On Rue Tatin: The Simple Pleasures of Life in a Small French Town. Susan Loomis
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was all so different from anything Michael had ever worked on, from the electrical system to the plumbing. I checked in with Florence, who reassured us that her little house was ours for as long as we wanted it. We settled in even more.
The babysitter’s tenure was over so we saw her off one gray day. Life began to take on a rhythm. I needed to travel for work, so at least once a month I left on a Monday and would be gone most of the week, making sure to return in time for the weekend. Then we went to the Messy House, as Joe called the house in Louviers, which was paradise for him. He could build sand castles in the dining room, where Michael stored his pile of sand, or bang nails into boards while Michael and I worked alongside.
Our first weekend there together was magic. It was cold, so we were all bundled up as we worked. We hauled and scrubbed and organized as Joe ran around trying to help. Mid-morning Michael and I both had a longing for coffee, so we all went to the café across the street to take a break and warm up. The owner seemed to know who we were. ‘Next time if you’d like to take the coffee back to your house you may,’ she said in a friendly way. We accepted her offer. On days when we were all in the house, Joe and I would go to the café and I would order two grands crèmes and a chocolat chaud, which the owner would put on a tray. Holding Joe’s hand and the tray, I would navigate my way across the busy street feeling like a native. We would all sit in whatever room had a ray of sunshine coming into it or, if it was a particularly nice day, outside in the garden to sip our coffees and chocolate.
Once Michael got a good electrical line installed I was eager to make coffee in the house. I bought an electric coffee-maker and some coffee, brought cups from home, and went to our favourite local bakery, J. Gosselin, to buy sablés, Normandy’s traditional butter cookie. At morning break time I made coffee in the room upstairs where the owner had lived and where Michael had installed a plug. This coffee would be the first thing I had prepared in the house, and this was a momentous occasion. My hands trembled as I fit the paper filter into the machine and measured the coffee into it. I’ll never forget the eerie feeling I had smelling that first tempting, warm, human aroma in the house. Michael and I looked at each other. I could tell he felt the same way. How many people throughout the ages had made coffee, or the equivalent hot, comforting drink, in this house?
That was the first of many pots of coffee brewed in the upstairs room, where we often lunched on one-portion quiches, or small tomato pizzas, or baguette sandwiches stuffed with ham or cheese or hard-cooked eggs and vegetables from the bakery.
Progress on the house was steady, but slow. Every time Michael started on a room, expecting to be able to proceed easily from point A to point B, he’d find something that needed fixing first – a rotten beam that needed replacing, for instance. Before he could replace it, however, he’d have to move a wall, or shore up the floor, or go in some other direction before he could actually get back to point A. He desperately needed a helper, not just for the physical help but to assist him in interpreting the language and the system for buying materials, but that was out of the question. With the price of sheetrock (plaster-board) alone triple what it was in the US we needed every centime we had to pay for materials. So Michael worked on alone, slowly developing systems. He would often come home after a materials-buying trip so frustrated he could hardly speak. ‘People here just don’t want to give out information,’ he would fume. ‘In the States if you have a question you go in a store and ask the people working there and they fall all over you trying to answer it because they want your business. Here, there are a bunch of no-nothing Napoleonics working in the stores and they hear my accent and act like they can’t understand a word I’m saying even if they did know the answer.’
Over time Michael learned to avoid the larger stores, where prices were generally lower, and head for the smaller ones, which were somewhat more expensive but were more likely to have someone who knew something.
Within a few months of his starting work on the house the plumbing was functioning, the electricity installed. After we had decided which room would be my office Michael went after it, cleaned it up and installed enough electrical outlets for all my machines. Edith and I painted it one afternoon, and the next day I moved in. What a relief it was to move my office out of our bedroom in that tiny little house on the river. Now, we wouldn’t be woken up by those late-night faxes from the States.
I had two phone lines installed, arranged my file cabinets and Michael painted a lovely wood panel turquoise and laid it atop them as a temporary desk. He built bookcases and put strips of wood on the wall next to the desk. I pounded tiny nails into the strips and hung a bulldog clip on each one, so that I could hang up current projects to keep track of them. Once all the machines, from fax to answering machine to computer and printer, were installed I settled in to work.
From then on, the minute I dropped Joe off at school I went to work in my office. There was no heat in the house but if I got really uncomfortable I simply plugged in a powerful little space heater and aimed it at my feet.
I loved working in that clean room amidst the mayhem, with its window looking over the garden, the street and the side of the church. I would shut the door and revel in the white walls and the desk and get to work, stopping occasionally to look out the window. The church bells, which ring on the hour, quickly became a beloved sound. I came to distinguish the funeral dirges from the regular bells and whenever one began I would look at the scene spreading out before me, as the hearse arrived along with the florists and their massive bouquets. Far from being morbid the funerals are simply part of the church’s daily commerce, right along with the weddings which become a nearly daily event in the month of June.
I am a lapsed Catholic but I enjoy going to mass from time to time. I expected to go once in a while since it occurs within fifty yards of our front door, but somehow, hearing the hymns and organ music and occasionally the congregation praying was enough.
I do delight in watching weddings, though, and the wedding tradition in France calls for a civil ceremony at the town hall, which is up the street from us. Once that is over, the wedding party makes a procession to the church, stopping at the side door, directly across from my office window. When the entire party is assembled it proceeds inside. For large weddings a set of double doors is opened which affords me a view of the interior all the way to the altar. I can see the glint of candles and the outlines of everyone inside. It’s lovely.
Joyfully ringing bells signal the end of the ceremony, and moments later the bride and groom come out the front door onto the parvis, or square in front of the church, followed by the crowd and a storm of tissue-paper hearts, many of which float on the wind into our front yard. When Joe was small he loved to chase them all over the garden, carefully hoarding his handfuls. The wedding parties gather outside to await the gaily decorated cars that come to pick them up and whisk them away to what will be hours of eating, dancing and eating again. Some days there are two or three weddings in a row. If I’m in my office I see the priest finally emerge from the church at the end of the day and lock the door with a satisfied flourish before going on his way.
After my office, the next room to be finished was Joe’s room, then our room, then the bathroom and finally a temporary kitchen, which meant the house now had a working fireplace. All of this took a full year, during which time we stayed in our little cottage on the river. We continued to love it, often taking long walks along the river during summer evenings, when it is light until 11 p.m. I worked steadily on the book throughout, continuing to travel at least one week a month and sometimes more. That first year I drove the winding wine routes of Alsace, knocked side-view mirrors with another car in the Pyrenees as I went to visit a cheese-maker, shivered in the cold waters off the coast in Brittany during a visit to oyster beds, and had the thrill of harvesting mussels right outside of Bordeaux. After each trip I would return laden with specialties – bottles of fruity Alsatian Riesling and an assortment of sausages, an entire Ardi Gasna (Basque sheep’s milk cheese) weighing just over two pounds, or cannelles – custardy little pastries from Bordeaux. We tasted these as I recounted my adventures, making them real for everyone.
EDITH’S ENDIVES ROLLED IN HAM Les Endives au Jambon d’Edith
Every time