In And Out

We write to you from the hamlet of Denault, near the village of Corancy, near the slightly larger village of Chateau-Chinon, in the Burgundy region, from the home of our latest hosts, a Dutch couple named Hans and Jacqueline.

“But, wait!” demands the flustered blog enthusiast, “I thought you were going to someplace deeper in the Pyrennees!?” Well, yes, that was the plan, but then began the story of the last couple of weeks, entitled: We Came, We Saw, and We Got the HELL OUT! This is the story of the Jardins D’Eve, host number five.

Before it began, the day of “switching farms” was already off to a bad start. When we left Sol and Joan’s, Aubrey had three days of stomach bug under her belt – “le gastro” as they call it in French – and was feeling downright “enferma,” in every sense of the word. We loaded into the camper-van of a friend of Sol and Joan’s, Ramon, who was passing through Saint Girons on his way back to Spain, and set off to the market where we had convened to meet our next host at noon. As the van careened around the corners of the little French routes, and the boxes that Ramon had painstakingly stacked in the back of the van tumbled into heaps on the floor (“No os preocupéis, más alla del suelo no van a ir!” or “Don’t worry, they can’t fall any further than the floor!”), Aubrey was already feeling faint. And when we said goodbye to Sol at the market and lugged our oversized and overweight backpacks to the plaza where we were to meet Rene-Jean, we began to have serious doubts about the wisdom of changing farms when Aubrey was on three days of nearly no food and hardly any sleep. Little did we know that was not to be the worst of our fears.

We were picked up by Rene-Jean, the man who we understood to be Eve’s husband. This was a mistaken assumption, however, as we learned during the car ride that he and Eve did not live in the same house. “Oh,” we said, “so is she your girl-friend?” “Yeah, something like that,” was his response, “we have two daughters together.” In this year, however, untraditional relationships have ceased to faze us, and he seemed nice enough so we continued cheerily on our way.

The bubble was burst on our arrival to chez Eve. The property was visibly a disaster from the first moment we arrived: the house in a poor state of maintenance, the yard full of trash, the garden nothing but brambles. That’s ok, we thought, good people live in messy homes, sometimes, but we chuckled to ourselves as she explained that she made her living as an interior decorator, and just gardened on the side. Aubrey went promptly to bed (our room was admittedly quite cozy and comfortable) and I ate lunch with Eve. Our meal consisted of a bit of cauliflower boiled to an unrecognizable state topped with some cheese, and some grated carrots with vinegar. That’s alright, simple food, I thought, I can handle this. However, after a lunch conversation that could be described only as tense (a lot of complaining about her life, threatening to slap her daughter, and talking vaguely about all of her projects that she had “prevu” but never finished), my ability to rationalize away the problems of our new host was beginning to waver.

We decided to give things some time to improve, and for a spell it seemed they might. We spent the weekend recovering, had a nice dinner with the family to celebrate the sale of a car that they had fixed up, and got to watch the final ski race of the Olympics on French TV (during which the announcers held firmly to the belief that the only possible outcome of the race would be two French skiers tying for first place. Unfortunately, Norway was also competing in the Olympics). However, once the work week began, our ability to put up with ridiculousness was put to the test again.

Our first day, we came down to breakfast, waiting for an assignment…. Eve chatted, took the children to school, and left us twiddling our thumbs. Upon her return, she had us write down a detailed “list” of assignments, and we got started around 10:30 with item #1: “raking the leaves”. This is in quotes because it was absolutely impossible to accomplish without first going through all of the junk that was all over the lawn, sorting out the useful things from the trash, and clearing everything away so that we could actually push the leaves around with her swiftly shattering plastic rakes. We occasionally felt like archaeologists on a dig, unearthing bits of plastic toys and the heads or handles of tools that had been tossed out to decay under the layers of crib mattresses and plastic sheeting. We shouted our discoveries to each other from our trenches of debris: “What the hell is this? An oven mitt? Why is it under the rose bush?” We found a bed frame, a shower curtain, an old satellite dish, card-board boxes, and the remains of a metal rake (“Oh, there that is,” said Eve). Eve looked on, picking her favorite broken/unidentifiable things out of the truckload worth of trash we had decided must be sent to the dump (Note*- Aubrey is the daughter of Karin Nelson, and also strictly abides by her mother’s “save anything that could one day be useful” ideology, but these things surpassed even her “usefulness” standards). When we came across a dead Christmas tree, and started to add it to a brush pile, Eve stopped us, saying, “Oh, no, don’t get rid of that. I’ve had it since August (?!), and I just can’t bear to part with it.” The only things we didn’t find in the garden were living flowers, not even perennials: only dead ones and shattered plastic pots were in evidence.

We spent 3 full days trying to clean up Eve’s disastrous backyard, but we continued to tell ourselves, “this isn’t so bad—at least we’re working outside, at least Rene-Jean is organized, so we can ask him if we need tools, and at least we are learning French.” That much was true. In two weeks at Eve’s house I think I learned all of the possible ways to tell someone to shut up (“tais-toi ou je vais te claquer” was her favorite). This was because the relationship between Eve and her two daughters (aged 4 and 7) seemed to us (although we’re no experts in these matters) somewhat abusive. For instance, rather than making her 4-year-old daughter comb her hair, she instead just told her, “Look at your hair! You are so ugly! Are you really going to go to school like that?” Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending how you look at it), the girls seemed to be quite accustomed to this, and had learned to simply ignore their mother completely, as she had no will to actually exercise any authority over them. This made the atmosphere at the house somewhat less than relaxing: the girls, desperate for attention, make as much noise as they possibly can, while the mother tells them to shut-up and they ignore her and screech all the louder. This continues until Eve puts on a DVD, which entertains the girls for about half an hour, or until Rene-Jean comes over for dinner and actually pays them a bit of attention. Unfortunately, he also is the only one who really disciplines the kids, so for the time being, “si tu ne tais pas, tu iras chez Papa!” was also a common, and somewhat effective threat (Papa doesn’t let them throw their toys all over the house), but we’re both convinced that some day soon they will realize, as we did, that it is a relief rather than a punishment to go stay with their father.

Problem number one for me chez Eve, however, was the food. With the exception of a few very nice meals, our diet at Eve’s consisted mostly of Melba toasts, instant soups, and instant mashed potatoes. Most of the real food that we ate was either made by us, or Rene-Jean, when we ate at his house down below. The problem seemed to be that Eve didn’t actually like food. She ate very small amounts of very plain foods, and then spent the rest of her dinner chastising her children for eating too much. This is not to say that she actually did something about her daughters’ diets, but rather the contrary. She berated them for eating what they did (mostly things like sausages, cheeses, and desserts) and as much as they did (they ate easily as much as Aubrey or I, and the youngest girl ate an entire, foot-long, chocolate Easter bunny in one day), but even as she scolded she continued serving them seconds, thirds, and fourths. The girls were very overweight, and had a tendency to ask everyone who came into the door if they had brought any “bon-bons” for them.

We hedged for about a week. The location was gorgeous (if anyone ever wants to go for a Pyrenees hiking vacation, Massat would be an ideal starting point or base of operations), and we were learning some good French. But the more we thought it through, that’s all the place had going for it, and we decided, “life’s too short.” We called Hans and Jacqueline to ask if we could come early, and moved up the date to Thursday, March 18th, but as time went on we decided that wasn’t soon enough and made arrangements to return to Sol and Joan’s Catalan ranch on Saturday the 13th.

Just around this time, Massat was socked by about a foot of snow. With the snow, we couldn’t clean her garden-mess, we had finished with the other items on her list (painting a few spots on the wall) in what she seemed to think was record time (and relative to the pace at which she did things, perhaps it was), and when we asked her what to do with ourselves her response was “j’sais pas”. For week number two with Eve, we literally did no real work, and mostly just killed time waiting for snow to melt. At least when we had to break the news to Eve that we were leaving early, we could use the lack of work, due to the snow, as a reason for moving on, and despite our worrying and practicing our “we’ve decided to leave” speech hundreds of times, we ended on a cordial note (a relief after the reaction of Rafael at the farm in southern Spain).

This is not to say that we wasted our time in Massat. We did several very nice hikes, even after the snow, and serendipitously managed to hook up with the local school to teach French kids how to cross-country ski. Three times we accompanied the school up to a little XC ski center called the Etang de Lers and skied around setting up slalom courses, teaching them how to play “Sharks and Minnows”, and introducing the kids to skate-skiing. After the final session (which coincided with our last day at Eve’s), the Directrice of the school asked the assembled professors, “alright, who’s going to host these two next year?” as we blushed and shook hands and thanked them for buying us ski passes and renting us skis.

So there you have it, the story of the Jardins d’Eve. A bit different from the biblical story, perhaps—it was no Eden—but both stories end with a couple leaving the “jardin.” We were brought back to Saint Girons by the ever helpful and responsive Rene-Jean (“why couldn’t we have ended up WWOOFing at his house” we asked ruefully), and returned to Sol and Joan’s. For five days we returned to the rhythm of Catalan living, and just to establish an even starker contrast between the productivity of the two hosts, helped to plant an entire, well-planned organic orchard of 70-some-odd apple trees in the course of less than a week (Hmmm… more biblical connections?). The whole of Ariege also seemed to be happy that we had left Eve’s house, and the week at Sol and Joan’s the weather was downright spectacular. We also went horse-back riding three days that week, so we got some good color(s) on our butts as well as on our faces. The last evening we took a long trail ride, trotting past brand new baby calves and as we gaped at the view of the Pyrenees stained pink by a beautiful sunset. It was a great way to finish our adventures in Southern France.

And then we hopped a train North, and were greeted welcomed at the gare de Nevers by an enthusiastic and friendly Hans, and whisked off to yet another starkly different place. Although this time, in a much more positive way. How you ask? Well, you’ll have to read the next blog. Love you all, miss you dearly!

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