I have been away, you may have heard...

I've been posting on Facebook, because for several weirdly technical reasons I have a hard time getting the photos I take with my phone into my laptop.  Oddly, pouring them from device to device has not worked.  But...

My last day at Klutz was August 1.  August 2, bright and early, Pat Murphy and I got on a plane to Chicago, thence to Paris, then a train to Rennes, where we were picked up by Ellen Klages and Scott Lynch and taken off to La Cahudiere, a farmhouse and the site of Ellen's month-long birthday party.  You know how the word "idyllic" gets bandied about? Here, it works.  For six days I got to hang out with fun people, see some of the countryside (Mont Saint Michel--holy cache!), talk, swim, cook, eat, talk, drink, laugh, and practice my abysmal French.  At about five thirty every day, people would start to drift out to the table in the front yard (seen above), and the whole crew (it got up to 18 while I was there) would sit around nibbling bread and cheese and morsels of sausage and cornichons and whatever else seemed nibble-able, while drinking cidre (Normandy and Bretagne are the cidre capitals of France) or wine, and talking. About eight thirty, the local cows would start wandering past us on the other side of the fence, and shortly afterward there would be dinner.
At the point were the cows wandered by, someone would go to the fence and greet them: "Bonjour, les vaches!"  The cows seemed unimpressed, and yet they kept on coming.  There were also bunnies, chickens (including one enterprising hen who kept making breaks for freedom and being returned to the chicken run) and a pig named Pig:
Pig was a jovial sort, and really loved Ellen's party because we brought her all the food scraps.  Every time you approached her pen, Pig would dance over to to her trough, jump into it, and dance excitedly, waiting for a rain of banana peels and strawberry leaves and what have you.  Never has a being been so easily gratified by so little.

But really: the conversation, the congenial company, the food and drink, were all sublime.  The toast every evening was "I love everyone in this bar!"  And I did...