The Dream of a Second Home

Souvenirs of France: the tablecloth - gift
from my mother's trip to Provence,
 the eau de vie-from our exchange student.

The French House is Don Wallace's memoir about the second home that he and his wife purchased on the island of Belle Ile in the Bay of Biscay off of France's Brittany coast. After one visit to the island they were under its charm and when the opportunity of purchasing a property there came, they jumped at it. Granted the property was a real fixer upper, and they were barely making ends meet in their first home (apartment life in New York City) they decided to throw caution to the wind and make the purchase. It would be several years before they could afford to make the house habitable. I'll let you read about their adventures with builders and financing, not too mention the neighbors and the local building authorities.

Reading the book reminded me of my time spent in France as an exchange student during my high school days. The Nacel program was a four week, summertime opportunity for students to stay with a host family and be immersed in the language and culture of a foreign country. Since I was studying French in school, and my ancestors came from France that's where I choose to visit. I arrived to find my host family on vacation in Les Issambres on the Cote d'Azur. We would spend three weeks there with most of our time at the beach, swimming and windsurfing. Windsurfing was a challenge to me, I knew how to sail a sunfish but standing up on a board and holding onto the sail was a totally different experience. I finally learned to keep my balance, and could tack (mainly a sailing term I imagine), but when the area got busy with other windsurfers, I became frightened of colliding with others.

My host family were staying in the summer home of my "mom's" parents; my "father's" parent's summer place was not far off. I imagine that may be how Claude and Marie-Christine met, there at the beach seeing has his parents resided outside of Paris and her's in Fougerolles. I suppose by now that they have inherited the properties and still travel there for vacations with their children and grandchildren. That was one of the difficulties that Wallace encountered in his life in France - that properties pass down through the family and many are eagerly awaiting their inheritance.

My dream of a second house doesn't take me to France or Tuscany (Frances Mayes memoirs are another favorite of mine). I like to read about other's experiences in foreign lands but I'd like to stay closer to my own backyard so to speak. As a New Englander, I can't image living anywhere else. My dream home is one on the water somewhere - lake, river, or even an estuary. As I get closer in age to retirement, I spend more time thinking about my future second home. I dream of the day when the tuition payments are done so that I can put my income to better use. In the meantime, my husband and I can travel about the region, staying in B&Bs and researching the area where we would like to own our vacation home.

Agatha Christie, Sackville-West and Gardens

Garden and Household
bric-a-brac

 I'm listening to Agatha Christie's Postern of Fate, one of my favorite Tommy and Tuppence mysteries. In this novel, the last that Christie wrote, Tommy and Tuppence are retired and have moved to the suburbs as we call them here in the US, and are remodeling and settling into the house and garden.

The story opens with Tuppence trying to organize her collection of books. I can sympathize with her. I've got loads of books and I'm always trying to figure out the best place and way to organize them. Down in the family room I've placed a large dining room hutch purchased at a second hand store which serves as a bookcase. There I have the fiction books. Upstairs the bookcase in "the office" contains the non-fiction and "work" books - science: biology, chemistry, and ecology. The hallway bookcase contains more fiction books, and the some of the kid's books that didn't fit on their bookcases. In my bedroom I have a small shelf devoted to what I consider inspirational books, and the current bedtime reading is stacked on the bedside table.

Tommy and Tuppence have their faithful henchmen Albert with them and an even more aged gardener, "Old Isaac" helping them. In the passage I'm writing about Tuppence and Isaac are burrowing through a box of tulips that have been ordered and planning how to plant them so as to make the best effect. This made my mind immediately jump to the section of Vita Sackville-West's, In Your Garden, that I have currently on the bedside table for gentle reading to settle me down for a good night's rest. She advised her readers on the best varieties of bulbs to purchase, their color, price, and seller.

Hutch filled with vintage
silver and odds and ends

Now I love tulips and their vast variety of size, color, and shape, unfortunately, so do the white-tail deer that inhabit the woods that surround my yard. I tried planting tulips the first Fall we lived here and in the Spring they dutifully came up and were promptly eaten. I was heartbroken. I did my research and discovered that daffodils were poisonous and deer resistant and I decided to invest in them. It turns out that Brecks has a wide variety of daffodils not just your average yellow ones. They have managed to bloom and double over the years. Still wish I could have tulips to brighten my springtime garden, but I buy some to place in the house, safe from Bambi.

Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters

Lockets: one given to me by my
mother and father for my First Communion,
the other by my daughter for Mother's Day.

I love to browse for books. Who doesn't? At the library I like to look at the returns cart before someone re-shelves the books. What books are other people in my community reading? Did they choose wisely? Would I like what they've read? It's how I came across an older title of Elizabeth Berg's: What We Keep.

Ginny, the narrator of the story, is the same age I am - 47. Lately, I've been wondering how did I get to be this old? I certainly don't feel old, but my daughter is now 20 and my son will be 18 by the end of August, they will both be at college this Fall and my husband and I will celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary in November. I've been doing a lot of living over the years and if I take after my grandmother (she turned 100 in June), I have a lot more living to do.

What We Keep is the story of a family's unraveling and the stitching back up of it. Ginny and her sister Sharla are drawn tightly together when their mother leaves the family. Both girls close out their mother when she returns and wishes to re-establish their relationship. Mom comes back a changed person and neither daughter is able to reconcile to this new personality. Thirty-five years later Sharla asks Ginny to go and meet with their mother. Ginny reviews her childhood and her own motherhood. I'll leave the story and its ending for you to enjoy. I couldn't put down the book.

As for me, I have a deep relationship with my mother. I've always been close to my mom, but our shared experience of caring for my dying father drew us even closer. My sister, unfortunately has been living abroad these last four years and is finally returning home in a month's time. It will be the start of a new phase of life for the three of us without dad.

Relationships are constantly changing and growing. Even my own with my daughter as she enters into adulthood and my role as mother changes. I work hard at letting go so that she can become her own independent being. Even my role as daughter and sister has changed over the years, and I know it will continue to change and that is a good thing. One of the hardest things in life is to accept change. We want to cling to the things we are familiar with. We want things to stay the same. It's not healthy for things to stay the same and that is the life lesson that we all have to learn.

The Manor House Garden

One garden room at Hidcote Manor picture taken on my vacation 

Agatha Christie and many of my other favorite authors have written about the weekend house party at someone's manor house and there is always a scene when someone invites someone else out for a stroll in the garden. Once out in the garden there might be the "important talk", a dalliance, or even a murder. It didn't really make much sense to me to go for a walk in the garden because I was picturing my garden, but once I had been to England to see what a real manor house garden looks like it began to make all the more difference to my reading.

Gardening is serious business over there in England. Many of the gardens that I visited are even larger than my entire plot of land (1.67 acres). They employed designers and architects and engaged and maintained a staff. When Hercule Poirot is interviewing the gardener, this character was a full time employee with perhaps a "boy" or two working for him. Here I am, just me beavering away at my attempt at a cottage garden and a small vegetable plot. I've had to take a week off due to the rain and an aching back and the weeds have gone rampant from my neglect.

In researching about famous English gardeners I came across Vita Sackville-West, poet and novelist who funded her gardening passions with the proceeds from her literary career. She and her husband purchased Sissinghurst Castle and transformed the grounds, he did the architectural planning and she the plantings. I used the ever precious inter-library loan system to get a hold of a copy of her In Your Garden a collection of her articles written for The Observer during 1947-1950. Now I understand the inspiration that Katherine Swift had for her gardening column written 50 years later. I guess it is a testament to British gardeners that weekly gardening columns are still popular especially seeing the demise of the printed newspaper editions at least here in the US. I'm guilty of giving up the paper subscription when I found myself recycling stacks of them unread. There is always so much more good reading material than the morning paper.

I'm wandering just like one would along the crazy brick paths of a manor house garden. On January 22, 1950, Sackville-West wrote of her plan to design a garden with a single color scheme. She was envisioning a garden of just white blossoms against a backdrop of green and grey foliage. Of course this garden came to fruition as one for which she is famous.

Memoir - Under Magnolia

My baby picture

Growing up in New England, I had a different experience than that of Frances Mayes as described in her newest memoir Under Magnolia. I'm always a bit fascinated by stories that take place in the South, it seems almost like a foreign country to me, points of reference can be so different. Sometimes I can relate and other times I can't.

Mayes' has a few years on me as well, she was in college when I was born, so my experience of growing up female is much different than hers. I certainly wasn't a tomboy, but my father taught me to fish, mow the lawn, shingle a roof, build a campfire, and that an education was essential and that I most certainly was going off to college to earn my degree. Mom taught me how to keep house, cook (baking wasn't her favorite so when I got adept at it I was the chief dessert maker), sew, knit, do needlepoint, garden, and encouraged me to get that education while I was young. My mother's family couldn't afford to send her to college, but she did earn her degree in her late thirties.

Mayes relates her first experience with visiting a funeral home and I was immediately transported to the funeral parlor (as we called it) in Rhode Island from which all my relatives were buried. There is a smell to funeral homes, some might call it death, but that's not it. There is no smell of decay. It is a smell which I cannot describe. It looks more like death; the woodwork stained dark, the velvet curtains which covered the windows which kept the outside light from making its way in, or the pedestrians from looking in at the bereaved. The embossed wall paper that was popular during the time the place was decorated, made the place depressing. Unfortunately during my childhood so many of my relatives passed away that the funeral parlor was a familiar place. There were few happy occasions for gathering together.

Vacations at the beach were a happy time for Mayes. There is a real sense of freedom at the beach. I too had many happy times at the beach. They were solitary times as my parents worked to maintain the cottages that my father and his friend had bought as investments. After helping out where I could, I was free to go to the beach where I would walk for miles or go for a swim. I scoured the line of pebbles that split the beach from the sandy bottom further out in the water, for shells and sea glass. My territory was marked by a white house with blue shutters at one end and a pink beach house at the other with no others in between. Very few people came down this way, the public beach was well up the road.

One last thing, Mayes, wrote about the suicides that took place in town while she was growing up. She and her family didn't talk much about them, but they did wonder and look at those families differently. I was a member of one of those families that folks look at and talk about. I wonder what they said about us. It's hard to grow up with that pain in your household, for even there we did not talk about those that we loved who chose to leave us behind.

Garden Reading Installment #3

Untamed garden

 "Read-a-little, garden-a-little, read-a-little, garden-a-little, weed, weed, weed...."  reminds me of that song  from The Music Man. Moving on. Yesterday's installment from Katherine Swift's The Morville Year was about those plants that move or seem to spring up out of nowhere. I've got a whole garden that seems to be that way.

Once upon a time I too set out to tame Nature by planting a garden and she just laughed at me and my hubris. But mankind continues to try to tame her with its borders and formal garden lay-outs. Granted I never started out that way. As a novice gardener I chose the things that looked pretty to me and planted them where ever I thought they would look best. Little did I know about the plants I chose or whether or not they would flourish in the spots I had planted them. The tag said full sun, but in reality it needed partial sun, or part-sun really meant full shade. You  get the picture. Things died. I cried. I tried again.

A foxglove which has
self-seeded.

I got wiser. I borrowed books from the library and spent time learning about the growing conditions of plants. I amended my soil. I watched and timed the number of hours certain locations in the yard received sun light. I started over. I shuffled plants around and lo and behold things took. Things thrived. Things spread. Oh how things spread. Phlox took over. Spiderwort wove a web throughout the garden. Even the white campion sprinkled itself about. This summer I am challenged with trying to bring it all under some semblance of control. I will not say order for I know there will never be order. As a science teacher I know that there is no control in Nature, the name of the game is called ENTROPY.

One challenge about reading Swift's book is the difference in the language of plants. She sprinkles the Latin formal names throughout like everyone should know what she is writing about. Then there are the common names for plants, which is the whole reason scientists went to a formal method of naming species in the first place. I find that I have to keep my phone close by so that I can look up on Google images the plants which she is discussing. Often I am familiar with them and other times I am not. As a more seasoned gardener (I will not call myself a master gardener just yet. I need to get through a few more seasons for that.), I know better than to run out and try to acquire the lovely things she writes about. For one thing, I know that the climate of England and New England are not the same and some plants will simply not flourish here in my garden. I have learned my lesson there; plant what will work. That's why she has her lovely garden open to the public so that people like me can go visit and see those plants which we can not grow at home.

Garden Reading Installment #2

Garden walk in progress

 Reading can be like eating potato chips, you can't eat just one, but if you know better you occasionally will put down the bag and come back to it on another day; so too is Katherine Swift's The Morville Year which I've written about previously. It's a book to go to when you need just a quick fix of gardening wisdom. Today it was her column entitled "Not a Bed of Roses" where she describes what happens when she took a week off from the garden. She returned to plants in need of water, attacking plant blights and pests, and weeds. She quickly through herself back into the work and only came in when her husband called out to her at 11:30 pm.

The pile of  bark mulch waiting to be
spread.

I too took some time off from the garden this weekend. It is the curse of the gardener that you can't be in two places at one time. You are either indoors cleaning or outdoors gardening, you can't do both. The house was in need of some attention so I broke down and gave it some. Tonight after dinner I went out to finally plant the marigolds before they die in the garden center pots. The sprinklers got run as we've had a couple of sunny and warm days. I plucked a few weeds but there are plenty more awaiting my wrath. Then there's the bark mulch that still needs spreading, and the garden walkway which I am building is but a pile of bricks. Swift was my inspiration, like a little garden angel sitting on my shoulder and encouraging me to get out there and get to work. Pretty soon it will be summer vacation and I will be able to work out in the garden every day if I want and have time to get some of the indoor projects done as well.