I kicked off summer tonight with the first veggies for our balcony garden. While I may be dreaming of eventual tomatoes and peppers, I am getting started with lettuce, basil and the oh-so-precious cilantro (not always easy to find during those summetime Mexican food hankerings…I personally hate to let a cilantro craving go unsatisfied…it tends to lead to homesick fits).
What a mess! And when you are on the 3rd level, you can’t exactly brush the excess dirt over the side and on the balconies and terraces of the neighbors…
Solution found.
This post is in large part directed at the Swiss civil authorities who will one day decide whether or not I am citizenship worthy. Personally, I think anyone willing to vacuum their balcony merits instant Swiss citizenship. Do you not agree? In fact, this might make me too Swiss. Regardless of their decision, however, I am comforted knowing that this new found fear of angry neighbors and complusion to tidy up even the outdoors is mine to keep forever.
Like The Water
Like the water
of a deep stream,
love is always too much.
We did not make it.
Though we drink till we burst,
we cannot have it all,
or want it all.
In its abundance
it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill,
and sleep,
while it flows
through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us,
except we keep returning to its rich waters
thirsty.
We enter,
willing to die,
into the commonwealth of its joy.
-Wendell Berry
The Swiss love winter sports…all of them, apparently. Curling included.
Moving is no easy feat. For two weeks we wrapped and packed, surprised by each filled box: where did we get all this stuff?!
Fortunately, we have really nice friends. Like, r.e.a.l.l.y. nice. I think they endured many sore muscles and aching backs on our account in the days following.
Our neighbors happened to be moving on the same day. They hired professionals. I think that this was a very good idea…
I love the contrast between the professionals’ truck and our little “Je suis à Louer”
Next time…
When we arrived to our mountain hotel, the only remaining parking spot was filled with 4 feet of snow. To this, I despair. For Jean, it is a challenge and a chance to “do some sport,” as he says.
How did a girl from Texas meet and marry a boy who thinks that this is fun?
In January we packed up the apartment in Yverdon and with the help of some precious, generous friends made the move to the “big city.” After two years as a countryside dweller, I can say with both confidence and a little bit of sadness that country air weighs heavy in my lungs; a city’s pace, its movement and mysteries, energize me in ways I had forgotten. What’s more, we managed to achieve what we were told was impossible—finding an apartment that we love in one of the world’s most challenging housing markets. Herringbone wood floors and crown moulding for her; a balcony with a view on Lake Geneva, the Alps, and umm…the country of France (how awesome is that?!) for him.
We are one happy duo.
Sometime just before the beginning of 2011, I officially had lived in Switzerland longer than I ever lived in France. Oddly enough, this was a strange and even unwelcome anniversary. In so many ways, Switzerland is still a foreign country to me, while France and Burgundy especially feel much like a second home.
I found this photo while cleaning up some files a few weeks ago. Burgundy is a countryside best explored on bicycle or by foot and best savored slowly. I feel so lucky to have had more than a year to call it mine.
This little church was my regular stop in Givry, a town on the côte chalonnaise. Between it and the vinyards, there wasn’t much to see.
But that was the point.
I took these photos two weeks ago when it was so hot I could hardly stand to exhale. C’était la canicule. A heat wave rolled through our little piece of earth, bringing real summer for the first time this season. On this particularly hot day, I moped listlessly around the apartment, feigning responsibility in the form of half-hearted housework. Even the meagre breeze from the garden below seemed to come to a halting stop just outside our open windows. This is life without air conditioning, people. I stood at the window, sweat drops perched perpetually on my upper lip, tank top and shorts rolled in every direction possible, pathetically waiting for the little wisps of air to pass the surface of my skin.
My photos are a little over exposed, but then again, so were we.
Now, weeks later, fall is respectfully reminding us of its inevitability with crisp mornings and shorter evenings. The relief is welcome, naturally, but I must say, I sort of loved the unrelenting heat. In it, there is a certain respect for the natural order of things.
In my former life as an American urban dweller, for example, I never had the pleasure of experiencing rain as benediction. Even in the extreme heat of Texas and DC, readily available air conditioning provided enough relief to allow momentary forgetfulness. Life without air conditioning is a new thing entirely for me. Each night during the heat wave, it seemed that the atmosphere would reach a point where even it could no longer sustain the weight. The sky would open up and rain, blessed longed-for rain, would descend on the garden. The cool and the smell of life would waft through our open windows bringing not just reprieve but reminders of just how exhilarating it is to be human. Frail and finite, but alive. Some experiences evade my amateur skills of description. All I can say is that it was good. Very good.
We spent these evenings, languid and happy, looking for grace in glasses of lemon water, waiting for mercy in thunderstorms.
Summer, you will be missed.
Taken at the beach in Yverdon. Don’t you wish you could enjoy summer with this kind of abandon again?
“I wish to wrest education from the outworn order of doddering old teaching hacks as well as from the new-fangled order of cheap, artificial teaching tricks, and entrust it to the eternal powers of nature herself, to the light which God has kindled and kept alive in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interests of parents who desire their children grow up in favour with God and with men.”
Johann Heinrish Pestalozzi
an innovative educator and lover of lost children, immortalized on Yverdon’s Place Pestalozzi where he established a school in the château
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