Roy likes to re-introduce me to the P word from time to time. This former New Yorker slash American has finally let it sink in. For over three years we have called this place ‘ours’. It’s been just 22 days shy of two years since we owned it. We still had not spent a single night here.
I remember the first couple of weeks after returning to London, back in May of 2018. This was just after the Teyssandier family accepted our offer on their property. The agent told us the paperwork would go to a governmental office in Paris then back again to Duras. We would be signing the contract within ten days. Ten days became a few weeks, then a few months. It’s funny how wildly relative time can be. How the length of a day could feel so different in the pre-pandemic world of individual choice. I counted every day with an entitled impatience. I walked our dog Hartley in the park in Hackney and phoned the agent in Duras. I had already gotten Hartley a pet passport and dreamed about the day I would take him across the border and see him running on the land, freer than he was ever able to be during his six years as a city dog. I asked the estate agent why things were taking so long. “That’s France!” he beamed, proudly teaching me something I already knew. I worked hard at being patient and more ‘French.’ It took exactly a year before we finally received three different contracts for the various buildings and parcels of land, each about 50 pages long and full of French words I hadn’t come across in any of the language books I’d been studying. I cursed myself for not preparing for this after so much time. I sat in my office in London with a candle lit for ambience, translating, drinking tea, translating, scribbling down questions for the agent, translating. During all this, Hartley snored on the sofa in my office while the rain came and went, getting up to press his paw on my leg when he was ready to stretch his.
Then the COVID pandemic hit the world, and an aggressive form of cancer hit Hartley and I started to long for those sunny days in the park impatiently counting days and weeks. We found a vet that made house calls who came by every time we called, at any hour of the day or night. Hartley hid his pain that I only noticed in his eyes while looking at some photos of his last days. Hartley passed on a Wednesday morning in July and the little heart that had been beating next to me for the past seven years (but weirdly as long as I can remember) left a hole that will never again be filled. That very week we went back to France with Hartley’s ashes in the back seat. He never sat in a room on his own and I wasn’t about to leave him now. I was running away from something I could not shake, and toward something I could not acquire. Although we were now allowed to enter France at last, we still would not be staying on our property.
I don’t know when the last inhabitant of the house departed from the hamlet in Grand Truchasson. What I do I know is that there was no evidence of a septic system, nor any sort of bathroom. The electrical wires were from before I was born. There was not a window or door that closed properly. There were only spiders and thick webs covering every surface. It had been a while. We continued to rent gites in the area while we sorted out getting permission and finding builders. The breakthrough came when we were introduced by our new local friends to Monsieur V., a trusted and experienced project manager. M. V. wrote 18 pages of detailed specifications and sent us devis (quotes) for every element of the build. These new costs, if not at the same price point for the French, were still less than half what we had been getting from the architect. It started to feel real.
Now we are here for the summer. M.V. has sent over the electrician for an interim job in the wine barn. We had already turned on the water supply and opened the electrical account. We got compost toilets and bell tents, an actual lawn mower. Roy took a self-administered crash course in the French plumbing system and I learned some new curse words directly from the source.
All of this may not seem much but turns out to be just enough to set up domicile on a formerly uninhabitable piece of land. We knew that once the tents were up, we would not leave them so we worked in a precise order; power wash, rudimentary water supply, wait for the electrician. Kitchen, hot water tank, plumbing. Wood decking to serve as the only respite from the bare ground, sun shades as the only respite from the hot sun. Delivery of some furniture in storage. Tents up. Home.
