Free Our House is Certainly Not in Paris by Susan Cutsforth Page B

for la piscine. On his white plastic chaise longue – no French home is without them – he has a pile of house magazines gathered from vide greniers .
    He pores over the pictures and explores the options. We pause to gaze at the golden stone of la grange and the immaculate new slate roof. While it took at least a week on our last working vacances to find the time to venture into the barn, this time we manage it on our third day. Though only a few steps from our petite maison , domesticity has consumed the daylight hours until now. While an absolute extravagance to even contemplate its conversion, it still remains at the pinnacle of our rénovation dreams.
    Literally as we finish weighing up the merits of paving or decking round la piscine , Jean-Claude appears. I had only just said that once again we would need to get his help sourcing a concrete supplier and voila , he appears round the side of la grange . As with all our pursuits, he enthusiastically embraces our crazy paving plan and with just a brief interlude for a hasty Kronenbourg, he whisks Stuart off to the nearby village of Cressensac to start investigating prices and all the possibilities. Though on the verge of seventy, there is never any time to be lost where Jean-Claude is concerned. Perhaps indeed it is the very fact that seventy is looming means that he embraces each day with enormous delight and enthusiasm.

18
Two Worlds
    At home, through choice, my week day has life more or less an unvarying rhythm. I go to school, I return home, we walk Henri, tend to household tasks and the demands of daily life; renovate; friends on the weekends, family from afar in the holidays. In the early hours, as the day breaks and pink light floods the sky and sea, I write before going to work. A very simple life, a comforting sameness. In Cuzance our world is utterly different. In many ways, it mirrors our early renovating days in Sydney, more than a decade ago. We worked virtually every waking hour. As soon as we arrived home from work, we pulled on our renovating clothes. I learnt how to mix concrete; I ferried wheelbarrows of bricks from the front of our terrace house to the back; I loaded skip after skip with renovating debris. And, we lived without a kitchen for nine whole months. Yet somehow, we had huge reservoirs of energy. It meant that we went out frequently for dinner and despite the punishing labour and arduous hours, we found ourselves in a large circle of new friends. Moving to Sydney from Canberra was a new life in every possible way. Just like in Cuzance, friends dropped in frequently and often lent a hand.
    So now it is too, many years later and on the other side of the world, that suddenly we also have a circle of new French friends who also drop in to check on our progress and invite us to apéritifs and dîner . The endless hours of summer sun, means that each and every day, holds any number of possibilities. That is one of my strongest memories when I return home to a more sedate, prosaic life. That on a morning when I wake in Cuzance, the day holds the promise that anything at all is possible.
    Despite my utter lack of attempt to learn any French at all in the intervening year between my two lives, I utterly astonish myself when the few words and phrases I do know, surge back into my memory. On the morning I wake with the intent of writing my postcards I bought on our morning in Paris, my waking thought is that I have already assembled the sentence in my mind to go to Le Bureau de Poste . ‘Hello, three stamps for Australia please.’ Later, as I stand in the queue – as is my habit on such occasions in a French shop – I rehearse the sentence in my head. ‘Bonjour, trois timbres pour l’Australie s’il vous plaît.’
    And always as you leave, ‘ Merci beaucoup, au revoir,’ which conveys, ‘Thank you very much, have a nice day.’ While my inflection is incorrect, nevertheless the woman on the