This is a photo of a great red leaf in a vineyard taken recently here in the autumn. The article below was written almost 2 summers ago. We’ve come a long way since I wrote this.

Chapter 15
Swimming Pool and Landscaping

As might be expected, building a pool in Provence is right up there in the stress and disappointment we experienced in building our house. I’ve met an American lady living in Aix who says she will never, never (she said repeated this twice) have anything built in Provence. She did need some work done in her house and had a man come out to look at what was needed and now she is waiting for the estimate of the work and has no plans to hear from him any time soon. If you have expectations and want something down right away you will end up with a stress ulcer and have periods of time when you think that your head is going to explode. I should add that even Maurice, being French and all, has the same reactions and can’t believe how hard it is to get something done here.

My American friend thinks it is just different in Provence. According to her, people in Provence always put their families first in their lives. This is one reason why shops close for lunch with those long breaks because this is a family time for getting together over a meal. Friends come next and in France this means that these friends are ones you have had since childhood. They might have other acquaintances, different levels of friends, but never one they value more than the ones made first. Down near the bottom of the list is work and this certainly appears true to me. I often see shops closed for lunch around the various villages in Provence, as well as the rest of France, and think that if this were done in the States, everyone would stop shopping there; Americans would take their business elsewhere. Customer service, as we in America think of it, will probably slowly make its way into France mainly because customers will start demanding it and, most probably, because the shops will discover that they make more money this way. I could be wrong but there are more and more shops in Paris doing this. Can it be far behind in the country?

Back to the swimming pool. Maurice picked out a local builder who, in fact, lives three houses down from us. He first talked with us in October and told us they could start sometime in January. January came and went with Maurice calling and leaving messages several times. Finally we were told they would start our pool at the beginning of February. They didn’t start digging until the end of the month. They decided that we needed two support poles under the end of the pool nearest where the land dropped off so two deep holes about ten feet deep were dug. Maurice and both the pool builder and landscaper all thought that the pool needed to be very near the end of the land so it would be in the sun more time. To me this wasn’t an important factor as once summer sets in and the temperatures start soaring, it isn’t that necessary to be in the sun. You aren’t going to get a serious chill sitting in a tepid swimming pool in the shade if it is in the 90’s or more. I put up a little protest but let Maurice put the pool where he wanted.

When they started digging it looked like the pool was going to be way too close to the house, like we could jump into it from our porch with very little effort but that didin’t turn out to be the case. The pool, because the land was so low in realtion to our house, was built as a cement square sitting above the ground at first. To get to it for a look we had to climb down from the porch or consider putting a plank across from our porch to the pool but never did. Eventually the landscaper came and filled in two porches with dirt right by our house which helped to get around out back.

Progress on the pool was in fits and starts. Sometimes there were workers everyday doing something but we went most of April with not much of anything being done. We had been told, and had started hoping, that the pool would be finished by early May. This didn’t happen. We were planning a trip to the States at the end of May and Maurice didn’t want to leave without the pool being finished. He had learned to be around as much as possible when work was being done or something was done wrong. One day our neighbor across the street came roaring over as we came home from a trip to the grocery store because a huge truck bringing equipment had torn off a branch of one of their trees trying to turn off the very narrow road into the even narrower entry way to our house. Their house was the first one built on our street and the wall surrounding their land was built much too close to the road-we were required to have about 6 feet between a fence and the road-and some of the braches of their trees and bushes hung out into the road. I didn’t understand what the big deal was. It was an oak tree that grows all over the place and I’m sure they didn’t plant it, and they couldn’t even see the damaged part of the tree from their house or land, they had to walk out onto the road to see it. I think they were mad that the truck driver didn’t come tell them and just threw the branch over the wall into their yard. They thought Maurice should have been there to supervise. I don’t know how this could have been done when we never knew when anyone was going to show up and I doubt that Maurice would have been out on the road to watch the truck in any case. Half the time we didn’t know anyone was at our house until we looked out a window and saw a truck pulling up near the pool. I learned not to open the shutters to the bedroom until I was fully dressed as I sometimes was surprised when a workman or two strolled past on their way to work.

Our landscaper couldn’t do much of her work until they put the soil around the pool. Maurice had the name of the man who was supposed to do this and called him one day to see when he was coming as the swimming pool supervisor had told him the dirt mover man was due on a certain date. The digger knew nothing about it. The supervisor of the pool was doing the same thing the supervisor of our house did, telling us what we wanted to hear while, at the same time, collecting money. Maurice was able to get the digging guy to come out-he had his own earth moving machine-and finally fill in the area around the pool. It made such a difference and gave us an idea of what the yard would finally look like when we, some day in the distant future, got it finished.

Maurice would often jump the space between our porch and other walls before they were filled in with dirt as he tried to get a little work around the yard done. One day the front door opened and I heard him calling for me. When I arrived at the front door he was bending over holding his forehead from which blood was dripping to the ground. He had slipped on our “non-slip” porch and his head came down on the corner of a wall. There was a gash in his forehead and nose, large abrasions on his arm, a deep scratch on his glasses lens, a tear in his jeans and his thumb hurt. He was lucky he didn’t break something or end up with a concusion. For the next week he sported a spectacular black eye.

The landscaper put some nice gravel on one of the porches and planted lavender and rosemary on the hill below the pool. She said it was really a little too late to plant them as it would be a little too warm so we had to water them every day or so. I wasn’t in Provence at the time and Maurice bought the flat green hoses that spray out thin misty little jets of water. I had hoped for the hoses I used to use, soaking hoses, as I think they do a better job while saving water. I think Maurice didn’t want to bother with burying them or pay the higher price so we were commited to this type of watering system. I feel like it is worth the time and price, not to mention the labor, to get soaking hoses installed at the beginning. You can’t see them and I like the idea of saving water. Well, maybe some time down the road this will happen. The hill where the new plants are is huge and it will be an enormous job. Maybe they won’t need much water once they are established. Right now we have two bright yellow hoses that run across the yard to attach to the watering hoses-not very attractive. I found out later that once the plants were established, we didn’t need to water them. This worried me, not being used to this mentality, but the plants all survived although I think they would have grown more and produced more flowers had they been watered but with water being so expensive here, I’m just happy that they all survived the summer.

We have huge expanses of land behind the pool that will require landscaping and I would like to, at one point, build a little pool house/covered area or cabana to put chairs under. This will be a year or two down the road when we aren’t putting out masses of money for other things needed for the house and yard.

The pool after it was built, before the dirt was put it around it and the drop from our porch.

The pool after the dirt was put around it. The pool filled with water in the front of the photo is our neighbor’s pool up above our house.

We are back in Provence for two weeks. Here is the view from the back of our house our first morning with mist floating in the “Valley of Water”.

I think these are persimmons. Don’t they look like jewels against the blue sky?

Chapter 13
Country Living

Living in the country takes a lot of getting used to for someone who has always lived in a city. I guess the small town that I grew up in, in the early years of my life, would be fairly country in feel, a little town called Silver City, New Mexico. I have a few memories of it, the small yard in front of our house, the downtown with a single street and no stop light, and a phone number consisting of three digits. But, being young, it all seemed huge to me and I still remember the surprise of the height of the counter in the principal’s office when I went to see the school again years later.
No, I am used to city living. I love Paris and the ease of getting around by metro or bus, how walkable the whole city is, filled with small local parks or the larger Luxembourg or Tuleries gardens, the walks along the Seine, puttering around the Louvre, all of this is what makes this city great to me. A movie is just a short metro ride away, a book store the same. There are so many restaurants to choose from that we never will get to try them all. Huge department stores are available and tiny boutiques abound, shopping heaven in other words.
With the nearest city 45 minutes away here in Provence things get more difficult for me. Going to a movie is a major production requiring a lot of planning. I save up a list of things to do so we don’t waste the trip. Meticulous grocery shopping lists must be made or you end up cooking something very simple when a necessary ingredient was forgotten on the trip to the grocery store. There are small grocery stores closer to us, but most have just the basics and the fruits and vegetables are not usual at their peak, lettuce being soft and tired, tomatoes dull and bruised looking. There are great and fun local markets just about every day of the week but, again, it requires loading up in the car and arriving before noon or so or everyone is packing up for the day, especially in the summer when temperatures start to climb. None of the better markets are near us but there are a few nearby villages with one man selling cheese, olives and nuts and a lady selling vegetables and fruit. Not of lot of choice, but good for last minute buys. And, of course, nothing is open for two hours at lunch time. They call that quality of life-getting to have lunch with family. I don’t always agree, being an impatient American forced to wait for the two hours to pass before I can buy anything-what about my quality of life? Some shops are the same in Paris, but most of them are starting to stay open, especially the larger stores.
I have never had to worry about garbage where I have lived before. Here we have to haul everything up to a garbage collection center. As the garbage bag in the kitchen gets full, I take it out of the container, tie the bag and put it out in the garage. We are trying to keep cans, bottles and platic containers separate, like good citizens, for recycling. So far we have just been putting them in plastic bags but I am thinking we need to invest in some special containers out in the garage. Sometimes we just carry the garbage up the hill, not too great a distance, to the collection center, but we often have so much we have to use the car. It is quite a chore and I miss the convenience of wheeling out my garbage can to the curb.
For some reason, the electricity goes out quite frequently in this region. Sometimes it is because of violent thunder storms but sometimes it is a bright, blue, sunny day with nothing much going on weather wise and off it goes. We always go to see if our neighbors are without electricity as well and they always are. There is a lot of building going on all over Provence so maybe some line gets cut miles away from us. I’ve never found out.
We are lucky enough to be able to use our computer here in Provence. We had some sort of digitalized connection that speeded up the phone line use in some way but it isn’t that wonderful high speed internet connection. We we first moved here, Maurice called the phone company and found that they didn’t expect for us to have DSL connection until 2007 but when he heard that nearby Grambois had it, he called and tried to get it connected. They told us that they would make the connections, give us a modem but they still didn’t know if we would be able to get the connection. This seems very amateurish to me and makes me realize just how different country living can be although we did have some problems in Paris as well, come to think of it.
One thing we get here that we didn’t in the city is quiet. It is so very quiet and in the morning birds are easily heard. When one of the mistrals blows down the mountain, moving through the trees, it can sound like a pounding wave of the ocean thundering to shore. From the back of our house we can see some low mountains in the distance. At night there is an occasional set of car lights as they come through a little pass. We drove one day to find where this was and it was a drive of about 5 or so miles. A little closer in is the road we take when driving to the house. Occasionally, I will have a window in the house open and off in the distance I can hear the sound of a car or truck motor. A few minutes later I spot the vehicle on a road far below us. Five minutes or so, the car actually passes the road by our house. When waiting for someone at the house, I can usually spot them heading our way by hearing their motor well before they arrive here.
Of course there is the pleasure of seeing the night skies without light polution from cities. Every star stand out brightly and the moon is wonderful to watch as it moves across the sky. Early in the spring, when I lean out our doors to close the shutters, I see Mars and Venus low in the sky, even Saturn and Jupiter for a while, still amazing me that planets in our solar system are visible to me as I go about getting the house ready for the night
As the heat increases in the summer it can be a little hot on our porch where we like to have meals. There is usually enough of a breeze that eating outside is fairly comfortable at lunch time and the porch is in the shade until 3 or 4 PM. If there is a mistral blowing I don’t bother setting up our table outside as napkins get blown away and glasses get blown over. As it gets later, towards dinner time, the sun is at a slant and the light, and heat, pour onto the porch. Around 8 PM as I start getting dinner together I’m thinking we will have to eat our meal indoors but at 8:10 every evening the sun dips behind a nearby hill and the porch is in shade and it’s perfect for eating there. The evenings really cool off in Provence and it is wonderful to sit outside, have a drink and watch the fading light followed by one star and then another.

Flowers in market in Aix.

This Chapter was written about a year ago. Problems still loom.

Chapter 12

Brown Water and Backs

Maurice continued to have very bad back pain for months. It was so bad and he had so much trouble sleeping that the doctor put him on a prescription of morphine tablets. Now Maurice doesn’t react to medication the way that most people do. Sleeping pills that will knock me out for ten hours don’t phase him. Antibiotics seem to be the only medication that work on him as they should. The morphine turned out to be one medication that affected Maurice. The first night he took a tablet he slept like a baby for eight hours, something that hadn’t happened in several weeks. Of course, morphine isn’t something that you can take indefinitely and the time came when he had to stop. By this time he had been having some physical therapy and, what seemed to help the most, an injection of local anesthetic and cortisone in his spine at the point of injury. We had also been to a spinal neurosurgeon who told Maurice that his back would slowly return to normal if he kept up the physical therapy and didn’t overdo it with physical activity. Surgery, thank God, wasn’t going to be necessary.
The problem was getting off the effect of the morphine. Maurice tapered down taking less each day and then went through months of disturbed sleep. The morphine seemed to have affected his system and he couldn’t get to sleep without it. Most nights he could sleep an hour or two, if he was lucky, but then spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, finally falling asleep around 8 AM and sleeping until 10 or so. Some nights he would get up and watch TV for several hours. I had nights where I would go and sleep upstairs in the guest bedroom because his thrashing about in bed gave me sleepless nights as well. We had several very bad months for a while there. Eventually Maurice returned to his usual sleeping paterns. Some of his sleepless nights, of course, was due to the stress and worry of the plumbing.
Our shower finally ended up being pulled up three times before, and we still aren’t sure about this, the problem seemed to be taken care of. Luckily, the expensive shower covering survived being removed so many times and all of the tile that had been damaged was replaced. We could now use either toilet or bathtub. Maurice is puzzled why I remain negative about the plumbing, very suspicious anytime the toilet doesn’t flush with vigor. It may be years before I don’t think twice before flushing one of them.
One day I filled the tub with water and used some new bubble bath. I got into the water and then noticed that the water seemed reddish brown. For a minute I thought that perhaps the color was due to the bubble bath. It was lavender in color and I thought perhaps the formula dissapated into a brownish color when it dissolved. Just then Maurice came in and said the water in the toilet was brown. I had an awful feeling that the color could be due to some plumbing problem and wondered what I was sitting in. When I let out the water, a red-brown ring remained in the tub. It looked and felt like dirt. This was when I resolved to start drinking bottled water while in Provence. I could almost hear my poor kidneys making grinding noises trying to work all of the grit through the delicate little tubes as they did their cleansing thing. It turned out that it was due to the water and old pipes in the area, not our plumbing.

A sign on the side of a building in St Remy. You can tell we are in wine country.

These types of ruins are very common in France. This was at the top of a little village near St Remy.

Chapter 11

We’ve Got Bigger Problems

Well, the beast under the house died. The plumbing problem has turned out to be a disaster. The plumber came out twice with a roto-rooter and the problem remained. Next he pulled out the bathtub which involve removing tile around it, breaking most of it. Then he pulled out the shower and discovered a huge hole in the pipe under the floor. Apparantly this was the source of our problem. He thought that perhaps someone doing the maisonry dropped something heavy and broke it. Whether they knew it at the time or not doesn’t really matter. The plumber fixed the pipe and, since it was a Saturday, quickly took off without test anything.
Maurice turned the water on in the sinks and went out to watch the flow from some port outside that let him look and he watched huge amounts of debris flowed by. (On the street, by our house, a lid can be pulled up and the flow of water in seen in a little open channel as it goes down hill to the water purification area.) Finally, the pipe couldn’t handle it and it clogged up somewhere up the line and the flow went down to a trickle. We were told the toilet upstairs was connected to another pipe and that it was going to work.
Well, things went from bad to worse. The toilet upstairs slowly started slowing down and finally, when I took a bath upstairs and let the water out of the tub, something seemed to break under the house and water poured under the floor. We think another pipe broke, maybe due to the backup in the former pipe. We think we now have two problems, the first broken pipe and a new broken pipe.
To say we were depressed is an understatement. Here we had a beautiful house and, really, we could’t live in it. There is a fabulous view and the skies are blue with incredible light pouring on the trees. There is a gite in the village up above us and we thought there was a possibility that we would be reduced to going up there to use their shower and toilet. We decided we had had enough and made reservations on the TGV to go back to Paris on Christmas Day. We did’t plan to come back until the problem was solved. I felt like Scrooge and had visions of boiling Stephane in olive oil and burying him with a sprig of lavender in his heart. Merry Friggin Christmas. Bah, Humbug.
Plumbing problems continued to abound into February. A plumber came out and finally got the pipes unplugged. The shower was reinstalled along with the bathtub and it’s tile covering. Everytime I emptied the bathtub or flushed the toilet I said a prayer. And, to add to my sense of doom, there was an unexplained odor in the bathroom smelling like wet cement. Maurice went under the house to see if it was wet but found only dry dirt. Fianlly, the toilet started doing its ineffective swirling thing again and I was unable to use the upstairs bathtub in the bathroom without the odor. There was some sort of new blockage involving the upstairs bathroom and the downstairs toilet.
We called our trusty building supervisor again telling him our problem only to be told that at least we had a working toilet and could take a shower. He had bigger problems to deal with elsewhere. We called our insurance company and reported the problem and started getting our own people out to start finding the problem.
In thinking about all that has happened we have decided that the plumbing problem started when they dug the foundation and discovered more rocks than they expected. We feel that they didn’t dig the foundation hole deep enough and as a result the pipes weren’t installed properly.

A week or so ago, I drug my husband out of bed at 6 AM so I could get photos of the Senaque Abbey in good sunlight before the lavender was all gone. It is one of the most famous places in Provence as fields of lavender run up to the old abbey providing wonderful photos. So we get there and darn if the abbey isn’t in a valley with a big hill blocking the sun. I took photos anyway and we hung around for 45 minutes and still the sun wasn’t on the abbey or the lavender. It was very peaceful and still there and we were the only ones around and got to hear the bell in the tower chime for an early morning mass. I had to photoshop the heck out of the photo to get any color. I will try again next year for a photo and not bother getting up early.

Water
Chapter 10

November is a rainy month in Provence. It rained so much last year in November that the laying of our foundation was delayed for months and, once again this year, November was proving to be wet. Every morning we woke up to gray skies and pouring rain. I understand this is one of the reasons vineyards do so well here with the combination of heavy autumn rains and hot dry summers with the sun baking the roots under the rocky soil, leading to juciy grapes and the famous wine. There was a lot of flooding in the south of France with Montpellier getting more rain in two days than it usually did in two months. Marseille had massive flooding as well with loss of lives.
At least, being situtated on a hill, we didn’t have to worry about water flowing into the house as I had seen on TV. We were elevated enough that most water should just flow under us and around us. We had several worries, however. Our neighbor above us had just installed one of those prefabricated swimming pools and with all of the rain I could picture it sliding down into our yard if the soil and large rocks didn’t hold it. Maybe we wouldn’t have to build our own swimming pool after all-we could just use theirs and landscape around it. But, in the end, it held.
We badly need rain gutters which aren’t allowed in our area. I suppose they ruin that “Luberon look”. When we opened or closed the shutters every morning and evening the water fell from the roof to our heads. Also, water made its way into our garage, even with a newly built water drainage system around our house. A small lake formed in front of our house, but at least we could now get into our garage so we didn’t have to trudge through the mud to enter the front door. We had a river of water running down one side of our house going where the swimming pool would eventually be. I could foresee a lot of work needing to be done to redirect the water flow and I was sure it wouldn’t be cheap.
I started noticing that the toilet wasn’t flushing well. Finally, one morning, it didn’t flush at all, but dumped water on the floor. The plumber came out later in the day, removed the toilet, tinkered around and then said he would have to come back the next day with a roto-rooter type device. It had been pouring all day and he had tracked large amounts of mud and rocks into the house. He had also gone into our bathroom and done some work under the sink. The place was a mess. We did a minimal clean up and had to brush our teeth in the kitchen sink. Luckily, the toilet upstairs seemed to be working fine. Maurice was really upset that this was happening but I told him that, in my experience anyway, there were often some sort of debris in the plumbing pipes dropped there during work on the house. I’d had to have plumbers out to a new house in the States as well. Luckily, we weren’t able to see into our plumbing future at this time or we would have been plunged into a dark depression.
The plumber returned the next day and did his thing with the rotto-rooter, making a huge mess once again. I hadn’t done the acid wash needed on the bathroom floor tiles yet as I had just finished painting the bathroom and was really glad as I think I would have had to have done it all over again. I still needed to one more coat of paint in the water closet and was glad that hadn’t been done either when I saw his black handprints on the wall. He was really a slob. He told my husband that we should have elevated our house more-that that was one of the problems with the toilet. I guess he meant that we needed more gravity for it all to work well. The toilet seems to work alright after he left, but I had a feeling the problem wasn’t really taken care of. He told us that if what he did didn’t work, he would have to pull up some of the tile, maybe the shower and tub, and dig some holes to get to the pipes. Now that’s depressing.
The next morning, after the plumber’s visit, I could see the toilet having the same problem it did before any work was done. At night I can hear a double glurging sound, glurg-glurg, and I imagine some sort of underground, snake-like animal slowly dying, emiting it’s death rales. We called the plumber, as well as the house supervisor, to try and get someone out to solve the problem but were told he was fully booked for the entire week. I wondered if they knew what is going to be involved, knew that it would be expensive and don’t want to bother. I imagined that we would have to get a plumber on our own to take care of the problem.
If I could only flush the toilet without praying it was going to work, I would be one happy woman.

I don’t have these steps in my yard, but I wish I did. These were in a Provence village named Joucas.

I am now back in Provence enjoying the warmth and blue skies.

Building A House In Provence
Part 9
The Dining Room Table

We had a really nice kitchen, but no table to eat at. Even when our furniture arrived from Texas we would’t have a table as I sold it before we moved. We don’t live near a big city, or even a large town. The nearest village has 300 people and not one shop. Aix is around 45 minutes away if the traffic is flowing, which it seldom seems to do. I kept hoping we would find a table at some sort of used furniture store somewhere in Provence but we had no luck.
We made a trek down to a huge industrial area right outside of Aix. Almost every store selling anything for homes or home repair can be found there. The traffic can be a nightmare and even the famous round abouts don’t handle the flow well. I always dread going here but we often end up at some store in the complex, such as a huge Castorama, that will usually have what we need being similar to the Home Depot in the States for home improvement projects. We had to have a dining room table as we were really tired of eating off of our coffee table, so gathered up our courage and set off on our search. We found a parking place with difficulty-this place is always packed- and walked around the area going in many stores. We found one table we liked but the price was more that we wanted to pay and the store manager wouldn’t deal with us no matter how we tried. In fact, the table had been several hundred dollars cheaper when Maurice had seen it about 6 weeks earlier. So we left without our table.
We needed book shelves really badly as well and while looking at many in several stores, I couldn’t get Maurice to pick some and buy them. He wanted to see as many as he could, think about it, and then come back and buy his selection. I am not this type of shopper. I want to get in, buy what I need, and get out. I don’t want to return if at all possible. Maurice does the same thing with paint. Instead of buying all that we need at once, he only gets one or two containers at a time. He did the same thing with the shelves and poles we needed for the closets. We need to fix four closets but had only done two because of this, I call it strange, habit. We have to spend the money anyway so why not just bite the bullet and do it? It one of those things in marriage where you look deep into the eyes of your loved one and swear you see another life form there.
When we got home, three hours later, without a table, paint, or bookshelves, Maurice decided to look at the possibility of buying a dining room table on the Internet. This is what we ended up doing. It is a little scary just looking at a photo and picking it out, but it costs a lot less than the store where we were, there is free delivery and they will even put it together for us as a promotional gimick. I’ve never bought a dining room table before that wasn’t assembled which gives me pause. It didn’t arrive for several weeks but, in the meantime, our furniture from Texas arrived, and we had an “elegant” folding card table to eat at. I was really curious to see what would arrive.
Several weeks later two men delievered our table. It wasn’t bad for something picked out via a photo on a computer screen. It has a sort of “farm table” look, can seat eight people, and 6 more or so with extensions. We only bought four chairs to begin with and will have to order some more somewhere down the road. What a pleasure to have a table and matching chairs when eating a meal. It seems like decadent luxury after holding our plates in our laps while sitting on ratty plastic chairs.