Picking up Robert's tools

Robert showed up at the house at 2pm and helped me load Honduran mahogany parts from the ugly staircase that used to go between the present main bedroom to the present kitchen. And some 5 or 6 meter long oak floor joists from what is now the guest bedroom. The joists must have run 150 lbs, with lots of nails stubs sticking up too. What with having to wait for Attorney Snoutsworthy to finish up with a conference call with a court, I didn't pull out until quarter of four. I had the hang of his big truck by halfway to Prayssac, and, at Caze, was adequately backing up a couple hundred meters on a lane near Gloria's house to let a dump truck by.



It gave me a pang to turn into the familiar driveway marked with the lieu dit (place name), Cavart, and pass the fences and gates I'd helped build, going through the green gate that was plastered all over the front pages for a couple days after the murder. The police tape was still sort of intact having been tied and retied. Six months after the crime, I didn't bother. I took a long, uneasy look up the lane toward the Dutch neighbor where Helene killed their friend. Nobody around, the bamboo fronds growing higher and higher.



All the doors had two red wax seals, one on the door, the other on the jamb. The strings embedded in the seals had long since been broken so I just opened the front door, half expecting the wretched German shepherds to bark and lunge against the glass.



I decided to walk through the whole house in case there was broken pipe or an open window. Dorien's toys, no Dorien. Eleanor's bulletin board and the bed I made for her, but no Eleanor. Helene's and Robert's beds were neatly made up. There were bags of possessions marked with Helene's maiden name, the name they use at the jail.



Robert gave me a detailed list of what I was to pick up. It took a long time even though I know the shop well and have at least passing familiarity with his huge collection of tools. He is setting up a carpentry job, timber framing a porch roof. It would have been a lot harder if it had been a masonry, zinc, roofing, or sheet metal job he was doing, to mention just a few of his trades. Setting up a job, tryng to get there with enough and not too much equipment, this is extremely personal. An odd thiing to do for another carpenter, as if he were partly incapacitated. This incapacity is a legal one though, not physical, in the form of a court order forbidding Robert from visiting his house and workshop. I found and loaded three different sized skillsaws, including the big Makita 18". And the automatic mortiser, which I covet and which Robert had brought over for me two years ago, unasked, to use here on the joists and beam of the kitchen floor.

The light was going but I was all loaded when I made a bêtise: I drove a little too far into the orchard and one of the front wheels sank into the soft earth up to the axle. I scrabbled around for the jack, raised it up to the maximum, cribbed the truck in that position, added material under the jack, raised it again to the maximum, more cribbing and so on about 7 or 8 times. Dumped a bunch of wood into the hollow where the tire had been, inserted a board under the tire itself, a lot of gravel under the rear tires and gave it a try. It STILL was spinning! So I called home, had Robert tell me where he stored his come-alongs and cable, wrapped cable around a convenient huge piece of steel I-beam, winched the truck in the maximum, reset the come-along, winched some more. Then jumping in the cab, before the truck could decide differently, I revved my way out. It was completely dark and I forgot the 8 meter ladder which was the last item on my list. I forgot the list too.

Off to prison, on to Castorama

We headed off early to Agen to visit Helene in prison. We had to be there by 9:30 at the latest, so I didn't see much of the scenery on the way though Matilda, our GPS, took us along many twisting roads, over hills, not along the hemarroidal course of the Lot River. The door to the Maison d'Arret des Femmes has no marking at all, but they had my name on file as a qualified visitor. A small man went on ahead of us with his young child through a series of doors opened with anonymous clicks by an unseen guard. My shoes set off the metal detector so I had to wear an incredibly mangy pair of slippers. The small man and his son visited his obese wife who had murdered her own mother. Helene seemed to be herself, extremely sad of course but seeing things clearly. We sat and talked together, the three of us, holding hands the whole time. While the visiting room / parloir was decrepit, filthy, with dangling wires, doors smashed by having been kicked Helene says their quarters are like a hotel: they cook their own food in kitchenettes, watch cable tv, take courses, tend a small garden. She had a decent tan.

Afterwards, in order re-enter the real world gradually, we walked over to the old city, ducked out of the rain into Agen Musée des Beaux Arts and looked at tiny clay figurines from Lebanon, circa 2000 BC.

We found a space for the car at the edge of park with among the worst war memorials I've ever seen. The vast majority of cities, towns, and villages in France have monuments to the dead from the slaughterhouse of World War I (1914 - 1918). And the vast majority of these simply state: "Pour les enfants de [name of town], mort pour la France" I often wonder what must have come over a town to order one of these bloodthirsty, war-glorifying jobs:






And then what is the meaning of this memorial to the Agen folk who fell during World War II?



The final depressurization took the form of a visit to a gigantic Castorama, a sort of French Home Despot. I got myself a professional cordless drill as an improvement on using the heavy Hilti 3 in 1 for finish carpentry as well as a Bosch router and some cheap bits. Couldn't locate with a speed square, curses for having left such a lightweight necessity of life at home.

We continue to sucked into the vortex of the Clicclack flooring departments of giant stores. Stephanie, like Diogenes of old, holds up pieces of MDF with wood patterns photographed on the fronts to try to understand why a photograph of cherry costs a lot more than a photograph of pine.

LaFargette Distillery

Just on the other end of our suspension bridge crouches a distillery. You smell it before you see it, a smell of fermentation something like the smell of silage on a Vermont dairy farm. I have no idea what goes on inside the squalid building, but from time to time, the yard outside fills with what's left after the grapes are crushed for wine. And this, I'm told, is made into eau de vie, life water, brandy. Robert told me that the vintners are required to send the lees of the wine to a distillery so that the government can confirm that they are not making moonshine themselves. I love the dark violette color of this stuff when the sun hits it late in the afternoon, even when there's only a little still left against the walls.





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At last, a kitchen sink!

After a couple of weeks doing dishes downstairs in the unheated bathroom, what a luxury to have a kitchen sink. Manu the plumber stood us up yesterday as I neurotically ran to the window every time a car door slammed. Surprising how many car doors slam around here. The sink was fine except for one stainless steel screw that was missing. I wouldn't mention this detail except to note that just as when you do construction underwater, every gesture is far more difficult, finding the correct stainless steel machine screw here will probably require many stops, much earnest inquiry. We bought the faucet at a reputable supply house but it was a demonstration model, screwed down to a plexiglas plate embossed with the maker's logo. We were happy to get such a high quality faucet for so cheap until Manu's boss Piveteau told us it surely didn't have a proper core, that it was just a dummy that wouldn't mix water. Gladly, he turned out to be wrong.

I've mounted the stock Ikea cabinets on a high kickspace to make the counter height comfortable for me. When it's time to try renting the house in the summers, we will have to advertise it for tall Dutch and American people. Now I have to find 4 bolts to modify the adjustable stove legs which will not extend far enough.

Later I will get wood and make door and drawer fronts in Robert's shop in Montcabrier. I look forward to visiting several nearby sawmills to check out stock for this and for the stairs. This has to happen fairly soon in order to get the wood in the house here first to acclimate itself.

Now we have to get tile laid down on the marine ply countertops and on the wavy brick walls. 

   

 

The cemetery at Anglars

We kept seeing this cemetary from the right bank of the Lot walking toward Prayssac. So on our way home from a long circuit from Castelfranc to the Juillac bridge and back, footsore or not, we decided to have a look. The cemetary is at the end of a lane and past a very small hamlet. There are a couple recycling bins stationed just before the gate. It has perhaps a cedar or two more than a normal cemetary.  

Here is a very popular headstone shape. Which brings up a puzzle: how does it happen that in a region full of such overwhelming architectural beauty, lovely gardens, refined aesthetic taste, how does it happen that the taste in these cemetaries is so tacky? This headstone shape reminds me of Elvis Presley's pompadour or a Phillips table radio from 1942


Here are some typical memorials spread across a grave without a raised tomb.







But the pictures on the tombs make this graveyard a real treasure. In the cemetary at Albas and Castelfranc, there are photos of young men who dies in WWI while these photos are all current.








Here's a plaque with a poem. It sounds really familiar to me. Does anyone have any idea where it comes from?





Death is nothing
I’ve simply gone on to the next room
I am me, you are you
What we were for eachother, we will always be
Call me by the name you always used
Talk to me like you always did
Don’t use a different tone of voice
Don’t be solemn or sad.
Keep laughing like we always laughed together
Pray, smile, think of me, pray for me
Say my name at home the way you always did.
Without any kind of emphasis or trace of shadow
Life means what it always did.
The thread is not broken
Why would I be absent from your thoughts
Because I am simply absent from you sight?
I am waiting for you. I am not far away.
Just the other side of the road.

 

Choses vues : végétation

It's still January but one has:



The first scraggly forsythia, a nice line of primula, something fluffy...

on the way to Albas 2

Further along our way, we went through the enormous walnut grove that is part of the great estate called Mirandol which belongs to one of the great families around here, the LeGrands. The LeGrands also own a bunch of property in the town including an incredibly ugly former restaurant just on the town square. In addition, they have a million bright yellow canoes and kayaks stored at Mirandol on the outskirts of town as well as in a vacant lot they own in town where years and years of vines and weeds have entangled the canoes and their large carriers they are stacked in. The business used to include guided trips to Africa and all the canoes bear the name of the enterprise, Safaraid. Anyone's guess why they don't just get rid of them all.

Walnut orchards are common around here and include an experimental orchard run by the government in nearby Juillac. They are now sold on a world market and are subject to the vicissitudes of growers in South America, the taste of consumers in the US, etc. In the old days, say 1600 to 1920, walnuts were a really big deal in these parts. They were the primary source of oil for lamps. Much of the bread was made from walnut flour. You can see all kinds of armoires, fine entry doors, staircases etc made of this European Walnut which is in general far lighter in color than American Black Walnut.