The hidden and the revealed

With renovations underway, a two-hundred-and-thirty-year-old structure is emerging as it was built—local stone, lime mortar, great oaken beams, and soaring ceilings better for storing bales of hay than housing humans. So too are the effects of time and weather. Much of the hidden mortar is in need of repair, as do the beams—particularly those under the eaves—softened by damp and animals and neglect, and the ceilings having served as a home for owls and filled with the evidence of appetite and survival require a definite commitment to resettlement and renovatio.

A local chicken farmer—somewhat lower in the local hierarchy than those that farm cattle, but still elevated well-above foreign landowners—has installed a great diesel machine that crushes vast amount of grain. Over a kilometer away, its thundering presence is causing concern across the town (and beyond), with its impact differing depending on the intervening hills and valleys, the state of the weather, and people’s patience. Whether the talk will translate into action, among those who matter, is as much a mystery as whether that action will take the form of reparation or torches and pitchforks.

Today, drivin to a morning spent wandering through a builder’s supply store, an older gentleman barely peddling his way down a hill, beret tight on his head, scarf blowing in the wind, and a baguette strapped to the back of his seat—a mark of an indelible France. At least until we all decide that cars are more convenient, bread is better from the supermarkets, and the generational desire to live a life more closely lived and far from the quiet patterns of rural life finally kills it off. No time soon, but the evidence of its near inevitability evident nonetheless.

Here at LaBu such a life persists, as it does in hamlets all over France, where the potency of dreams is made manifest by those fleeing such futures. Whether it will matter at all will depend on forces far from here, and in many cases, far from France. But anachronisms and fantasy have a way of living on, regardless.