Letter from Saint Clar, Gers, Midi-Pyrenees, FRANCE

Dear Family and Friends,

Malana and I have given ourselves about twenty layers of activities while on this journey.  We want to vacation in France, learn French, go hiking on the awesome nature trails, learn to cook, learn about cheese and wine, match history with architecture, draw and paint… see what it’s like to live here.

First order of business:  Learn French. When I first visited France, the locals had a hard time understanding my French.  It seems their comprehension has improved a lot since then.

I think I can get much better – lots of room to learn.  But if I don’t learn French, it’ll be their fault.  Sooo many people want to practice their English that strengthening our language aptitude for “la langue francaise” is moving a lot slower than we expected.

Yesterday we had a visit with Gil, a Corsican-born fellow whose wife, Irene, invited us over to their home when she heard we are from California.  Gil is

shorter and rotund with dark green eyes, like most Corsicans, while Irene is taller and slender with strawberry hair and blue eyes, like many French of Breton extraction.

Gil told us he got some big breaks in life when he visited California on a whim, met people who loved his accent and his cooking, and had a very good run as a private chef and entrepreneur.  Nowadays, Irene sells Gil’s baked goods at the market, which is where we met.

We drove to their converted farmhouse and barn near the end of a road situated in the middle of freshly plowed fields.  Gil showed us around his acreage and explained the function of each tree he had planted, how and when he pruned them, and why they were situated in each location.  He explained how he ‘seeded’ the ground around his pine tree with mushroom spores, and how he uses everything he produces to sell or somehow support their country lives.  He gets enough firewood by trimming the branches of his aspen trees once a year to keep their fire stoked in an enormous custom-chiseled stone mantle fireplace.  He gets enough olives from a single small tree to keep him in oil, and still have many olives to prepare and share.

Gil was so excited to have people with whom to speak English–Californians no less–that he talked nonstop for four hours.  

In that time we learned his complete family history (seventeen generations in the same hamlet in the mountains of Corsica), handled the artifacts he had saved from his father’s time (an old rotary telephone that was the only one in the area, an ancient balance that was used for hundreds of years), witnessed the progress to his refurbished farm house that he and Irene have been working on by hand for nine years, examined his photography and acid-process etchings, looked over two single-edition recipe books he created for his children, learned the process he used for forming cookies, heard about the girlfriends he’d met for the past thirty-five years, and enjoyed a gourmet dish of sautéed duck breast with local wine and honey glaze, and cream pommes de terre au dauphinois (scalloped potatoes).  We also learned nearly everything about local cultivation, the types of cover crops (petit pois) that are planted between the harvests of sorghum, corn and wheat, the types of small grapes that are used locally to produce Armagnac (a blend of Bacco, Colombard, Folle Blanche and Ugni), the cost of chicks (€1.5)…and basically somewhat more than I’ve learned in my entire life about farming.

When he heard of our interest in exploring whether we are suited to settle in France, Gil described the benefits of the Gers (this department) and insisted it is by far the best place to live in France.  This enthusiastic recommendation was similar to those we have heard from friends in the Gironde department (in Aquitaine, near Bordeaux), and in the Herault department (Languedoc).  “It is not because I live here zhat I think it is zhe best, but zhe other way around,” they say.