Sylvia's Journal

We spent a week in the Loire Valley, between Nantes and Angers. We stayed in stately old chateau (it is available on Airbnb, here), the ancestral home of a dear friend who invited us and some others to accompany him and his wife to the chateau. We learned about the interesting bi-continental family that started when a French artist married his American wife. Their offspring settled either in France or in the US and some in both places. As a result, there are now dozens of cousins who speak English, French, or both. 

We were settled in the ‘red room’ with its 14 feet ceiling and large windows looking out on the spectacular grounds on one side and on another wing on the other. The windows have three positions: closed, wide open or half open with some ingenuous hardware that keeps them in that half open position. There are no screens which means we had to share our living quarters with flies during the day (especially in the kitchen), big noisy flying creatures at night that were attracted by our lights, and occasionally bats.

I learned that bats are an integral part of the biodiversity that creates the world’s most famous grapes. They don’t only eat mosquitoes (of which there were few, may be because of them) but also the grape worm and other pests that would affect the harvest. Once you know that, all thoughts of tennis rackets or baseball bats (so often used in the US to get rid of these creatures) evaporate. It is about co-existence. And the flies in the kitchen? You get used to that. I grew up in a house without screens and was used to wasps and bees and flies freely flying in and out of the house. Now, in the US, if we spot one fly in the house, we go after it with a vengeance. It’s all about context!

Of course, we drunk much wine, which was produced by the vineyards belonging to the chateau or to other chateaux. We did not visit a vineyard and now I wished I had because our fellow travelers did. They brought back interesting literature about wine making and biodiversity.

Since the internet had been knocked out by a storm before we arrived, we never had access to the whole wide world. I had not bought a French sim card. I had bought an E-Simcard in the US that I never got to work (which is a whole other story). I turned my phone off for the entire week. At first it was a little strange to not be able to look something up, send pictures and messages, but I soon got used to it, and liked it. Of course, I knew that the next week I would be fully connected again, and had a husband who was connected.

The cooking responsibilities were fluid and easy. We bought fabulous food at an outdoor market where we could have easily stayed a whole day and buy three times as we could possibly eat in a week. The cheeses, the sausages, the seafood (mussels, live langoustines – related to crawdaddies), and vegetables were all very tempting. In our little group we had people who loved to cook and improvise (using the refrigerator remains from the previous group that had stayed there – we called this soupe-frigo), and we had people who liked to clean up. It was all very easy and amicable which is not to be taken for granted when you live with people you have never lived with and even some we didn’t know before we got there.

We had access to enormous variety of produce from the chateau’s ‘potager.’ A large patch of land that was leased to a professional grower who serves restaurants nearby, and us if we so desired. It was enclosed by a 2-meter-high stone wall to keep the wildlife out.  We learned that everything was grown organically and in alignment with the phases of the moon and the mood of the universe. 

The chateau has an ‘Orangerie,’ where the countless citrus trees overwinter. In the summer they are outside. They were heavy with fruit:  oranges, lemons, kumquats, limes, and all sorts of other citrus varieties I don’t know the name of. While these trees are outside, the inside is taken over by one of the cousins who is an artist and holds workshops there. We had full access to the space. Axel produced a lovely woodcut of a water lily, one of the many flowering plants around us. The sights and views inspired me to create a treasure hunt in rhyme. It was a place that instantly released our creative juices.

When my in-laws lived here (from the early 50s until my mother-in-law died in 1993) the house they lived in remained essentially the same. They moved from one side of the house to the other and made only one change, removing a wall to make their TV room bigger. That was all, in all these years.

I remember when we visited them, before 1993, this was a quiet neighborhood with only the sound of the foghorn, waves, and seagulls. We experienced this kind of quiet in Finland. Coming back was a rude awakening. For one, we have a construction project in our backyard. It already made for one noisy summer last year when the foundation and framing was done and continues to do so now. Masons cladded the chimney with fieldstones that had to be lifted onto scaffolding using a squeaky flywheel and cut noisily with a stone cutter, from early morning till the end of the afternoon. This lasted for weeks. And now that this is done people across the cove are building a new house in and on the rocks which has required blasting and now produces loud noises from big trucks that are being loaded with rock debris. And when the construction noises calm down there are the landscapers with their noisy and polluting gas-powered landscaping equipment, mowers, blowers, and trimmers. It is never quiet anymore.

This morning when I walked around the small peninsula where we live, I counted 7 construction sites and 12 houses that weren’t there, or didn’t look at all as they do now, when my in-laws lived here. I sometimes wished I could take my long-gone in-laws for a walk around the neighborhood and watch their expressions. 

I know what has changed. When Axel grew up here, most houses were summer houses and at that time, summer houses were for the summer, not requiring the same creature comforts as their rest-of-the-year homes. People who lived here all year round like my husband’s parents, weren’t wealthy. Now our neighborhood is populated all year round; properties are snatched up by people with much wealth who either pull down the old houses or renovate, leaving only the bare house frames intact.  For years now there hasn’t been a summer without some construction project nearby. On the day Axel’s mother died we got phone calls from real estate developers asking whether we were going to sell. We now have several real estate companies in town and construction companies, all running booming businesses, creating more wealth and more wishes for more and better.

Everyone seems to be bitten by the bug that whispers in our ears (“not good enough”) – even we are bitten by that same bug. All the advertisers and happiness gurus are telling us that we could be happier, if only we lose some weight, buy this or that, get new clothes, renovate our kitchen or bathroom, or meditate every morning.  I did the latter for 2 years and have stopped doing so. It didn’t make me happier or calmer.

Knowing that most people in the world are sleeping in hot and buggy places, without screens on the windows or air-conditioning, and millions don’t even have a home, I wonder how we could ever be dissatisfied with the beauty and abundance around us. If only we could be satisfied with what we have, rather than indulge in dreams about more and better.