Fall has arrived, but it seems late this year—probably something we all will gradually get used to saying year after year until we simply stop noting the death of the remembered world of the Before Times. In early September the butterflies suffered a mass confusion and entered a second period of fecundity, hanging on almost every available surface two-centimeter-long pupae. Watching them all become adults seeking a mate and the start of a new year was difficult, with only a few remaining flowering plants and the evening lows ill-suited for courtship, and even life. Today, after some heavy rains and more seasonal temperatures I’ve not seen a-one. A change from Friday, where the field across the lane was alight with them.
Time and its cycles are always a theme in France, and particularly so in the rural parts. We’re not so much as out of time here as we are on a slightly divergent line, one that values speed in different ways than those parts of the world where faster is progress. Typically, after the painful period of adjustment, that’s just fine. But it also means that we’re not likely to see a plumber at LaBu until sometime in the near year—despite visits to prepare quotes etc in March of this year. C and I will probably end up doing the plumbing, or at least those parts of it that don’t put the house at risk of fire or floods. Of course, it also sometimes takes three or four months before anyone thinks to bill you for work, so you count on sunrises and sunsets and get on with it.
The garden is slowly entering its period of quiescence, at least as quiet as anything gets here. The deciduous leaves are turning color and falling, the character of green is also changing in the fields (at least those not recently plowed under for the “winter” wheat) from a deep Dartmouth shade to something more akin to a yellow-green. The clover is still growing of course, because after a summer of everything else rampaging through the garden, it feels the time is right. So far, nothing is competing. It, alternatingly at this time of the year, holds heavy dew and light frost equally beautifully, particularly in the early mornings when I walk to the garden house.
Aside from the plumbers, which as I suggested ought to be placed somewhere near the top of a new sort of endangered species list, and given every opportunity to breed uncontrollably, the house is coming along. By the end of the year, I’m hoping to have the top floor in a semi-livable state (which means everything but finishings and final floor down). Depending on my mood and the day’s labor, one can interpret this as either the results of wild-eyed naivety or well-reasoned optimism. But it is nice to see walls where only months ago there were snakes (which if you’re a new reader, is from a much more…highly-strung period of the house’s evolution).
I expect winter sometime next week, and then a return to summer, and then perhaps a mass migration of plumbers to the environs. We can live in hope.
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