A Place in Normandy Read Online Free

excite anyone’s milk. Behind them ambled a broad woman in working blue who encouraged them by calling out their names and waving a wand of hazel still tipped with leaves. The smell of the herd embraced me. I shifted down and followed the cows until their road veered into the Bouquerels’ field.

    The town of Mesnil, 1988. Photo Walter Chapin
    Then it was downhill along the narrow road, five feet wide at best, worn pink between the hedgerows. It kept to the broad trough cut by the douet, next to the marshy banks hidden behind pollarded trees and thickets of brambles. Before long I came to a particularly overgrown hedge that ran along the foot of the hillside on which the farm was situated. Behind these hedges, out of sight, was what was left of the farm. I slowed and pulled in at the drive, climbed out of the car to open the gate, and stood transfixed by the rich shock of the smell of cuttings tossed over the gate into the drive from the grass trimmed for our nearest neighbors, the de Longprés, Parisians whose grouping of half-timbered cottages was shuttered. Having houses on both sides, the de Longprés control the road at the foot of my hill and could, if they wanted, stretch a chain across it and collect tolls from travelers—perhaps as many as three a day. Their properties blossomed for all that the owners were not in residence, and their gardens were in trim and coyly disciplined. I stood at the bottom of the driveway, the steep orchard behind me, on the far side of the road, rising to the woods that crowned the hill opposite the farm. I heard the douet chattering along under the bridge—that was all right—and smelled cows I could not see, looked in my mailbox (new last year and, I congratulated myself, still existing) and pulled from it a damp flier for an electronics shop in Lisieux. I noticed how thick and tall the nettles and brambles already were behind the gate and along the driveway as it started uphill. I glanced toward the spot where the shade of the tall trees meeting over it formed a cool bank. The house I wanted was still out of sight.
    Even the foot of the driveway offered the comfortable fit of an old shoe. The hot air stirred and made me dizzy with rich scents. I smelled familiar mud and turned left to face the marshy stretch of pasture between the douet and the road, across which lay some of the poplars that were supposed to line the stream. This was Julia’s favorite part of the farm, since it was level and she was from the Midwest. She sometimes said she would like to build a house there, in what she called, out of nostalgia for Illinois, “the flat.” Everything in view was either dead or overgrown or a mixture of the two, since even downed poplars that anyone would have been obliged to acknowledge had died now thrust up green branches and refused to give in. The genius of the Norman climate normally does not allow, except in dense shade, a square inch of empty dirt. Something grew everywhere. The hair and draperies of the sirens were so unkempt that I could almost hear Julia saying, Oh, God, it’s such a mess —meaning, It’s so beautiful. If teenagers are going to be so absurdly lovely, why do they have to do this to their bedrooms?
    I drove my car in and closed the gate behind me. The drive rose at an angle that varied between ten and fifteen degrees after crossing the beckoning douet. ( Douet is the Norman variant of the French doigt, or “finger.”) The ascent began in a splurge of crushed mint under the car’s tires. Offering something like a kilometer of uphill going that started in the primordial damp under the alley of lindens and chestnuts, the drive was sometimes more a streambed than a proper road. As my Renault undertook the steepest and most rutted part of the climb, I tried to calculate the number of truckloads of gravel that, if all this were to become my fault, I would need to order to fill the crevasses. The car struggled