The La Bu blog is finished. Thanks so much for reading.
Category: Diary
L’automne est arrivé
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 […]
La fin d’un temps
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 […]
Holy, Hell. It’s June.
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 […]
The last days of April
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 […]
Stones, stairs, and sorties
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 […]
Early Days of the Refiguration
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 […]
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 […]
Spring has come
Rain overnight, but by early morning there is a deep fog and the luxuriate sound of drops of water falling onto last Fall’s leaves and early Spring’s grasses. The field I know is across the lane is still some few hours from being entirely recognizable, […]
A place in the world
The little town of Domfront, a few miles from the house, has a not too unusual silhouette for France, or really for most of post-feudal Europe. There’s a steeple—although a truly unusual one—as well as ruined castle, which aside from its surrounding gardens has nothing […]