land’s fingerprints run from its veins, he strains to extract a large stone. The rocks knock together to punctuate breezes, each heartbeat measures each breath in his throat. The wind and the rain will weather the stones, this land, his body and work. But I can still sense them, and I’m still trying to tell him I’ll listen as long as he talks.

That afternoon, I took a nap and he worked for a couple hours before the family went to town to pick up the third sister from the airport. Mike and I used the time to go into town and get a few things. The freedom of being able to just go to town was a huge deal to him. He had to take the bus to Nice a couple times. It only came twice a day and came back once a day. He had taken a different bus to a town down the road and had to hitch hike back.

Since all of the sisters were in town, we ate lunch by ourselves. It was fine, a simple meal, some vegetable soup, corn and beet salad and some bread. It was probably the nicest meal we had the whole time I was there.

My feelings about going back to the olive farm were these, I was neither excited nor dreading it. I didn’t feel that we had left on the best of terms, but they weren’t horrible. I went back because Mike was there and from what I understand, he went back because he had a respect for the place and felt a connection with it because it was the only farm that we had worked on.

Needless to say, I didn’t have the same nostalgia about the place that I did before. I was prepared to do crappy jobs and work alone and not really get a lot of positive interaction with the family, so it was fine when that happened. The first morning Mike went off to do the hard labor that he had requested and I was to make confiture (jam) with Claude. Mike had told her that I wanted to learn how to make jam and I was really excited and sort of shocked that it would happen. I was actually skeptical. And I was right, it was too good to be true. Claude showed me the process. You sit in a room with no heat (there was still snow on the ground outside), by yourself, washing the oranges in water that is barely above freezing level. Then, you cut them open to find no juice, but many seeds and you dig the seeds out. If there are too many seeds, you take the whole inside out and keep the orange rinds. They were the saddest of the sad oranges in the saddest of the sad settings.

I finished the whole bunch right at noon and we were off for lunch. After lunch we went back to work. I never got to see the end of the confiture-making process because I was too busy ramassaying (picking olives off the ground). This wasn’t my very least favorite job, but it isn’t too high on the list. In fact, when I got sick last year and Mike had to pick olives off the ground by himself, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the reason we ended up leaving so abruptly. It isn’t so horrible of a task if it is sunny and there are people around to talk to, but when you are sent to do it, it is almost degrading. It is monkey work and you feel less important.

That being said, I didn’t let it bother me much. I think coming to the farm with low expectations and the knowledge that I was only working for 2 days made anything bearable. I suspected that I would have these tasks, mainly because I knew how much time it took to earn Claude’s respect and I knew i didn’t have that much time OR the desire to do so this time. I just did my job until the bells rang 5pm, then went on my way. (we would later find out that WWOOFers were only supposed to work 4 hours a day, 5 days a week–we would work 6.5 hours a day, 6 days a week)

Mike was doing something else that afternoon, moving branches around or something and he would pass by and whistle at me. Even that quick exchange made me feel like someone cared about me and it made picking olives not so bad.

At one point, Claude needed me to cut the blackberry bushes back, so that Mike could dig them out. This job required that we work together, something which I believe Claude tried endlessly to avoid. It didn’t slow our work at all, but it did make it MUCH more enjoyable. In fact, we would have been much happier doing all the tasks together and probably would have worked better and faster.

That night we ate dinner with Claude in her place. Despite the fire, it was cold inside as usual. She wasn’t feeling well. When we got to her living room, there were only two comfortable chairs by the fireplace. I pulled over a regular chair from the table, but she said something and went off into the other room. She proceeded to take an electric saw and cut the legs off of a broken chair so that it was at the same height. I sat down. Claude told a story in French that I understood 1/3 of, then she went to bed.

On that night, we thought of the word for Claude–martyr. There is no other way to describe her. The sadness that we felt for the place the year before, I can’t help but think that is how she wants us to feel. The place doesn’t have to be sad at all. It is what it is because of what Claude and Margerite make it.

Mike later told me that Claude had told him that “people idealize this slow way of life, but it is hard, you are constantly fighting against nature.” Her life is a struggle because she makes it a struggle.

The next day was easier. I ramassayed alone in the morning and after lunch. They told me to go find olives on the ground and pick them. Most of the trees had been picked, so I had to hunt for them, but I filled two baskets full. I was a ramassaying machine. I was literally digging them up out of the ground to fill those baskets. This year I wasn’t doing it for Claude and Margerite to succeed, i was doing it so I could succeed at not being sucked down into their misery. At lunch, Claude came to the table with Margerite and Monique (the youngest, prettiest one, who we found out had cancer last summer). Monique seemed nicer this time. She was personable and real, still distant, but I think that’s how she was raised. Claude sat at the table with her head in her hands. She was so sick that she couldn’t even eat, but she still came to the table. It was a scene, people trying to talk without paying attention to the woman bent over in pain at the end of the table. She should have been in bed, but it was in her nature to suffer, and I think, have everyone else know she was suffering.

At 4:30, I took my full basket up to the house. Margerite gave me another quick job of pulling weeds in her garden. I could see Mike now, he was finishing up with pruning the Kiwi trees. It was a hard job and I didn’t envy any of his hard jobs. At 4:55, he came over and watched me work. He was done because it was close enough to 5pm to be done and he reminded me of that.

Mike took this picture when he quit at 4:55 and watched me work for 5 minutes.

Neither of us have jobs like that. We don’t quit at 5pm, we work until we finish or get to a stopping point and it felt incomplete to just walk away.

Before we went down to the apartment, Margerite told us that Claude needed us to work on Saturday. Mike had told Claude that we were going to go to lunch in Italy on Saturday and we needed to leave early. But, she needed us to work in the morning, so we did. Mike dug holes and planted fruit trees, I weeded a garden that I didn’t even know existed. We didn’t make it to Italy in good time. It didn’t matter, though, the place was closed for for repairs and we ended up eating elsewhere, but it was still bitchy. We could have been upset, but we really weren’t. I remember thinking as I was pulling up the lawn of weeds that covered the few puny lettuce leaves that I was just so happy that I was not sad. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it isn’t. I didn’t have to live like Claude and I didn’t have to think like Claude and even though she could keep us there working, when we wanted to be eating delicious Italian food, she couldn’t make us feel as miserable as she felt. It was a win. Wow, this is kind of a mean blog post!

And we did end up eating good Italian food. And the Italian people were nice to us and invited us back for a party! Which is one of the reasons we thought, “Why do we want to move to France instead of Italy?”

After the sheep were put away we went back to their house and had some tea – we talked about politics, about travel, about planting and pruning and the strange, strange weather. In their kitchen, next to the sink where Jessie was preparing tea, hung a single poster, this portrait of Sitting Bull.

I said, “That’s a hell of a presence to have in the middle of your kitchen.”
“Oh, is it?”

I wish we could go back and work with them – they’re serious about permaculture, they’re serious about politics – but it doesn’t fit our schedule. We’ll have to go back another time.

The sheep being shepherded out of the pasture.

“These things look dangerous…”

Another wwoofer leads the flock with the huge dog, Zack.

Azure and another wwoofer keeping up with the flock.

As with most of France, there were walls like webs all over the hillsides.

Jessie, with her Sitting Bull presence.

Riana carried the chicken back to the house and gave Azure a lesson on cleaning it – feathers, guts and so on.

We were going to redo the dishes after this, but you know, it was lunch time and we were all tired from the events of th day… whatareyagonnado?

In the meantime, Benji and I followed the dog back to another neighborhood then lost the scent. Riana later tracked him down and the owners gave her 40 Euros and a bottle of champagne in apology, a nice gesture in my opinion. They could have been jerks about it. Apparently the guy (a Brit) goes for walks with his dog off the leash, then his dog disappears for an hour. The guy returns home assuming the dog will behave himself, but he’s suspected in some earlier chicken murders as well. Now they know.

Tonight we had coq au vin.

The borscht was unbelievably good, I got the recipe. We never made the schmaltz, apparently an old Jewish dish of cooked chicken or goose fat, apples and onions (probably with some spices), cooled and blended then spread on bread like mayo. The pumpkin pie was made from scratch. On Saturday it says, “Fish Guts” – the fish guy comes to town and Riana collects the guts for the chickens.