A little bit of French heaven

Friday, May 23, 2008
Chateau Lassalle, Aignan

We seem to have landed in paradise, or at least almost paradise; here there is weeding and renovation work and I think in paradise there won’t be weeds…. But nevertheless we are in WWOOF heaven.

Our hosts are Steve and Karina, originally from England, who are the same ages as Walt and I; they have 2 boys aged 12 and 9 and a little girl aged 4 who is outgoing and well adjusted and seems to like playing with Reed just fine. There’s only been blood drawn once and that was from Reed’s nose, when he bashed it on Ella’s head when they were jumping on the trampoline. Steve and Karina moved to the Pyrenees in France in the early 90s and bought Chateau Lasalle about 7 years ago. It’s a substantial stone house with parts of it dating back to the 1500s and maybe even earlier than that. Steve does a bit of everything – taking care of the land, gardening, working on the house, running an antique business, putting on art shows – and Karina is a freelance journalist. I've put a link to their website, www.oldfrenchstuff.com, in the title of this post.

We’re staying in the two bedroom gite that used to be a concrete block pig stable that Steve transformed into a lovely and comfortable little dwelling with a view of the east pastures where the sheep and two donkeys graze. You can always tell when people have a sense of design and Steve and Karina obviously do; the gite is decorated simply but with southern French style: lovely old pieces of furniture, lots of cushions with richly colored fabrics, blue and white walls, terracotta tiles on the floor, yellow and mint and pumpkin orange trim, framed antique postcards of the Chateau and Aignan, etc. And they feed us lunch and dinner every day; lunch is usually bread, salad, ham and salami and pate, and cheese. For dinner we’ve had roast chicken with chickpeas, roasted red peppers, and sweet corn; and last night was garlic parsley mashed potatoes and stewed beef from a taureau, a bull, which was killed in the bullfight held in Aignan twice a year or so. Apparently every little town in these parts has a bullring. Steve and Karina never go to the fight itself, but enjoy the meat, which is very rich and tasty. Steve says these bulls live a fabulous life, with acres and acres all to themselves for 3 years, until it all ends in a single bad afternoon. We drink wine that they get from the local cooperative; they take their empty bottles in and fill them up from the tap, like getting gas in the car. It’s cheap and good.

All this is in exchange for Walt and I each working 30 hours a week. Next weekend is an opening – another vernissage!, for those who remember our first experience at Verderonne last September – and we are busy making the front garden and terrace look terrific, as people who come to the opening will be offered a meal for a certain amount of money and they’ll be served outside if it’s nice. I’m weeding garden beds and raking gravel pathways, and Walt is helping Steve prepare the soil and get a new hedge planted around the perimeter fence of this part of the garden which will look nice and also keep the dogs in. My back is killing me but once my muscles get back in shape for bending over I’ll be fine. Next week I’ll help Karina start to get the food ready. I think I’ve just agreed to bake a load of brownies to put in the freezer, and I need to help her think of a starter too. It’s tricky, because she doesn’t know how many people will eat. So she has to prepare loads, and then put whatever’s left in the freezer.

The vernissage is a display of about 40 posters from 1968, especially from the month of May, a time of great civil unrest in France – they even call the people who were participating in the demonstrations “sixty-eighters” – soixante-huitards, I think. Steve is framing all the posters, which Karina inherited from her parents who were quite active in the demonstrations and were in prison in 1968. Her mother must’ve gotten out sometime, though, since Karina was born in July of 68.

The weather here is warm, and yesterday we ate ripe cherries from the tree; today we had salad from the first lettuce harvest of the season. The wisteria climbing up the front pillars of the house bloomed a month ago and so did the iris, and the lavender is just about to burst into purple glory. Everything is lush and green, and this morning we worked in the rain for a while, not minding it since it wasn’t cold. We sleep with the French doors in the bedroom open and wake up to birdsong, and sometimes a little donkey braying.