letter from the hibernaculum

I left New York for France when I did--though it meant quitting a job I loved at a time when the phrase “in this economic climate” was cropping up rashlike as the catch-all reason for people to postpone the pursuit of fun or self-fulfillment--because I liked my Brooklyn apartment too much. I’d moved there after several years near Washington Square in an apartment I called the Manger, for eating and sleeping, the two uses to which mangers have been most notoriously put through the ages, are all I ever did in the place. As I told myself when I moved in, who needs a living room when you live in the West Village? But somehow when I turned 30 it began to bother me that my bed touched three of the walls of my bedroom, and my youngest sister had recently moved into the Manger’s second bedroom, fresh from the generous 19th-century interiors of rural Utah, and couldn’t reconcile herself to paying so much for such small berth. So we moved to Brooklyn, and for the same price we’d been paying before the last rent-hike at the Manger, we took the parlor floor of a Crown Heights brownstone whose Victorian charms were undefaced by the landlord’s pragmatic and minimal renovations. The place was a run-down palace of ornate woodwork, parquet floors, sliding french doors, ornamental fireplaces and chandeliers on 14’ ceilings. My sister’s room, which had been the front parlor, we called the Bowling Alley. Who needs coffee shops, bars or restaurants that serve something besides fried chicken and pizza, if you live in the Bowling Alley? My room had been the library, and though it was smaller than my sister’s, it was still almost as big as the entire footprint of the Manger.

(above photo: Joe Gerhard)

For a while I kept to my old habits of spending most of my waking hours out and about in Manhattan, where when I wasn’t working I was wandering the streets and playing sessions in bars. But gradually a new desire began to take root in me to stay at home on my days off, which were few enough and far between. I began to arrange for more days off, and found myself content, even keen, not to leave my apartment all day, which would have been unthinkable in the Manger, unless I were very, very ill. The stronger my attachment grew to staying home all day in the apartment, reading, writing and practicing my concertina, the more ridiculous it seemed to be living there; for however much one loves one’s apartment, one pays to live in New York for what lies beyond the apartment, and if one wants to be a shut-in one had better find a much cheaper place in which to shut oneself. Fortunately, I had such a place as my escape-hatch all along: around the time I moved to New York I’d been given the standing offer of housesitting in Chasteuil, an offer I put on the back burner to make the most of all New York had to offer for as long as I had the stomach for it.

* * *

And so here I am, deep into my second winter in Chasteuil. In fairness, I spent most of last winter away from here, traveling in Eastern Europe and Ireland, and I spent spring and summer running around France with a non-stop stream of visitors (whose willingness to travel so far to see me made me feel more than ever the appropriateness of the monicker I gave this blog) and traveling to sessions and festivals with my newfound Frenchy partners in musical crime. By the end of summer, when I went to Ireland for almost a month and then headed off for a river-guiding gig in the Grand Canyon, I had to congratulate myself on having managed to replicate the invigoratingly hectic and scattered nature of my life in New York--only I was getting more sleep and sunshine and eating better cheese. So when I returned to Chasteuil from the rafting trip, which I bookended with two weeks in Utah, and followed with roughly a month combined in New York and London, I was very much ready to hole up, to retrench, to just be here.

(above photo: Nancy Herfield)

You might be wondering, in passing, about the legality of my continued sojourn in France. Indulge me then, while I summarize my first foray into the byzantine byways of French bureaucracy on the regional level. I spent last year here on a visitor (non-working) visa I obtained from the French Embassy in New York, an intimidating experience I wasn’t eager to repeat, though I wasn’t one of the several over-dressed women openly weeping in and around the Embassy on the day that I went there. I had to submit proof I had the means to support myself for a year and proof that I had a place to live, and I had to buy a health insurance policy (this policy, which includes comforting provisions for the repatriation of remains, is meant for Americans living abroad and is cheaper than any comparably inclusive policy I could buy if I were still an uninsured American not living abroad...) When I started looking into the possibility of renewing my titre de séjour, which is roughly equivalent to a visa, I was directed to apply right here in Castellane at the Mairie (town hall), where my papers would be forwarded to the Préfecture in Digne-les-Bains. I filed all my papers at the Mairie before leaving for the States in early September, and on my return in November I was greeted by a letter from the Préfecture informing me that the OFII, the immigration office in Marseille with which I had registered right after moving here last year, had no dossier on me, and that therefore the Préfecture couldn’t process my request. It was suggested in this letter that the OFII had sent me two different convocations, or summonses, for an obligatory medical exam, which convocations I had ignored--which was news to me--and I surmise that my dossier, which surely existed at one point, was more or less chucked as a result. I was invited to call the OFII at my earliest convenience to request another convocation for a medical exam, without which I could in no way be considered for a new titre de séjour. All of this was conveyed mostly in the passive voice, well larded with subjunctive and gerundive conjugations, and summed up thus:

Je vous précise que, faute d’effectuer cette visite médicale ayant un caractére obligatoire, votre titre de séjour ne pourra être renouvelé. Dépourvue de carte de séjour valide, vous vous trouveriez alors en situation irrégulière et pourriez faire l’objet d’une mesure de reconduite à la frontière. Je vous prie d’agréer, Madame, l’expression de ma considération distinguée...

The key words here, if you’re struggling, as I was, with the arch officialese, are situation irrégulière and reconduite à la frontière. Yup. I immediately called the OFII, of course, where I was asked my name and date of birth, put on hold, presently informed that there was no dossier on me, and disconnected. This happened three times in exactly the same way. It became apparent, after I finally gave up and sicked Pascal on them, that I was caught in an exquisite loop of bureaucratic non-communication between the two offices, one in Digne and the other in Marseille: the OFII denied my existence and wouldn’t give me a convocation without a dossier, and the folks at the Préfecture had all my paperwork and actually seemed sympathetic to the idea of renewing my titre de séjour, but couldn’t do so without the results of the medical exam. An official in Digne suggested a solution that would reinstate my existence for the OFII, and a month later, after the exchange of much additional paperwork between myself and the two offices in question, all of which passed through the hands of the very helpful women in the Castellane Mairie, I received a convocation telling me the day and time I was to present myself at the medical center in Digne. The medical examination, after all that pettifoggery, entailed nothing more than pulmonary x-rays for tuberculosis and a doctor asking if I had any diseases that I knew of. I answered in the negative, and with a cheerful flourish he signed the final form, which was, like all the others before it, somewhat of a thing to be admired, you’d have to admit, if the sight of a lovely official document all properly filled out and signed and neatly trimmed with stamp-ink thrills your heart. There are many stereotypes about the French that I have found to be without foundation in fact, but they do love their forms and their rubber stamps. I’m currently in possession of a temporary but valid titre de séjour, and when the replacement document arrives at the Mairie in Castellane I will be subject to a rather hefty tax payable not in cash but, just for kicks, in special timbres (stamps) that I have to buy at the Trésor Public...

* * *

The snows of Christmas are gone, but it’s cold enough most mornings in Chasteuil for a filigree of frost on the windows and a hard faux-dusting on the kitchen gardens below the village. The stone houses in this part of the world are wondrous for hoarding the cool in summertime. Walk down a narrow street in Castellane on a buzzing hot midsummer’s day, and from of the dark, open doorways of the ancient apartment-buildings you’ll feel silent drafts of air lolling out onto your ankles, cooler than from the maw of any air-conditioner. And up in Chasteuil it wasn’t until July of last summer that the inside of my house warmed up enough that I didn’t need a sweater to sit in my kitchen in the middle of the day. By the same token, there’s no heating this house in winter, at least not without an electricity bill that would make me think I was back in New York again. And when we get a stretch of clear skies in midwinter, it’s definitely warmer outside than in.

I heat the house with wood, and I only heat the kitchen. I can see my breath in my bedroom, even in the middle of the day, and I sleep with a hat, scarf and every blanket in the house, but I’m perfectly cozy that way. As Melville said,

...truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable anymore. But if... the tip of your nose... be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. (Moby-Dick, Chapter 11)

Melville’s narrator was referring to the shared bodily warmth of himself and his bosom friend the cannibal Queequeg, and I have only my two hot-water bottles for company, but I often remark on how cold the tip of my nose is when I’m in bed, and how little it bothers the rest of me; and sometimes when I neglect to make the bed until the afternoon (don’t hold it against me that I make my bed these days, Mr. Gerhard, now that I have time for it) I’m astonished, when I put my hand in to pull the hot-water bottles out, at how it feels as though someone was lying there all along and just got up, leaving their warmth in the sheets. These are the sorts of warmth-seeking, anthropomorphizing tricks the mind plays when someone who’s never been able to afford to live alone spends weeks on end by herself in a big stone house in the mountains, I suppose. I experience a similar fond flush when I walk into my kitchen, which I keep shut up to hold the hard-won heat. The room feels alive, and the seat of this companionability is my Godin stove, enameled in darkest green and standing sturdy at the height of a dwarf.

Using such a stove in winter is a lot like sharing one’s house with a large, extraordinarily well-behaved dog--the long walks to gather kindling, the cleaning out of the ash-box and sweeping up of the ashes that fall on the floor in front of the grate, the occasional feeding throughout the day and rattling of the poker to encourage the coals. I can always hear it ticking and snapping and respiring, as I sit at the table with my back to it, with the susurrous breathing of a sleeping beast or sometimes with a windy soughing like the singing of a faraway choir. When I came down with a fever on New Year’s Eve and couldn’t face the above-mentioned puritanical cold-nose business, I made myself a bed on the kitchen floor out of old couch cushions and my sleeping bag, right next to the baskets of kindling and the stove, and I felt exactly the anticipation I used to feel before a slumber party when I was a kid, to be sleeping in the same room as my fire.

If the stove is damped all the way down, a good oak log well-banked in ashes will burn all night, slowly as coal, and the first thing I do when I come downstairs in the morning is open the bottom door of the stove to wake up the fire. Then to brisk gresilling of the night’s embers going to work on a fresh log, I sit down, facing the stove with the coffee-mill between my knees, and grind my coffee. I’ve made a little couch in the kitchen out of the cushions I brought downstairs on New Year’s Eve,

and during rainy weeks I dry my laundry in the kitchen as well.

A month of bad weather after the holidays meant a month of little to no internet connection in Chasteuil, and I became accustomed to not even wondering what was going on out there in the web-wide world.

Nancy and Pascal left on their annual winter trip to California, and with them gone I only occasionally cross paths with my other neighbors, who are also in hibernation mode. These little conversations start with the weather, move on to the all-consuming topic of firewood and le chauffage (the heating of one’s house) and usually end with an expression of surprise that I’ve chosen to stay here all winter, teute seule. I assure them that I’m perfectly happy with my books and my concertina and my writing projects. I don’t try to explain that maybe I would go crazy all alone like this, if it weren’t for my other life in New York, ever present in the back of my mind as though part of me persists there, where any one day of these would be a precious expanse of solitary indulgence to be savored for its entire velvety length. Nothing exists in itself.

Sometimes I do wish there was someone to whom I could say something like, doesn’t the skin forming in this cocoa-pan look like it’s alive? Doesn’t it tighten and shift as rapidly as the spectral pulsing of the northern lights?

Sometimes I get a visit at my kitchen window from a handsome gray cat whose name I don’t know, but for whom I’ve taken to putting out scraps.

I don’t know who really feeds him, or whose house he lives in to get out of the cold. But every morning while this late-January gold streak lasts he spends a few hours curled up in a little grassy hollow downhill of my window, getting what he can for as long as he can get it.