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 […]
Arrived on Wednesday to begin The Work. And, as I write this, I’m listening to Bach’s Mass in B minor, which seems appropriate. And drinking a double espresso, which does as well. One of the hamlet’s two resident cats just waddled by (there is no […]
I am a regular enough reader of what one might call The Literature—as well as a wizened veteran—to know that gardeners suffer from a seasonal disorder that clouds their minds, and their judgement, as the days grow a little longer after the winter solstice. I […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
To dwell is to garden, so said Martin Heiddeger. One of the rather dubious charms of La Bu is the state of its garden. There were visions early on, as we began to look for somewhere in France we could make home, of finding a […]
Traditions come and go. At least nowadays, as we’re all searching for something to hold on to that feels real and right, and of course authentically ‘us.’ It’s gotten to the point, at least with me, that if something should repeat within a period of […]
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 […]
