You know, I don’t think I ever did the interesting things in the States that I get to do here. A chance encounter at the Ansouis market led to an invitation to a book launch party. I wrote before of the book and wine, Extremely Pale Rose. The author, Jamie Ivey, also has a blog and I read about his new book coming out and he was kind enough to invite Maurice and I to a party at his home. We found his home at the end of a road leading through vineyards and olive trees. There was live music, all the rose you could drink and good munchies being passed around.

 Here is Jamie and his beautiful wife, Tanya. Aren’t they cute? She is expecting a baby in October.

 Here is his new book. It is sort of a play on words of the famous French song of the same name but without the accent on the e in Rose. I, of course, bought a copy and will be reading it soon.

 Do you know who this is? That’s right, it’s Peter Mayle! The party was packed with English people. I may have been the only American there and Maurice the only Frenchman. Anyway, Peter Mayle lives near Lourmarin and here he was at the party. After a couple of glasses of rose I approached him and gushed all over him. He was really nice and didn’t seem to mind. One of these days Jamie may also have people doing the same thing. I hope they don’t track him down to where he lives like some fans of Mayle have done. I wasn’t one of them. Honest.

 This has been a bad week. Most of it had to do with the house. Can you believe that you can have a bad time even when living in Provence? Indeed you can.

 We are lucky enough to have a swimming pool and the water is always really clear and clean. However, when we had it built we just had the surface plastered, not tiled. In the States you can, and usually do, plaster the pool with no problems but, as I have said here before, the pool guys did an incredibly poor job of it and the surface was rough and Maurice especially hated it. So he decides to have it tiled. He emptied the pool the night before they came-always a risky thing to do in Provence-but they actually did show up. They did part of the job one week-end and returned the next to finish. Maurice wasn’t happy with the job after the first weekend. In fact, he couldn’t sleep he was worrying about it so much and in the middle of the night got up with a flashlight to go and look at it. He slipped and fell and disrupted some of their work and has some scrapes and bruises to show for his midnight adventure. (I slept through the whole thing). So they finish the job, we fill the pool and four little tiles promptly come off. Maurice can’t stand it and he empties the pool again to repair it himself.

 Meanwhile, there is a cabana that we recently had built that needs painting. It is mostly just large timber supports with a tile roof with those pre fabricated sections in between that you can use to make fences with-just attach them to poles. Anyway, Maurice kept saying it needed painting. He had gone out and done the big wooden parts and they soaked up the paint like a sponge so we had to go buy some special product to paint the wood first with a primer. And, by the way, the paint costs over 60 friggin’ euros a liter! “What is it made of, gold?,” I asked Maurice. No, oil in fact.

(Oh Home Depot, I miss thee! I miss thy broad hallowed aisles, thy cheap paint and brushes, thy hours of being open, thy helpful sales people.)

 So, I get myself out there and start painting the sections that are pre-fabricated. They are made out of really cheap wood and there are all sorts of fiddle-ly parts and it overlaps all over the place and inserts on each end and the darn wood has ridges-you know, like Ruffles Potato Chips-Ruffles have ridges!- only there is about 1000 yards of Ruffles, all flat. I had been out there about an hour when Maurice came out and said, “Oh, you’re painting that?” Excuse me? It turns out that he didn’t think we should paint them, just the other wood so now that I’ve started, I can’t stop. It took me days to just get the primer coat on and the whole time I’m kicking myself for even starting. Maurice is in the pool digging up loose tile and saying, “This is a disaster!” It turns out he is using the same dang guys who did the plastering-what was he thinking? And I am painting Ruffles with, “What was I thinking?” going through my mind. When I am all finished I will post some photos-and when the pool is full too.

I think this is Don Quixote fighting impossible windmills-taken in Paris.

Writing the other day about the scuba diving accident that my exhusband had got me to thinking about some very different women that I met while on the San Juan naval base in Puerto Rico. It is a very insular, almost closed environment and I got a brief insider’s view while waiting there. It made me realize how important our attitudes can be.

 The first lady I met was the wife of the corpsman who was inside the recompresion chamber with my ex. She took me over to her home to spend the night. She was very supportive and when the phone rang early the next morning with the doctor calling she listened in, afraid, I think, that I was going to get some bad news. She was a very nice lady but she seemed full of fear to me, hated San Juan and wasn’t involved much in life there. She stayed home with her son and I think that was her life. Her first husband had died so maybe that added to some of her fear of life.

 I can’t remember why anymore but the second night I had to go elsewhere. This time I ended up in a dorm for visiting naval officers. It was totally empty(except for some really huge cockroaches) until the next night when many men would decend upon the base and very basic and because of said cockroaches I was afraid to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. My roommate this night was another naval wife. She was married to an enlisted man. Her husband, he was her second husband, was in the hospital. She told me that he had been at a party drinking and lost his balance while sitting in an open window on the second story of a building and fell out. She was very religious, told me all about her children from another marriage and seemed happy to me but, the next day, a corpsman that I was talking to told me that they thought her husband didn’t accidentally fall out of the window but that it was a suicide attempt. I actually met her husband the day we were leaving-his injuries weren’t serious-and he seemed very young and nice. I’ve always worried about what happened to them.

 I talked with several women in the navy, either nurses or officers and in the course of our conversations they told me they weren’t happy in the navy and that it was a man’s world. They didn’t expect and didn’t receive what they were told they would in the way of promotions. Most of the young men there, and boy did they seem young, spent every weekend drinking heavily-there was a toga party the night before my ex arrived-and it pretty much seemed like college life to me. I did meet one corpsman who told me that he didn’t go to those parties or drink because he was staying true to his wife. I think he was in the minority.

  Finally, on the last night, I spent the night at the home of a naval officer and his wife. They had a beautiful home full of antiques and collectibles. The wife was especially interesting to me. Her father had dived with Jacques Cousteau and she had a couple of beautiful artifacts that they had found deep in the ocean. She herself was a diver and went several times a week to explore the water there. She went out exploring and was taking a lace making class from a native somewhere in San Juan. She made her life there an adventure and didn’t seem to have fear. There was such a difference between her and the first lady. The whole experience, of course, made a huge impression on me and I really did try after that to live more fully.

 Of course, here I am now in Provence. Do I live that way, without fear and as an explorer of life? Not always. In fact, when we first moved here I was not a happy camper. I would have been happy to stay in Paris. We had a lot of problems with the house and money was tight, I was trying to start my own business in Paris so I kept making trips back to Paris quite often. The inside of our house had to be completely painted and because Maurice seriously hurt his back, I had to do it all. So every time I returned to Provence I had work to do. I did alot of complaining. Finally, about two years or so after we had moved to Provence, we were on our way from the TGV station to our house and for the first time I wasn’t filled with dread or unhappiness and I started really seeing the beauty that we passed and wasn’t regretting being in Provence at all. It took a while and I had to change my attitude but I slowly started blooming. I love it here now.

Salade Nicoise

 Please excuse the quality of this photo. I forgot to take the photo when I had the plate outside on our table and this is just a corner of the part of the dish.

 This provencal salad is very easy to make, really tasty and when you set the plate on the table everyone goes, “Wow!” and they tell you that it looks like art. The hard part is cooking the potatoes and green beans and, if you want, grilling a tuna steak or two.

Salade Nicoise

8 ounces green beans
1 pound potatoes, peeled and cut into cubes (I do this after boiling)
1 small lettuce in bite size pieces
4 ripe plum tomatoes
1 small cucumber, peeled and cut into cubes
1 green or red bell pepper cut into thin slices
4 hard boiled eggs, peeled and quartered
24 black olives, nicoise if you have them
1 can of tuna in water, or grilled tuna steak
garlic croutons
 
Make a vinaigrette-my recipe is 6 Tab. olive oil, 3 Tab. vinegar, 1 teaspoon of mustard to bind it together. I also add some chopped parsely.
Cook the green beans in boiling water until tender, followed by the potatoes. Put some of the vinaigrette on the potatoes when cooled down.
Arrange lettuce on a platter, top with tomatoes, cucumber and pepper putting them in a ring around the platter. then put an inner circle of string beans with the potatoes in the middle. Arrange the eggs, olives and tuna on top and garnish with basil leaves and chopped parsley. You can drizzle the vinaigrette on top but I usually pass a bowl around instead. You can also put anchovies on the salad and smash them up in the salad dressing if you wish but I’m not fond of them. Top with croutons.
 It’s a good dish for company and doesn’t require much time cooking. Very nice when it’s hot outside. I usually serve some cold tomato soup or gazpaccho before.