You know how at the beginning of every year, you sit down and make a list of everything you’re going to accomplish and when? And then, you work through that list methodically, checking off each item as you gleefully turn to the next? Yeah. Me […]
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 […]
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 […]
Two days on the Côtes-d’Armor—in Saint Malo, the wonderful fortified Corsair town, and textbook bit of Vaubanian excellence—amidst France coming out of le confinement. Masks are obligatoire in most places, at least for entering and exiting. Fascinating to see how quickly their use, and their […]
As of this afternoon, I’ve removed 14 snakes from what will become the master bedroom and study. It was, as I’m quick to point out should anyone ask, the master bedroom in the Before Times as well. This particular sort of snake—a nonvenomous constrictor—is the […]
It’s gotten chilly again, a reminder that this is still springtime and still Normandy, even with our concerted efforts to boil the planet into a miasmic new Jurassic. Over the last few days heavy rain. The new roof is holding up, which I expected based […]
Most mornings I wake to birdsong. Oftentimes, I just lay with my eyes closed, awake, but just. It’s a welcome moment in a day whose silences no longer lap around human endeavor but threaten to drown it. I talk to myself a lot. Always have, […]
The sunlight, captured, and reflected back into the north-facing room where I sit, hints at what’s to come over the next few days—temperatures in the mid-teens to somewhere around 20. Blue skies as well, or so the sky oracles promise, which is sort of too […]
On Monday, as the rumors of martial law and curfews began to percolate through the disquietude of social media into mainstream assertions of what was coming, our roofers worked through the occasional gusts of wind and rain in an effort to finish the house by […]
A life closely observed tends to be the goal—whether explicitly so articulated or not—of a well-lived life. We do, after all, only have one chance to savor the wonder that is us and our world. And it is certainly true in the world of words […]
