When I went in to ask the mayor who to call about an overflowing sewer pipe, and he had someone over to fix it by the end of the day, I knew I LIKED the mayor. I profited from that same interview to ask him if some day he would consider having the two plantanes pruned which were growing chaotically across our view of the river. He sounded favorable, there being other trees to deal with upstream that were about to tumble into the river after the recent tempest. He said they would have to rent a boom truck for a whole day and could probably fit it doing our trees. I was sort of hoping for some action maybe by the end of the decade. I was bowled over to hear chainsaws outside the rear windows at midmorning.
The French have an unfathomable relation to pruning. At the Creuniers they would have their plantanes-- huge ones, three or four feet through-- pruned down to hands with amputated fingers. Not one twig or minor branch would remain. Jeanne would say, yes they are now clean. I guess they grow enough foliage for plenty of shade all summer before they get "cleaned" again in late winter. Maybe my two requests to the mayor--to get the sewer fixed and to prune the trees behind my house-- were not so radically different.
Monsieur le maire is André Bessières and we watched him elected by the conseil municipal and sworn in last year. I take it he is of the famed old local Bessières family, as in Jean-Baptiste Bessières, one of Napoleon's most capable marshals. Word had it that he had lived and worked in far-off lands but had recently retired and returned to his native contrée. Nobody ran against him so perhaps his absence all those years had the effect of rendering him non-controversial. A friend from Albas seemed disappointed that he is not "souriant", a big smiler. Her new mayor is souriant. The old mayor of Castelfranc was also souriant. I like souriant as much as anyone, don't get me wrong. But I love this reserved, discreet new mayor who quietly gets it done for you even if you're just another foreigner.
I was thinking about the old mayor who charged us a fortune to move a few dumpsters from behind the house and how he might have handled the more complex matter of pruning two large plantanes. Someone told me a guy up the street had made a deal with the old mayor to cede a patch of his property to be used for a big electrical transformer if the town would in exchange prune a couple large poplars blocking his view of the river. The transformer went in but the trees were never trimmed.
So I was glad to see that before the end of the day, the truck had moved down to this person's house and restored the honor of Castelfranc.
