Frenaline

French Adrenaline. The ability to eat pastry and pate and not gain weight. The curious absence of most traces of chronic illness. The overwhelming need to go to the grocery store, farmers market and boulangerie multiple times a week. Frenaline.

So, two months in, we are having the new normal. We wake up, grateful for having our own bed and sheets again, we dress in something that looks remarkably like what we wore the day before. We walk the dog and then have coffee, croissant and fruit salad. We leave and go look at 4 or 5 houses for sale, often driving long distances and with a certain blase attitude about roundabouts and narrow roads which are tenamount to playing chicken with every massive lorry trying to take up 3/4’s of the road.

The days here start with frost and fog, followed shortly by the smell of burning. Sometimes the afternoon sun clears away the smaze, sometimes it gets colder and grayer. There is still much beauty here, but the fall seems synonymous with burning and hunting. Spring seems a ways off. I can not think most of my friends will want to visit at least until we have a house where the temperature doesn’t swing violently from cold to blazing with no thermostat. At the same time I can only hope we are loved enough that the description of the burning, the single toilet and the shower that is too narrow to turn sideways won’t prove a deterrent.

I have a wish list of US goods that is growing. It includes maple syrup, my favorite ginger candy and the powdered toothpaste we use. I may also add the new Bosch multi-head drill that they don’t sell here. I can always get a French charger for it. I am constantly making lists of houses that we should consider and occasionally thinking of traveling to easy hop destinations like Barcelona and Budapest.  I am living my French dream. Geoff has been listening to recountings of my dreams for more that 20 years. He has always said I have freakishly weird dreams.

If I can find a house that isn’t 5 stories tall, with wiring hanging like draperies from the doorways and attics where daylight is piercing the roof tile like a thousand points of light, I might want to stay asleep and dream.