Bunnies for sale. Skinless, bone in.

This is not something you would see in the United States. This huge sign was on the main square in Hyeres for several days featured a dead rabbit. The word France is strategically placed over its head but you can see it's once fuzzy little body there in its entirety. Hence the word entier.

Architecture in Hyeres.

The old town, built in the god-knows-whens, is very fortress like. Small streets, thick thick walls, lots of stone, tiny windows. As the city grew, the architecture changed. The styles get more and more modern in rings around the old fortified city. The top picture is a residence a few block outside the old walls. The bottom picture is a relatively new structure built to match the part of the city it's in. It is lovely and I never realized that it was new until Loralyn pointed it out to me. 

Ratatouille.

Assemble the ingredients.

Remove skin from peppers and tomatoes. The process of charring the skins off the peppers was not as easy as you'd imagine.

Girolles fried in butter. I could say saute but, well, really, they're fried. They're delicious.

Drain everything. Not sure why, it's a rule. But I added the juice to the sauce anyway.

Caramelize the tomato paste and add red wine once that's done.

Add tomato sauce or in this case crushed tomatoes. Not something we have in the US, at least not this product which tasted like ripe raw tomatoes.

Et voila. Ratatouille.

August 25 to September 25, 2010

I had to fly to Cincinnati to catch my flight to Paris. 

The flight from Chicago to Cincinnati was remarkable in as much as I was able to listen to the history of the education of the daughter of the woman across the aisle from me for the entire flight. She was only getting to 4th grade when we landed but what a fascinating adventure! It started in pre-school with Mrs Carthy. I know it was Mrs Carthy because she repeated it about 40 times. She told the story of the sparkling, lovely, creative, talented daughter with ADHD, or maybe she said HGTV, but I do know that every time she referred to her daughter she said, "my delightful, adorable, smart daughter with HGTV." As it turns out this same daughter is also hyperkinetic and apparently never stops talking or moving. This came as no shock to me because her mother also was unable to stop talking. But we hit a glitch in 3rd grade, which is why we were only in 4th when we finally landed. In 3rd grade, the teacher of this amazing, thrilling, genius (and we know that Jesus gives us all genius capabilities we just have to uncover them because she explained that in detail to the poor woman she was talking to) daughter's new teacher felt that the children should adjust to her teaching style rather than the other way around. Can you imagine? I recall when Sr Quinta adjusted to my learning style. It involved a metal ruler.

Just about this time I started weaving a rope out of my socks and looking for something strong enough to hold my weight. 

Right now I am in the Delta Skymiles lounge which is sort of a waste of time since it is 4 miles from my gate and it's too early to drink and it's filled with people, most of whom are on the phone talking really loudly and there are a lot of children behaving as one might expect children to behave in the presence of free cookies and coca cola. Gasbag on his phone next to me is "looking to implement fillers for management monitoring systems for the check piece of the cycle so it becomes a system of continuous improvement, does that make sense? Well to be quite honest with you . . . where are my goddam socks when I need them?

I just repeated some idiotic thing he said (You're going to have the opportunity to define asset management under the umbrella) a little too loudly and in a silly voice and he looked at me. I think I'll go sit at the gate.

The thing is

Foued's anger was misplaced. He was ruining his own life by taking it out on the one person who took care of him. He not only lost his job, Jean-Yves gave him a room in which to live, got him a bank account and forced him to manage his money and treated him like family. Now that was gone. Foued was homeless, illegal, apparently, and jobless. And it was all my fault.

So I made the decision.

I stopped the project. I liked the walls the way they were. I didn't want the beams to be painted. I liked the crumbling plaster ceiling (this, in retrospect was a mistake) and I told them to leave the walls. The contractor was very gracious. The workers I am am sure thought I was nuts. I am sort of. But what I didn't realize, couldn't realize was that Foued would be out of a job. Not permanently since there was work waiting for him but this job was over. He had been promised, say, 500 euros for the work and he was only going to get 50. He could not understand this. He had been promised 500. He was furious. Oddly, not with me but with the contractor. He took a hammer and began to chop out the wall he had completed. He was forcibly restrained and ejected from the apartment. Not while I was there thank God. In fact, I had no idea this had happened. I was out quaffing beers with Loralyn who was neglecting her children.


But Foued was furious. He stalked the contractor and spit in his wife's face. He came to my door and harangued me in French I could not understand, spitting (accidently) through his braces as he passionately told me a story I did not comprehend. He began to stalk me in the small town. Sitting in a bistro to have a beer was frightening for me. Walking down the small unfamiliar streets at night was horrifying. Everything echoes, there are not a lot of lights. 

Walls I like.

I walked back to my new apartment. Foued was busy finishing the wall without the stones. He immediately explained to me that we had to chisel out that old concrete and replace it. Ca fait moche - that's ugly. My French isn't that good, and neither is his. I listened, he repeated, he is patient. I want to understand. I think, OK, maybe he's right, though I don't like the idea of painting the old puitres, the beams, blue. That about makes me nuts. I mean no disrespect, to him or to Pavel. But I know what I like and what they are saying is not it. I ask if I might take some time to think about it. This is difficult for them because the meter is ticking. They have other work to do and this job can't wait for a lot of contemplation. I have the weekend. Later I decide not to re-do any of it. Pavel is gracious and he is after all French (though really he is Polish and I cannot understand him either). He doesn't care. Foued thinks I'm nuts.

Type inconsistencies.

I am not sure why this happens, though I do know that it has something to do with the 2 computers I use, one at work and the other at home. But the inconsistency in the type drives me nuts. Just sayin'.

Jambon, baguette et moutarde

Though I do not cook very much (which is odd considering how much I love to cook) when I am in France there is magnificent food shopping in this small town. Across the street from this lovely shop is a Casino, what appears to be a small grocery is actually a supermarket when you get inside it goes on forever. They have the most exquisite ham in the world there. Because I prefer to eat in the local restaurants, I don't often make my own meals, but one baguette jammed with the perfect ham and slathered with moutarde dijonaise is pure unadulterated heaven. Of course, at this point in the story I do not have a kitchen at all. 

The conflict begins

In Provence, they don't like the dark mess of the old so much. They like bright colors and lovely fabric. The contractor explained to me very slowly in French that here, in Provence, we don't want this old dark wood and poorly tuck pointed (he didn't use that expression, I could not have understood it anyway) stone. We need to remove the old concrete or whatever it is and replace it with something new and smooth. We'll let the old stones show through a bit but we'll get rid of the trail of fingers that put the concrete  between the stones. We need to cover the old beams, puitres (poot-tra) they are called, with a nice blue paint, something warm or bright and provencal. I understand I say, though I don't. I love the old beams and I love the fingerprints in whatever is holding the stones in place.

Foued, one of the workers, listened to the contractor, his boss, nodding his head in agreement. I told Pavel, the contractor, outright that I liked it the way it was but that, of course, I am not from here and am open to his ideas. I had just arrived, seriously dead tired. I couldn't possibly understand. I know that. Though I also know, I'm not French, I'm not from Provence, I will never understand. He immediately took me to his house just a twisty block away. I can tell you that his home is absolutely, gloriously, fabulously beautiful. He has taken a small couple of rooms in a very old place and made it into a sanctuary. Arid gardens, glassed in terraces and stairways that wind up into a pinnacle room cut into the very rock of this hill that overlooks this city. An original porch apparently made of the same wood as my ceiling, is painted green surrounds the top floor. Without reservation I can say it is something I would live in and be happy for the rest of my life. The kitchen is painted yellow-orange in a louche, swirly way like the walls in my apartment. Like pictures in magazines I have recently looked at. In fact, all the walls in every room are painted like that. Loopy messy swirly paint jobs, bright colors emulating in some vague way the way old walls look when they have been painted and repainted and replastered and repainted. It's a trend. Making what is not old look old, only not really, just a vague semblence of what that old is supposed to look like. Except that the idea is lost here. No one seems to understand that what they are doing is trying to make things look old, it's just a new style that's gotten disconnected from its roots.

Greason's Seatings

Shortly before I made the arrangement to purchase the apartment, Loralyn in a fit of some sort of brain fever had me make this Christmas card for her and her family. I begged her to purchase something not quite as, shall we say, idiotic but she was insistent that I spend an afternoon creating this card (which I should say features an enormous amount of photoshop work.) and so here it is. Just in time for Christmas.

Nothing to do with anything.

Our current pope. A completely loathsome and venomous creature who, since there is no hell, will not burn there where he belongs with all his fellow Nazis. One might imagine, if one were to imagine that God cares what we are doing on a day to day basis, and since he (the current pope) like so many heads of state, believe that the deity's hand was involved in the process of selecting him, that He might have possibly selected a cardinal without the Nazi roots as, say, a simple show of support to His Jewish, gay, gypsy and otherwise genetically inferior children.

One day free

In the midst of the work and all of the hoopla, in the midst of the cold and snow (yes, snow), I took off on a Sunday afternoon. I had purchased a big sheet of stiff watercolor paper and I opened the window and I used oil pastels to draw the window that stares at me from across the street. I have no idea who lives there but from time to time they have screaming fights. In this little town it is impossible to clear your throat without everyone else hearing you. Loralyn bought a lovely old frame and she had it framed. I didn't see it until I returned a few months later with my mother. It now hangs in the living room along with some nudes (which seem to distress half the world) that my friend Annette sent me from Massachusetts and some various and sundry old photographs we found at the flea market.

 

The lovely Loralyn

My devotion knows no bounds. One can clearly see by the expression on her face and her puffy white shoes our mutual love and respect. Except that I would never wear shoes like that.

Loralyn's birthday is December 5th

Her birthday falls on the the eve of St Nicholas and since I was raised celebrating this holy event, invariably I spend inordinate amounts of money buying her gifts and thoughtful delicious treasures. This year I surprised her with a new coat from London Fog, an accompanying scarf from a little boutique I adore in the Marais in Paris, the most recent National Book Award winning book, which I loved, a box of chocolates from ChocolateSommelier.com, a fabulous online chocolatier and a box filled with all the things she cannot buy in France, including chocolate chips, brown sugar, coffee creamer and people who are nice. I hope she enjoyed it all.

Voila le chantier

Chantier is French for work site, which it was for weeks. EVERYTHING was covered with plaster dust at all times. I would spend hours mopping the same place over and over. Besides that, the water there is hard and my hair, what there is of it, felt like straw. My mouth tasted like cement and felt like sand. I couldn't sleep. And it was getting colder every day. At night I slept with the door closed and a small space heater kept me vaguely warm. I slept in my clothes with made it easier to get up and get going in the morning. I started by painting the hideous green walls in my bedroom. 

Pandemonium

So, the apartment was a hell of workers, sanding, plastering patchwork and destruction. After 3 days with Mme Lassoued, I had to get out. Not that it wasn’t thoughtful and kind of her to allow me to stay, it was. And not that it wasn’t just a whole lotta fun, it wasn’t. But I had to get there early in the morning and get working. I had only a month before I was to return home. Chez Lassoued, it was early morning pandemonium, followed by breakfast pandemonium, followed by getting dressed pandemonium, you see where I am headed. We’d arrive at the apartment at noon. The workers in the meantime stood around smoking and commenting on everything. the French love to comment and opinionize about everything no matter if it concerns them or not.

So I moved in. It was freezing, the bed was filled with plaster dust. The whole place smelled like linseed oil which is not my favorite odor. I had to ask the workers not to smoke in the place.

Dedans

The interior of the apartment was a mess. There was a massive amount of work to do when I arrived. Although I had been led to believe otherwise, it was not habitable and I was forced to stay with my business partner and her husband Samy and their 3 children. Besides the obvious problem of living with 3 undisciplined children, the weather was abominable. It was freezing cold. Less then a week before when I asked about the weather I was told it was "beach weather." This apparently meant colder than a son of a beach.


Loralyn, who proved to be virtually of no help at all, is shown here pretending to scrape a wall. In reality she had some sort of illness that resembled consumption but probably was not because it did not leave her gaunt and operatically beautiful. Not that she isn't beautiful in her own way. As you will see.

The word bordelle comes to mind

The apartment was built in the 1600s as a convent. My apartment has 2 bedrooms and a nice terrace which overlooks the street which winds very steeply down to the original old gate of the walled city it once was. Hyéres is a port city but the port is not in the midst of town as it is in most of the cities on the coast. For this reason and because it is built on a very steep rocky hill as a fortress it has architecture that is different from the rest of the cote d'azur. 

When I arrived, this was the terrace. The inside only slightly more sightly.

Toute suite.

My friend Loralyn didn't need to be too persuasive. Within days I was in negotiations speaking to bankers and notaires in French. They were very polite and long suffering since my French, while passible, does not extend to things legal. Eventually I bought the damn place and made arrangements to go, in the middle of February, (Loralyn said "Oh it's always beautiful here".) for a month. Hyéres is in the south of France. It has a climate like Florida. The city itself is known for the millions of palm trees it exports to the Middle East. So I went.

Here is Loralyn looking smug. Which may have more to do with the fact that she is having a beer in the middle of the day and not attending to her 3 children for a change.