Home is wherever I'm with you

Alabama, Arkansas

I do love my ma and pa

Not that way that I do love you

Holy moley, me oh my

You're the apple of my eye Girl, I've never loved one like you
Man, oh man, you're my best friend

I scream it to the nothingness

There ain't nothing that I need

Well, hot and heavy, pumpkin pie

Chocolate candy, Jesus Christ

Ain't nothing please me more than you
Ah, home

Let me go home

Home is wherever I'm with you

Ah, home

Let me go home

Home is wherever I'm with you

Okay, I've been dragging my feet so hard that the tops of them ought to be all carpet burned or something. But don't worry, we don't have any carpet, and that was a metaphor anyway. So FINALLY I will update about life in Nashville and give you a virtual tour of the house.

The reason for the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros lyrics is a pretty great story, actually. We found the posting on Craigslist on our first weekend in Nashville visiting Josh & Jes, and we called and made an appointment to go see it. It was the first house we looked at, and we loved it instantly. The guy opened the door and the house was full of musical equipment. It turns out that he is the keyboardist for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and he is moving back to California to tour with the band again. He, his lovely wife, and their adorable daughter left such a light, happy energy in the home. We were sure immediately that we wanted the house, so we talked with the landlord and got things set up in a couple of weeks. It just seems fitting that his band would have such a great song called "Home" when that's just what we needed to find.

Things are going quite well in Nashville. I got a job before we even moved! I started working at an organic grocery store (I won't mention the name on the blog) at the juice bar and coffee counter. I really hated the job and how disrespectful the management staff was to the employees, so I quit pretty much immediately. They wouldn't honor my requests to be a part-time employee, we had to pay $30/month for parking because they wouldn't supply us with parking, the management was always super grumpy and tried to make me feel like a lazy employee, and this was the main reason I quit: They changed my schedule twice without consulting me (or even telling me) and then got pissy when I didn't show up for work at the right time THE VERY NEXT DAY. Well, gee, I guess I forgot my ESP at home last night when you were changing my schedule whilst I slept. Jerks. I just can't work for people who don't respect my time that clearly. I am a busy person and I take my scheduling seriously.

So then I called up my friend from Montevallo who is opening a cafe in Nashville, and I started working there the day after I quit the other place. We're having a good time. I feel like I'm notjust an employee like I usually am. I'm taking pride in doing things right and making lasting relationships with my customers. That is really what I want out of a job right now anyway. I don't want to just show up, put my brain on autopilot, and take home a paycheck. I want to be engaged in what I'm doing, learning, and working to the best of my potential.

Derek, after several weeks of pursuing a job at an organic gardening store, finally landed it. He started working yesterday. It'll be a nice financial relief for us both to be working, and I'm looking forward to settling into more of a routine with money. After being in Europe all summer, we were both stretching it until we could start receiving normal paychecks.

Starting the job before I actually lived here was stressful. Derek did most of the unpacking himself while I was at work. It created a kind of weird distance from my new home. I felt like I didn't actually live here. It took a few weeks to really settle in. I was stressed from work and Derek was stressed from not working. Luckily, this gave him time to build our amazing greenhouse by himself! He did a great job. There is a picture of it somewhere in this post.

I do work/trades at two fantastic yoga studios. One is Yoga Source and one is Kali Yuga Yoga. I love them both! For Kali Yuga, I manage the facebook fan page. I put up pictures, statuses, and create events. I feel so blessed to be given this opportunity. The owner, Leah, is so incredibly generous to offer me this trade. I love putting up statuses on facebook for the studio. I describe the day's classes, instructors, and encourage the community to come practice yoga. And I get 2 free classes a week doing that, so it's really incredible. At Yoga Source, I am the only work/trader he has, so he lets me come clean when it is convenient for me, and then I take classes when I can. I usually take a class for every 1-1:15 hours that I clean. I'm really picking up with my scheduling and I'm able to practice my work/trade yogas 4 times a week, and then lululemon always has free classes on Saturdays, so I try to go to those as well. So I am practicing about 5 times per week to prepare myself for my teacher training that is coming up in January.

Now here are pictures of the house!!! They are in a seriously wonky order, but whatever.

This is my Frida Kahlo light switch cover. I love it!

This is what will (very soon!) be Erika's room. It is currently full of all the junk I want to sell on Craigslist. The dresser will be hers, though.

Erika's room! Derek and I bought the bed frame and headboard and footboard at an antique furniture store right down the street from our house. It's so pretty! It is even prettier when it isn't covered with my Craigslist sale items.

This is all I'm letting you see of the dining room. It's doubling as my filing cabinet for today, so it's quite messy. You can see into the kitchen where Derek is making cornbread.

This closet is roughly 1,000x bigger than the closet we shared in Chicago. Eeks! My brassieres are showing. Derek pressures me to hang up my clothes after I wear them instead of keeping them in a totally organized heap next to the dresser as I would rather do.

Le lit. We're starting the crazy picture wall, but it isn't quite finished yet.

Da baffrum.

Piano, coat closet, super cute doormat, Mufasa wearing a gardening hat, and me waving at you in the mirror like a monkey.

The living room

The other side of the living room. We don't have cable, but we do have a lot of DVDs. Derek thinks he can hook my computer up to the TV so we can stream Netflix onto it.

This is part of the kitchen that is going to be my bread baking station when I have enough time to bake bread again.

I opened up some cabinets so you can see HOW MUCH SPACE there is!!! I am so glad to have space to keep my cooking stuff! That's a Lazy Susan in there.

Derek made cornbread for lunch today. He's getting quite handy in the kitchen. See, he developed this taste for good, home cooked food, but then I started never being home, so he had to learn to fend for himself. Now he cooks several nights a week.

I bought like 400 dresses at a thrift store so Erika and I can renovate them and either keep them or sell them at one of the many recycled clothing boutiques around here. Derek is hanging the curtains here.

The dresses. Pretty fabric!

Inside Derek's masterpiece greenhouse! The broccoli is doing well, the lettuce is great, and we've harvested a lot of radishes.

The outside of the greenhouse.

The back porch! Those planters are frozen solid because it was 18 degrees this morning. C'mon Tennessee! Act like the South.

Derek looking at the recipe for cornbread in the computer/music room/gym.

And finally... my art table! It's tiny, but I finally got it all organized. I set it up to paint because I haven't had the time to do any sewing.

And now I must leave you so I can take my stupid cat Kevin to the vet. He's a troublemaker, that one. We have to see why he is being such a troublemaker. We think he may have a little bit of testicle left or something.

La Serre pt. 5 -- Andy and Sara

The Universe is a good place. It realized our relative stir-craziness that was happening, and it delivered to us two wonderful Americans within walking distance. Just when things were getting bleak at La Serre, we were given Andy and Sara, a married couple from Florida. They are living in Lyon at the moment while Andy is working on some math thing, and they decided to wwoof on their vacation time to learn about permaculture. Anyway, we could not have asked for more wonderful neighbors. They are so intelligent and funny and entertaining. We've been over to their house (or their wwoofing farm) like 6 times and spent the night twice. Their hosts go out of town a lot, so we have really taken advantage of that. So these pictures kind of chronicle the food we've eaten together.

This is the kitchen at their farm. The night before I first saw it, I dreamed that I used a bunch of Christmas popcorn tins in my own kitchen. Weird!

More of their kitchen

One of the things we have learned from them is which weeds are edible and which ones aren't. This is some lovely nettle juice that we drank for its wonderful vitamin content and lovely grassy flavor.

At dinner party #1, we ate a raw lentil salad. It inspired me to want to participate in Raw Food Wednesdays when I get back. Raw lentils are good and filling!

Because Derek and I didn't have anything to bring to the dinner, we picked a million wild blackberries on the way to their house, which I promptly turned into a cobbler. It was good, but a little seedy.

The next day, we dined with them again. Here is the plate of assorted organic tomatoes along with the dippers for the raw hummous.

This is raw hummous. It is made from germinated chick peas. It was much fluffier than regular hummous, and I think I enjoyed it more!

Another day without anything to bring, so we picked more blackberries, plums, and elderberries. I made this pie. I made an olive-oil based crust "au pif" which means without really knowing what I was doing, and it was so good! I will always make that over a butter crust now.

The next morning, Sara made us pancakes using some pears I brought from our tree.

Someone get me this cookbook! I must have it!

Later that same day, we ate a great salad of lettuce, weeds, and edible flowers.

I forget what this weed is called, but it reminds me of the horticulture teacher in Harry Potter. Ughh what is it?? Well, no matter. The leaves taste like fish! We fried the leaves in a Corn Flake batter and ate it with sesame sauce. It was really delicious!

Andy fryin' up the leaves.

So anyway, bless the Universe for bringing these people to our lives. Derek and Andy have bonded over trading enlightening books and have very good discussions about them. We've had an amazing time knowing them! We are sad that they're leaving on Sunday, but we're leaving no later than Wednesday, so that'll be okay.

Yeah, we are trying to go back to Paris for a few days before going to London. We are straight up tired of farming, and this woman is about to drive us out of our skins! We'll see if it's worth the extra money to change our train tickets, but we think it just might be.

La Serre pt. 4 -- Work

Wwoofing used to mean "willing workers on organic farms" but they had to take the word "work" out of the acronym so that the tax people couldn't get involved. That doesn't mean that there is no work in wwoofing anymore, though! We work a lot, and we do a lot of brunt work. We weed for hours. We stand up and put microscopic seeds in holes for hours. We harvest, we plant, we clean. We only work an average of 5 hours a day, so it isn't terrible. I just wanted to account for some of the work we've done here.

These are the hundreds of shallots I harvested one morning.

We seeded all of these baby lettuces. These are about 2 weeks old.

For about 3 days, all we did was pull up baby leeks from the outdoor nursery and prep them to be planted.

One of the coolest jobs we've gotten was ketchup making! We learned a lot and had a good time doing this. Dominique stressed us out incessantly, but it was neat to see how to do this.

Tita and Loute on the ketchup making day. We were all inside and depressed because the weather was miserable. I drank 6 cups of tea that day.

Derek set up the camera to catch us making ketchup. That's all!

La Serre pt. 3- the tour

There is so much to this place, so let's hope I got enough pictures to try to paint a picture for my reader (s?).

Tita in the courgette patch. Harvesting zucchinis is a tough job! You get all scratched up, and if you miss one in the morning, it is enormous by the evening.

Big ol' Daddy pig

Itty Bitty baby pigs (don't think they are too cute because they'll be slaughtered in the next few weeks.)

Maybe I'm stupid, but I never knew that real sheep have tails! Most of the sheep I've ever seen have had their tails docked, but wow! Sheep have tails. Huh.

The flowers around this house are magnificent! Some lady who was visiting made this bouquet from the wild flowers. It is a couple of days old here, but it shows how lovely they are.

Coolest kitchen ever!

It really makes me want open cabinets in my house, wherever that may end up being.

This house is really beautiful and inspiring. I want to find a house in Nashville that I can make into my own space. I want an old place with character. No carpet. A porch. A huge backyard garden. Open cabinets. A basement. Collections. I'm such a cancer.

La serre pt. 2

Day 16 at La Serre du Bois. We've been doing quite a lot! Being busy seems to suit us, though, so it is all good.

Last weekend we rode bikes to a lake about 15 km from our farm. The ride was terribly difficult for both of us because French bikes never seem to be tall enough for our long legs, so although our seats were up as high as they could go, we still had to work really hard to get the bikes up some really mild hills. We finally got to the lake and were feeling a bit cranky from the tough ride, and we felt even crankier when we had to sit in really bug-infested grass near the muddy bank. The water was too cold to swim, and we just weren't really feeling the lake. After less than an hour, we got up to leave, but we were accosted by a very enthusiastic labrador retriever. As we were greeting the dog, his owners strolled up. We were delighted to hear a jolly English lilt to their voices, and quickly established one of those friendships that is solely based on the fact that a native language is shared between people. The couple-The Steers-are in their early 50's, and after having lived in England and Scotland for most of their lives, they moved to the South of France. They were such nice people and invited us to hear them sing some traditional Irish songs at a bar in a nearby village later that week. We were so drunk on English that we couldn't think of much else all week.

Which gets me to my next point. Although our language skills are definitely improving here, it is definitely at the expense of our morale. The personalities of our hosts are becoming much more clear, and sometimes I find myself with a terrible lack of enthusiasm when it comes to speaking French, and as a result, I find myself really not desiring to do much work here. The problem stems from the fact that Dominique is a very abrasive, fast-paced individual, and Derek and I are much more laid-back and slow-moving. That doesn't mean that we are lazy, but we just don't natually move about at break-neck speed. She stresses us out on a very natural basis with her quickness and vigor. She isn't really a gentle person, and she isn't too worried about hurting one's body or one's feelings. She almost threw me into a tractor when I was helping her roll a decorative wagon out of the way yesterday, and when she saw how irritated I was about that, she replied (in French of course) "Don't worry! You didn't get run over!" I wasn't actually worried that I had been run over. I was worried that I was going to take a swing at her head with a sledge hammer. She speaks incredibly quickly, and with a thick Toulousian accent, and it isn't a rare occasion that we don't understand. It is a very frequent occasion that I do understand, but I just don't have the energy to respond. I feel that my intellect is very misrepresented by my discouraged, apathetic attempts at French conversation with her. She thinks I'm quite a numbskull, and it really just eats away at me. She has almost made me cry at two dinners by just being too abrasive with me when I can't fully express/defend myself in her language. She is rough with Derek too, but he is less sensitive than I am, and he also understands less of her words when she's being difficult, so he has dealt better. Cyril, though, has been an absolute saint about our language gap. He will spend all day rephrasing things so we can really understand him, and he is very generous and open in our conversations. He speaks very slowly and with great hand gestures so that we can understand him better. He smiles at our mistakes and doesn't expect too much. I'm very glad that he is here.

We aren't learning very much on this farm. We learned a ton at La Petite Mane, but this one has been mostly full of busy work that we aren't sure about. We don't understand the function of much of our labor, like why we are stripping ferns of their leaves and putting the leaves under the cabbage plants. It isn't very hard work, and it isn't bad, but we just want to know why we are spending our hours doing that. One time, Dominique thought that I wasn't being quick enough in stripping the ferns, so she literally pulled the glove off of my hand, put it on her own hand, and showed me a faster way to do it. I was so appalled that the glove had been ripped off of my fingers that I said, "Oh, d'accord," and went right back to what I had been doing. I am really passive sometimes, but I'm a stubborn one, too.

I don't want to act like everything is terrible here. It really isn't. We're still having a good time and eating so well that I can't even see straight. I'm experiencing a very funny occurrance here before meals. We eat lunch between 1-2, and we eat dinner between 9-10. About 20 minutes to half an hour before the meal, I'll usually lay down on my bed and close my eyes to rest. I don't usually fall asleep, but I'll be in that weird in-between state. Well, I get really hungry here. I mean, I'm like shaking starving by the time I get to the table. So when I lay down, something primal switches in my brain and I can't think about anything but food. You know how sometimes you'll be almost asleep and then you fall in a hole and jump awake? Well, I will be lying there imagining that I'm about to put a fork full of food to my mouth, but then it falls in my lap, and I jump awake. Usually I've drooled all over my pillow. Sometimes I am still mostly awake, and I catch myself taking bites of air. It always makes me laugh, but I'm so hungry that I don't want to do anything but think about food.

When Thursday rolled around, Derek and I were pretty desperate to get away from the farm for a little while and we called our new British friends to see if they could pick us up before their concert. They could, and we went. They were both wonderful singers, and such great people to be around. We had a great time. Here is a picture of them performing, although neither of their heads are very visible.


As I mentioned in my last post, the 14th was a huge party at the farm. Everyone has been super stressed to get everything together and planned for it, and the phone has been ringing off the hook. There were 104 people at the party. Derek and I slept in a tent last night because guests needed our room, and I didn't fall asleep until the music died down around 5 AM. Then the rooster and various animals woke us both up every 20 minutes or so until we finally gave up on sleep around 10. At the party, they roasted a whole pig and a whole sheep on sticks. Here are the headless corpses spinning over the coals without a shred of dignity. Yum?

Here is a picture that was supposed to show the Crimmas lights, but it really didn't capture the ambiance. The house looked very nice!

Anyway, today we were back in our room, practicing music, when an American girl knocked on our door. Her name is Brenny, and she is from Oregon. She is wwoofing about an hour away, and for some reason or other, her host stopped to talk to Dominique and Cyril. She was going to make Elderberry syrup not far from our place, and her host invited us to go with them. We jumped at the chance to leave the farm, so we went. The other farm was having an open day for people to learn how to make the syrup and help them make it. Here are a lot of people separating the elderberries from the stems.


This farm is about 3 km from ours. To our absolute delight, we met the resident wwoofers, who are a couple of Floridians! Their farm is a permaculture farm, which is a concept I am learning to understand. They work very hard to acheive a balance between the plants so that they protect and nourish each other, and there isn't so much work involved for the farmers. Andy showed us a crazy variety of edible weeds and flowers. Here are some pictures of us at that farm.



Finally, and another cause of our lack of sleep lately, is Tita. She is our new puppy! She has blue eyes, but she was too busy sleeping to look up for a picture. I actually named her. Dominique wanted to call her Tic-Tac, but Cyril didn't like it (and neither did I). I suggested Tita because it sounded similar and it was the name of a main character in a magic realism book I recently read, and they liked it! It isn't my best naming work, but it is better than Tic-Tac.