Sunshine in the Jura

All of us have enjoyed a full day of sun today after frequent spring rains have puddled on top of the very clay-ey soil here in the Jura, making the trip out to clean out the chicken house and gather the 4 eggs each day (someone is still slacking off!) into a mucky adventure. Fortunately the grass still grows, and the pastures are lush and green, dotted with tiny yellow and white flowers. I've taken to going for a late afternoon walk down the country roads where I never see any cars, and it's quite different than going for a walk on the grid of roads between the corn and soybean fields of my native Iowa. The roads here go off in all kinds of crazy directions, taking curves for no apparent reason, and you don't quite realize how barren acres and acres of unplanted corn field looks in the springtime, compared to a verdant hayfield or a cow pasture, edged by forest. The birds are singing, the green lizards dart into the ditches off the warm road surface, the farm dogs are baying. So some things are the same everywhere, it seems.

There is a tiny wooden cabin not too far away, obviously someone's weekend getaway, which is next door to an ancient and rundown stone farmhouse/barn, which looks unoccupied, but is someone's home, as evidenced by the two dogs that run out to chase me away, the new regulation mailbox, and the male voice from inside that shouts at the dogs. There's no door, and a tattered curtain hangs in the doorway, but my desire not to pry has so far outweighed my desire to try to see inside as I walk by. I finally got a chance to say Bonjour monsieur to the old man who lives with his wife not too far away in another very old but somewhat maintained rendered stone house, who has a collection of watch dogs, a bunch of chickens, and a lovely little garden that he tends carefully. He didn't respond, but he at least called off the little dog, which was progress, I think. All the other times I've walked by the dogs have just barked to their heart's content until their job was done and I was away. The trick with the farm dogs I think is to not look at them, not change your pace, and keep moving. So far it's worked. I like to think to myself, if I lived here these would be my neighbors. If I lived here I would take them chocolate chip cookies, always a good way into the French heart.

Photos Promised from Gubbeen

I told several weeks ago about turning cheeses for an entire morning, and one reader wanted to know just how much cheese was I talking about? I did get some photos and have included a few above. Just to give you some perspective, in these curing rooms and in the smoker, a ton of Gubbeen cheese is produced each week, all of it handled by hand. The washed rind cheeses as opposed to the smoked cheeses are handled individually every day.

Testing a New Feature

Apparently I can email my blog entries in to my blog, so I'm trying this out. If you're reading this, it worked.

Avid readers take note: I can enter up to 10 email addresses that will automatically get my blog entries when they're published. Let me know if you want to be one of the select few!

Chateau Chalon

View from Voiteur up to Chateau Chalon
Budding out vineyards on way to Chateau Chalon
Street in Chateau Chalon
Lobelia in Chateau Chalon
Views from Chateau Chalon

I've made some feeble attempts to deflect jealousy by hinting at the hard work we do, complaining about cleaning out stables, hand-feeding giant schnauzers, mowing acres of lawn, turning cheese for hours on end, etc. but I can't keep up the charade - life is good on sabbatical. (Although we DO think constantly of Walt's brother Dave and his wife Linda in the hospital. I really miss her emails and hope her therapy goes well so she can write me again.) Our hosts here in the Jura stocked the cupboards and freezers well so we're dining on osso buco, sirloin steak, potatoes, leeks, and homemade spaetzle, brioche, Lindt chocolates, comte' cheese, and various kinds of homemade jams, homemade creme de cassis with champagne, etc. etc. Yesterday at a small grocery store we bought a charentais melon, a little round one, the kind I'd heard about in France but never had. We sliced it open for dessert at lunch today and I almost got knocked over by the aroma. Then I leaned over to lick the juice off the cutting board that had leaked out when I cut it open. That melon alone is enough of a reason to move to France, it was that good.

Weather dawned gorgeously sunny on Saturday, so after we dealt with veterinary/equine related issues with colt Alesha (I talked on the phone to the neighbor AND the vet's receptionist, in French! sort of...), ate lunch, showered, and dressed, we headed out in the car towards the SE, where I'd read something about some nice places called Chateau Chalon and Baume-les-Messieurs. We started on the motorway and as soon as possible turned off into a village to find the country road alternative. We got turned around in the village and as we headed back the other way an older gentleman flagged us down and asked where we wanted to go. We told him the name of the place and he started to point towards the motorway and I said, "Petite chemins!" (small roads) and he grinned broadly and pointed up the hill, showing off some English for us as he told us how many left and rights we needed to take. I tell you, I have yet to meet an unhelpful French person. We headed off into the hills and were rewarded immediately with long distance views and the discovery of a little village called Brery where I could happily live, at least on sunny days, and then we got closer to Chateau Chalon.

Well. You know you're in a nice place when other French people are visiting for the weekend. I've posted some photos of our afternoon above. Chateau Chalon was one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. We didn't have any money so we didn't stop for any Cote de Jura wine tastings while we were there, but in a few places as we strolled by we could smell it, and that was enough.

Cuckoos and Owls and Lizards Oh My

We're having fun discovering the new kinds of wildlife sharing our world here in the rural Jura region of France. Yesterday the sun came out and burned off the fog after several days of gray and we shed our long sleeves for the afternoon and evening, at the same time that the little lizards who live in between rocks and in the walls of the house came out to sunbathe. The sun lit up the trees at the bottom of the pastures, the fresh leaf buds the color of chartreuse.

In the mornings when we wake up and again in the evenings we hear cuckoos out in the woods, sounding for all the world like the clock in my grandparents house when I was a kid. I didn't realize until now that there are real birds that actually make that sound. We learned the insidious origin of the term "cuckold" as well - when Walt learned that cuckoos lay their eggs in a reed warbler's nest, and pushes one of the warbler's own eggs out, in a matter of about 10 seconds. The cuckoo chicks are so big they steal all the food that the poor warbler brings to it, not realizing that her own warbler offspring have been crowded out by these cuckoo imposters. Yikes. Nature isn't always benign, is it?

Something is living above the rafters above the office where I'm on the computer, scratching and squeaking. We are seeing little tufts of insulation floating down outside above this spot, and today when Walt tried to see what was happening he thinks he spotted a little bird face, perhaps an owl face. We'll keep an eye out on this.

The long evening sunlight induced us out on a long country walk last night down the road before a late dinner, where the only sound of civilization was the occasional fighter jet, obviously on training runs while the visibility was good. There were some cows who thought, both times they saw us, that we were coming to fetch them inside for the night. There were also a couple of muddy little ponds into which dozens of frogs jumped, bloop bloop bloop, as we walked by. Some hunting dogs in an outdoor pen bayed and barked, doing their job, and the river rushed under the road down at the bottom of the hill, all muddy and swollen from the spring rain. "Chasse gardee" the sign said, amidst a swampland of standing water in the wooded, shrubby river flats. Hunting preserve. You wouldn't want to hunt down there now.

Life sounds idyllic here and indeed it is, but there is always something more trying happening outside the pages of this blog: trying to get tenants to keep our rental house full at home, worrying about sister in law Linda in the hospital in Tacoma, paying the plumber to fix the sewer line on our house in Moscow, trying to make my career as a freelance writer pay a living wage, keeping the guy whose chickens our dog killed in her temporary home from suing us, trying to make sure Reed isn't the only 2nd grader next year who doesn't know how to sit still and listen to the teacher... the list goes on. These are the things that don't always get written about, but still they're there. We haven't escaped from real life, we're just living it in a different way, perhaps.

Bletterans and Bellevesvre

After our morning chores we ventured out in the little diesel car to the nearby town of Bletterans and quite quickly located the market by driving down the main street, and following the crowds of people with empty baskets over their arms headed down the alley, only slightly put off by the American music blaring from some speakers mounted on the Cafe de Paris. I wondered if Americans are associated with shopping, so therefore, American music on market day?? The market winds its way through several streets and alleys and some of it is in a covered building, with no rhyme or reason to the placement of the various wares that I could see. We found local lettuce and spinach, and some farm-made organic goat cheese - buying the freshest ones, just out of the mold with the little mold marks still on it - and some fish. We also bought a slab of gingerbread, what I'm assuming is pain d'epices, or spice bread, moist and heavy and dark, filled with flecks of orange and chocolate; they also had plain, and fig, and nut varieties as well. I bought Reed a crepe filled with delicious regionally made strawberry jam (confiture); he enjoyed it but got cranky when he spilled a big glob of jam on the knee of his jeans. There is a fete paysanne in a week and a half at a farm not too far away from here that we'll go to - nothing like a bunch of local farmers throwing a party for a fun day. The post office was right next to the market so I was also able to mail some postcards that I wrote last week, too.

After our successful market trip - made so much easier by being able to speak just a little French instead of none - we headed down the road to Bellevesvre, where the mill is that makes the horses' munchies, and got a couple bags of the one we're almost out of. We tore the label off the bag this morning to make buying a new one easy, and indeed it was a piece of cake, everyone very helpful and nice.

The weather here is rather gray this week, with no end in sight. I wonder if it's because we're just to the west of the Alps.

The animals are settling down and we're getting used to our chores here. I got Hamish the dog that must be hand-fed to eat out of his bowl at lunchtime today. And the chicken who hadn't been pulling her weight laid us a tiny offering this morning, obviously doing her best to thank us for the raisins she's been getting from Reed's leftover breakfast muesli, and the spinach stems we've been tossing out there from our salads. Nice to know such treats are noticed by the small brained but big hearted chickens.

Bois de Gand, France

We've spent our week up to our ankles in straw and horsesh*t as we've learned the fine points of caring for and cleaning up after horses at the housesit where we'll be situated for the next month, in the Jura region of France. We arrived on Tuesday afternoon after two long days of bus/train/air travel from West Cork to Dublin to Grenoble to this tiny village situated in the countryside in the foothills of the mountains southeast of Dijon. We've been too busy taking notes about which horse gets which munchies and which giant schnauzer gets which pills to have begun appreciating being back in France but now we're getting the hang of it, and although today started out miserably drizzly, by lunchtime the sky had cleared and the afternoon was gloriously warm and sunny, lasting through the long evening. Within a few days we'll be settled, the dogs and horses will have relaxed too, and we can start enjoying field trips and going to the market in Bletterans on Tuesdays for our fresh salad greens and if we're lucky some farm produced cheeses.

Our generous hosts stocked the cupboards well so we shall eat like kings and queens, and tonight Walt did himself proud with the large carp that Alex and Tomas, the neighbor boys, caught in this house's pond the other day. They took home a creel full and brought us a large one, nicely cleaned. It was surprisingly delicious, fresh and tasty, baked with garlic and dill and lots of butter, the chef's secret weapon. The carp was accompanied by a delicately sweet pinot gris, and we thought Hugh Fearnsley-Whittingstall would have been proud, having been known to eat a carp or two himself. The bones were a pain but they helped us pace ourselves, otherwise we might have gobbled everything up much too quickly.

From this large house we mostly see pastures and woods, with one pasture leading down to a large pond. The nearby villages are undiscovered and a little rough around the edges, testimony to this region's slightly struggling economy. This isn't a place overun by Brits, which has its advantages and disadvantages both, apparently, depending on who you're talking to.