EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALNovember 8, 1998
Cameyrac et St. Sulpice
I love this bed, this room, this ceiling, and the armoire on
Rich’s side of the bed especially. It just makes it under the ceiling. It towers over
us and stands on four carved feet. It’s plain, almost masculine, a deep and shiny
mahogany, with little ornamentation and oversized, simple but designy hinges. Mdme.
Rosaven told me that this is where her children keep their clothes for when they come to
visit.
I’m sipping a mocha au lait. There are no mugs in this
gite. Only au lait bowls and demitasses. Rich has made us our favorite caffeineated
beverage and brought one to me in bed. Strong coffee mixed with hot chocolate and scalded
milk. We are snuggled with our bowls and absorbing this massive room.
We walk along the road to investigate the village of Cameyrac, but it
is only houses and a bus stop. We are so close to Bordeaux, and we assume that this area
is still suburban and chateaux-y. We walk back, pick up Alfi and make it to the Super U
in St. Sulpice in time to pick up the last Pain de Compagne. You have to stock up
on your baguettes on Sundays because the shops close at noon. The baguettes sell out as
every family buys four or five. France has many very good, large supermarkets with lots of
selection. They are well signed from the roads and don’t seem to interfere with the
business of the small specialty shops in the towns. Mdme. Rosaven has recommended the Super
U as the best in the area. It is filled with skinned rabbits, cured ham, fresh eggs
and an entire aisle of fois gras. Like everywhere in France, it has an encyclopedic
selection of yogurt.
Rich is pointing his face at the sun and staring at the church.
It’s tranquil here. There are Charolais cows and bulls in the field facing us.
Western France is gleaming into the salon.
We have had a breakthrough. Rich has dialed London (Microsoft Network ne
marche pas in France) and connected…we can get and send our email from here. We
are going to try to set up an Internet account with IBM Worldnet. IBM will hopefully be
able to give us Internet access in France. Rich has also solved the disc space problem
with our web host. It looks like we will have no trouble publishing the website. We are
very anxious to launch!
There is no television in our gite. We were hoping to have our French
lessons from the television but instead we are speaking to each other and it is rather
entertaining. There is a stereo here so we have connected our Discman and are alternating
between our CD collection and the radio, which features a lot of disco and French and
American pop.
M. et Mdme. Rosaven have come home and dropped in on us to see how we
are making out. Rich has done a few loads of laundry and has hung our clothes on a rack in
the yard. Mdme has told us that it is "villain" to hang one’s
clothes out like this and that we must use the line at the side of the gite or put our
clothes inside. (We didn’t know about the clothesline). Madame says she has friends
visiting tomorrow and we must hide our laundry. Now Monsieur is sitting on his rider mower
and doing laps in front of the Grand Maison. Lola is watching from her enclosure. Rich is
watching from his chair on the stoop.
We are studying. I am selecting a suitable gite for the coming weeks a
little further south in Maremne, on the Cote d’Argent (the Silver
Coast) and adjacent to the Pyrenees. We are also boiling a T-shirt and a pair of my
delicately shaded socks. They have been dyed by a dark load of washing. We have discovered
a European system of washing clothes in liquid-fire and if you make a slight error in
wash-separation your clothes all come out Paynes Grey. Paynes Grey is one of my favorite
colours but not for my T-shirts and socks, which used to be white and pale yellow. It is a
sensitive laundry balance, and for every load we are never quite sure just exactly how
much pigment will be transferred to medium-coloured clothing.
We are pouring our blacky-purple boiled T-shirt water down the septic
toilet in the hopes of desmellifying it. So far we have extracted four stockpot-fulls of
blacky-purple toilet-cleaner and the T-shirt is now a lighter shade of blue-grey. My socks
would pass for yellow in a black and white movie.
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