Last weekend to Cancale—a bit of respite from two weeks of working on the house. H and I bought a couple dozen oysters, and ate them on the sea wall, tossing the empty shells onto a beach shimmering with mother of pearl. Two glasses of Sancerre to wash the saltwater and iodine down before we went to lunch. Moules au roquefort and perfectly done frites.
The house continues apace. Interior room walls are now up, and C and I are alternating between filling in the odd curves and bumps between the two-century-old beams and fashioning extraordinarily complex geometries to account for the dormer windows where nothing is straight or regular. This week we begin dropping walls off of the sloping ceilings. Electrics are in place; a plumber is not. Renovation in the land of too-few craftsmen, which is to say almost everywhere these days.
This is the period of Ango in the Buddhist tradition, and I’m up every morning in the dark fog making my way to the summer house—repurposed in this season as zendo and writing room—for periods of meditation and study. It’s a nice counterpoint from the house work, one made even more so by my flagrant mixing of clothes intended for samu—meditative labor—and the magnificent Kazakh robe that is my de rigueur morning wear (great fur collar topping brilliant blue velvet). I’m sure the farmer who sees me most mornings on my subsequent walk down the lane, no longer even shakes his head at the weirdness of les américains. To be fair, I’ve stopped shaking my head at his propensity to plow and plant at eight in the evening.
The plague has returned as we all knew it would. Even our little part of rural France is feeling the pressure, with a case confirmed just last week in a nearby village. Our social group is tightening its boundaries: all for one, and one for all. One of us has already recovered from the first wave, but we all now assume any inoculation he might have had is long gone. Not that anybody knows. France has promised restraint, but already cafes and bars in the larger cities are once again closing. We just received our final order of sheetrock, metal framing, and insulation, guarding against a repeat of last time, where work came to a stop for two months because of the impossibility of getting supplies.
Working in the garden, I’m piling debris from weeding and winds together for a bonfire on the fifth of November—a concession to my British neighbors. Just yesterday, too, I gathered the last of our pears, and helped the few remaining butterflies out of a garage to get a final taste of blue skies and the obstinate late fall flowers.
Freedom, sunbaked fruit, and beauty…it’s all we can all ask for as winter comes.
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