The La Bu blog is finished. Thanks so much for reading.
Category: The Life
Wondrous Carnac Unknown
Carnac, in the south of Brittany, is home to one of the largest collections of neolithic standing stone assemblages in the world. Spread over four kilometres, these three thousand or so stones–almost all aligned east to west, from smallest to largest–were erected between 8,000 and […]
Butterflies amidst the grass
Back in the olden-days, LaBu was optimized for visitor quantity, with four bedrooms, all of which at some point or another functioned as parts of a hotel or gite. We found during the course of The Changes, in addition to some truly atrocious—and at times […]
Fall falls
Fall is coming to LaBu. The first sign—really—was the cherry tree leaves, which almost overnight began to turn a light shade of yellow, before gravity and a light still-warm wind scattered them across the grass below. Now, we have a few particularly precocious chestnuts that […]
2020: c’est fini
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 […]
Falling into the end of the year
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 […]
Soundings
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 Second Half
Driving up the Cotentin coast with an old friend, one of my oldest—some quarter of a century of putting-up with one another. He remembers me when, and I him. It’s a nice—but unsettling—feeling in this time of constant reinvention and managed public personae to spend […]
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 […]
The year begins
It’s mid-January, and I’m winding down a month spent in a new house in Normandy. It’s a new old house, one built in the late 1700s, and so it has been a fine place from which to inhabit both our contemporary manic futurism and our […]