The house we’ve rented in Normandy is three narrow floors, connected by a steep spiral of a staircase like a tightly wound spine. In our room, on the top floor, the ceiling is made of planks pressed together and painted white. Everything’s painted white, in fact, except for the rough gray hulk of the fireplace that takes up most of the living room.
“It works,” the caretaker assured us. “It’s nice for if it gets cold at night.”
It gets cold at night.
Actually, it’s cold for most of the day, too, although when the sun pops out from between the racing puffs of clouds it feels almost like a pleasant climate. Then the sun hides and the wind starts–35km/hour yesterday, whatever that means–and we’re sitting there shivering into our moules and cidre.
We are, of course, in apple country out here. I saw all of the signs for cider when we drove through last year, and got all excited about trying the local cider, because I don’t think of “cider” as an especially French thing, and it’s always nice to have little bits of the familiar sewn through, you know?
That’s right: after two-plus years of living here, I still thought that the French would get so worked up over a non-alcoholic beverage.
As it turns out, the Normans have two uses for apples: Calvados (a slightly bitter apple brandy) and “cidre“, which is, naturally, a sparkling and alcoholic version of cider that has nothing whatsoever to do with that stuff you get at orchards and serve hot and spiced in the fall.
In fairness to them, it is pretty cold here most of the time.
We picked a restaurant on the harbor last night (in spite of the caretaker’s warning that it was “just for tourists”–”We are,” Deb pointed out later). We scoffed at the scattering of fleece blankets over some of the chairs–but only for a few minutes–before one found its way into Deb’s lap and another one wrapped around my shoulders, tighter and tighter as the sun slipped lower.
The square where our house is is dominated by a large stone church, and every fifteen minutes it reminds us that it’s there. Jolie resents this imposition immensely, but the truth is that she’s not doing so well with anything here: ever since we put her in the car she’s been doing a not-so-slow slide into total hysteria. She made noises that I didn’t think a dog could even make for the entire two-plus-hour trip (longer than it should have been because we had to stop to try to “reboot” her, with only the most limited of success), and hasn’t slept for more than a few very shallow minutes at a time since then. She kept us up all night snarling at every creak of the house or passing car, and it was only toward morning, when I put her into the tiny old crate that she flew in to our wedding, that she let me sleep at all.
We know that sooner or later she’ll have to crash. She can’t just…keep being stressed 24/7, can she? She’s been on more walks in the last 48 hours than in probably any other two days of her life, and she still hasn’t slept; but we keep saying “She can’t keep this up for long” and she keeps proving us completely wrong. Deb got her some anti-allergy syrup that’s supposed to cause drowsiness and decreased alertness, but it’s unclear right now whether the pharmacist knew what we had in mind. Maybe a half-dose…maybe she just needs some sleep…maybe vacations don’t work on dogs.
In the meantime, she’ll be sitting under our table and snarling at passers-by while we sip our cider and watch the clouds, and it can’t be long before we’re all on the same page.