This crisp, sunny morning I woke up and opened the windows on my courtyard garden and while I was taking in the fresh smell of the greenery and flowers, I heard Piaf playing in a neighbor’s apartment. Paris doesn’t get any better than this.
My friends Deborah and Olivier (she’s American, he’s French) invited me to spend the weekend at their house in the country with their son Dylan and their dog Lulu. Their house is in the start of the Perche region near the town of Brou about two hours west of Paris. With all the time spent coming to Paris in the last 30 years, I have not seen very much of the rest of France and welcome any invitation to do so. I arrived Saturday afternoon and driving from the train station, the area was flat and very rural, and the roads lined with dry looking wheat fields are mostly narrow and one lane. Because the area is so flat, the sky overtakes the region with a mixture of thick gray and black cumulus clouds with the sun streaming in and out making for a dramatic landscape.
Their house is a 17th century farmhouse with a barn on a large, open field with an endless view of the countryside. It was a crisp, mostly cloudy day and we had a lunch outside surrounded by fruit trees growing peaches, plums, and apples. The plums were ripe and Deborah later picked some and made confiture. They also had a vegetable garden with tomatoes, squash, zucchini, and pumpkins.
After lunch we visited their neighbors Fernande and Robert who run a small farm across the way. Ferdinand and Robert were a robust, elderly couple in their 80’s who had been farmers all their lives. In fact, Fernande had never been to Paris. We toured the farm with its old barns, turkeys, chickens and livestock. An unusual treat for a die-hard city boy.
The rest of the day we sat outside playing cards, backgammon and Quiddler. Quiddler is an instantly addictive game, which is a cross between Scrabble and cards. Memories of past family game playing going from innocent to ugly came up. My closet competitiveness came out and I demanded that we play until I won, no matter how long it took. (It took till Sunday, 4PM). Shockingly, I spent a mostly electronic free weekend with no TV and no computer and managed to have a fulfilling time without them.
Deborah and Olivier made a delicious dinner of filet de boeuf cooked on Olivier’s outside fire of sticks and rocks, accompanied by produce from their garden, fantastic local home made sausages, and local chevre.
Sunday we went to a disappointing flea market in a nearby village and returned to Paris in the late afternoon stocked with Deborah’s plum confiture and bundles of fresh sage and oregano with the smell permeating my suitcase. As I spread the confiture on my toast this morning, I thought of how much I enjoyed the French countryside and want to return soon.
Please take a look at my photo albums from Nice and Beauvais on the right sidebar.
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