mars 9: Arrival in Guilberville, scene setting

I arrived at the St Lo train station, and it was pretty easy to find Laurent, the next farmer. He was there to meet me with younger daughter Claire, 12. We drove the 30 minutes back to their house mostly on a five-year-old Autoroute (the biggest kind of French highway) that you could hear from the farm. Though the farm is technically in Guilberville, it’s not near the town center that I never actually visited.



I was shown my cozy room on the first floor, and then I hung out a bit with Chantal, Laurent’s wife while she cooked up the week’s potage, or pureed vegetable soup. Cooking was briefly interrupted by a leak from the shower on the second floor, but it stopped quickly. All five of us (older daughter Helene is 14) sat down to dinner that Sunday and every night at the table in the kitchen where there is also a wood-burning fireplace that heats. Dinner was eaten out of one bowl or off one plate for each in spite of the different courses. Soup was cleaned out of the bowl with bread before the main dish, which was again cleaned off with bread before cheese. Cheese was a selection of yogurt, fromage frais (like thicker yogurt), an Emmenthal-type, Pont-Leveque and Camembert, the last two of which are typical Normandy cheeses. Dairy is what Normandy is known for, and Chantal and Laurent grew up here with a taste for it. In spite of this being a vegetable farm, we ate surprisingly few vegetables – mostly just in that soup or in periodic salads. Too bad since they looked yummy!



Breakfast every day was also eaten out of one bowl, a sequence for me of OJ, then yogurt with muesli, and then coffee with which I had at least one slice of bread with honey or jam or peanut butter or their all-natural Nutella-type spread. And after every meal, the table was cleared and then wiped down to get rid of crumbs on the plastic tablecloth.



Laurent and I lunched together most days since Chantal was at work and the girls at school.

Meal times with the family were scenes of more in-depth conversations than I imagine most families have at the table. Topics ranged from the reasons why people think they need religion to Helene’s genetics homework to the current violence in Tibet/Nepal.

The room we ate in was next to a hallway holding the bathroom and toilet, and then the farthest room was an unheated mudroom/laundry/refrigerator/dishwasher/cool storage room. There was also a sitting room with a tv on the first floor that was rarely turned on, mostly to watch the weather reports.



And what weather did we have! The first night I was there, Laurent noted that a “tempete” had been forecasted, and it was indeed a tempest the next morning with very strong winds and driving rain. This happened a few other times while I was there, and the trade-off seemed to be clear skies and cold, or rain and warmth. Of course, there were also the cold rainy days which contributed greatly to my slight cold.

Over my two weeks chez Laurent, I learned a lot about French politics and government, organic regulations and farming here, and soaked up their general outlook on leading a life expressly not geared towards consuming. Their basic philosophy was quite in tune with mine, and it was a great family experience.

I also enjoyed some great walks and runs in the area around their house which is near a new installation of wind turbines. The house was also located close to the crest of a large hill which afforded incredible views of the next valley and of the sunset.