I found flour in my bellybutton today. Flour covers everything here, like a layer of frost on your windshield on a morning in February. Except it doesn’t melt away, but instead sticks and sinks into the creases of every sheet and the cracks of every floor. No matter how much you clean and sweep and pat and dust and wipe down surfaces it always makes its reappearance or can be rediscovered if you pat your pants hard enough. That, though, is the nature of living in a house the doubles as a bakery. For the past ten days I have been living at the home of Nathalie and Francois Galpin, the owners of Le Chemin du Pain, which translates roughly to the “path of bread.” It’s in this small house, the epitome of a French cottage really, that we live a purely organic and simple life where days are spent waking up with the sun to bake bread for the markets on the weekends, making deliveries to people in the Allier region, reading novels in the afternoon when the bulk of the work is finished, cooking purely vegetarian meals, and taking long walks through the countryside. For the past three years I’ve hoped to participate in the WWOOFing program in America or in France, but it wasn’t until this summer that I saw the opportunity to do so and took a hold of it. WWOOFing stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farmers and has been around, as my dad informed me, since it was began about thirty years ago in England. Workers receive free room and board in exchange for helping on an organic farm, in an organic garden, or with an organic lifestyle in general. Going through the list of options this spring I had quite the time sorting through people who might me really cool, really strange, or just really isolated. There were goat cheese artisans and vegans who studied the medicinal effects of herbs and those who lived in the mountains and wanted to spread knowledge about caring for the forest. I saw offers from people who happily told potential WWOOFers that they could join in their moon chant circles and that playing instruments was a plus. There were those who did yoga and meditated and lived off of just their own garden and those who wanted someone to rebuild the wall surrounding their front yard. After sifting through literally thousands of posts I came upon Le Chemin du Pain, described by Francois as the opportunity to partake not just in farming, as there really isn’t much farming here at all, but to get to know a different kind of lifestyle that attempted to be simple, sustainable, organic, and healthy. It said that for the most party I would be learning to make vegetarian food, bake bread, work at markets, harvest honey from their beehives, and work in the organic garden. For the most part I only do the first of these three things, but living here has turned out to be…well, charming, in a word.
I left Paris all nerves, wondering if I would be living in the middle of nowhere (as EVERY French person I’d told my plan to had said, though in less polite words) with potentially very strange people. I will admit Nathalie and Francois aren’t conventional – but in the best way. The first time I saw Francois was when I arrived at the market in Moulins, carrying my massive backpack and another two bags, having just hauled everything from the train station to the center of the town. My first impression was that I’d never seen someone so clearly calm and peaceful and laid back. He sauntered over and helped me with my bags, offered me some bread as soon as I was set up behind the counter, and then took Heather (the other WWOOFer living her) and myself to get some tea at the café where Coco Chanel once worked. Finding out that I wasn’t the only WWOOFer, and what’s more that Heather was from England and thus spoke ENGLISH (YES), put me much more at ease and I knew that things would not be a struggle for the next seventeen days. After the market we loaded up the van and boy did I struggle. I had no idea where anything went, I had no idea what to do, and my French vocabulary did not extend to common commands and objects around a bakery. When we got back Heather gave me a tour of the house and then left me to get set up in my little room, another attic (apparently the French don’t believe in storage, only in bedrooms with extremely slanted roofs that you are VERY liable to hit your head on if over the height of five feet). Once that was done we had a simple lunch of vegetable pizza that hadn’t been sold at the market and some plum and raspberry pie afterwards. When the dishes had been cleared I decided to go for a run and get acquainted with the area. This was the first of many runs I’ve taken, and looking back is always funny since on that first run I thought I was hopelessly lost about three time – but really any of the routes I could have taken would have brought me back to the bakery in about ten minutes. It goes without saying that first run was not long, but this turned out to be good because I made it back in time to go with Heather and Francois for Friday afternoon deliveries and then to L’Echoppe – a co-op organic farm/grocery store where we spent the night playing billiards with old French hippies and listening to music from the seventies and eighties, after of course enjoying once of the best vegetarian meals I’ve ever had. That first night introduced me to a whole generation I knew existed, but not like this. I could imagine every person I met thirty years ago – from the one man who resembled a character out of a seventies British TV series with a plaid jacket and curly hair parted down the middle to the guy with one large dread made from a bunch of smaller dreads wearing a Rastafarian pair of overalls. Francois himself looked like the one who had been the bird watching, nature obsessed, peace defending hippie who strongly believed humans are all the same since really we’re all African in the beginning (these are actually things I’ve come to learn about him). The night, though perfectly wonderful, did not help one bit when I had to get up at 6:30 the next morning to help at the Saint Pourcin market. This was the first market where Heather showed me the ins and outs of setting up, explaining the different breads as we sold them (which look slightly different and can really only be identified by the different slices on the top – diamonds are kamut flour, diagonals are demi-complet, etc.). In the afternoon I took a seriously needed nap and then went for another run, this time getting slightly less lost. After my run I read and then we made dinner and then we decided to watch a movie since Sunday is a day of rest around here, so we watched Notting Hill in French – which does not have quite the same effect when you lose Hugh Grant and Julia Robert’s very distinct and wonderful voices to those of French dubbing actors and actresses. Still, it was a pretty perfect day and I felt happier than I had in a long time – finally being around a really nice family, going for long runs through some of the most beautiful countryside I’ve ever seen, reading Margaret Atwood and Oscar Wilde, and eating healthy organic vegetarian food made by everyone.
I’ve now been here for ten days and have essentially figured out the days which go something like this:
Monday we bake bread. Dozens and dozens of loaves of hot organic bread that I can’t resist the smell of in the early mornings (we’re usually having breakfast by 6:30 or earlier). Around ten am we have a brief break and share some croissants and coffee with the two hired boulangeres, Nadine and Corrine. After that we continue to work, I usually am in charge of chopping ten kinds of vegetables and fruits for Nathalie – who makes delicious little savory tarts and pizzas with mushrooms and carrots and parsley and leeks and tomatoes and every kind of typical French vegetable you can think of. By noon we’re nearly done with the bulk of the work so we set the table and usually Francois and Nathalie’s son, Floren, has made lunch. After lunch, the biggest meal of the day by far, we have some coffee and dessert and then finish up arranging the baked bread – taking it from the kitchen and furnace area to the actually bakery (this means we carry it through one doorway) – and then clean (which means we vacuum what flour we can, though it’s really hopeless to be honest). By 2 or 3pm we’re finished and have the afternoon off to read, run, and have tea (all of which I’ve been doing while here). Around 7:30 or 8pm we set the table again and have dinner, which is usually bread (of course), salad, cheese, and leftovers from lunch. Unlike most French family there’s no wine here really, but I don’t mind all of the tisane we drink instead (just another name for tea I’ve learned – apparently there’s a difference, not sure what it is). In the evening we usually watch a movie since Tuesday there isn’t much to do.
Tuesday Nathalie goes to the market that’s too small to need more than one person, Francois makes bread deliveries, and Heather and I get to sleep in and eventually make lunch. The first Tuesday I was here, though, was the big cleaning day. Four times a year Francois and Nathalie give the bakery a thorough scrub. This means washing the walls and the floors, dusting everything down and then vacuuming, patting all of the flour (or as much as possible) out of the baskets and the torchons (cloth covers), and refilling the wood for the furnace, and a million other things that took us ALL day long. Eight or nine hours of cleaning later and we were ready to collapse, but it was finally done and at the end of the day we had a delicious dessert and then passed out.
Wednesday is actually the official do nothing day (it’s the replacement for Saturday) and so we sleep in, take a long walk (Nathalie runs or walks on this day for about an hour), make some lunch, do some reading (or blogging), maybe bake a cake (last week we made carrot cake with an orange glace), and then eventually make dinner and go to sleep if we don’t watch a movie.
Thursday is the second big baking day and is basically a repeat of Monday, except at the end of the day we load up the truck for the early morning market at Moulins – the largest town in the area, 20 km away.
Friday we have breakfast around 6am and then finish loading the car if necessary and take everything to the Friday market in Moulins. This is where I first met the Galpin family and Heather and began my WWOOFing since this is where the train station drops you off. Friday night we go to L’Echoppe if we aren’t dead tired from the market (the first Friday I wasn’t, the second I was, I don’t know how I’ll feel this Friday but what’s lovely is that there’s absolutely no pressure at all whatsoever to go out on Friday and if you don’t you may very well get to watch a good movie).
Saturday we go to market in Saint Pourcin, which is smaller than Moulins, but just as charming. We don’t have to be there until around 8am as opposed to 7am so we have breakfast around 7am and then pack up the car and drive with just Francois – which means that we listen to “la musique de l’energie du matin” (the music of the energy of the morning), otherwise known as classical overtures and such things as that which at 7:30am driving through the French countryside as the sun is rising and the birds are flying all around and not a soul is out – is pretty epic and very energizing in the early mornings. It makes me feel like I’m in Pride and Prejudice. At the market there are regular customers like the man Heather calls Monsieur…and then whatever bread he’s ordered for the day. There’s a very old man with extremely blue eyes who talked to me last week for about ten minutes when he realized I was from America and showed me his bag from LA and told me all about his passion for collecting old hunting rifles (he has one from 1914) and advised me to find my own passion since those were the only things worth having in life if you wanted to be an interesting person with character (this was all in French so I had to listen very closely to his low growly voice that comes with age I believe). Around noon we finish at the market and by 1:30 we’ve unpacked and sit down for lunch and of course dessert. The afternoon is then spent just enjoying the day and relaxing, a common theme, but then work does start at 7am so it makes sense that most of it is done by 3pm at the latest.
Sunday’s are the second day of the weekend in which we don’t do anything except take a very long walk that they call a hike, but usually involves walking through some forested areas and lots of fields and down little country lanes. The first Sunday we walked about 3.5 miles to an art gallery in the middle of nowhere, basically in the forest, and had some sodas at a café nearby. Unlike the hikes I’ve taken in America, we usually have a picnic first (rather than in the middle), and this isn’t just bars and sandwiches but bread and cheese and chopped salad and apples and scones (if we’ve made them) and a normal salad and tea from a thermos and dessert. We also therefore don’t start hiking until around 2pm and finish around 7pm. The second Sunday of my trip we drove for about 45 minutes to another town and started a hiking loop near a little farm on a hill. But, before starting we of course found a place to picnic (it was actually someone’s field and we got into it by simply lifting the loosely connected barbed wire from its tether and then replacing it once through – no real boundaries here since no one is allowed to own an gun and no one really cares if you sit in their un-mowed field). We sat in grass a foot tall and watched the bugs flying around (there is no fear or dislike of bugs around here either since they’re inevitable) and chatted about the yummy meal. After we walked through hills for about five hours or so, taking our time to examine little shiny beetles on the side of the road, watching for beautiful hawks that would fly up from out of nowhere, and even seeing a fox darting across a field (my first time seeing one ever!). We didn’t walk fast, we didn’t have any time limits, and we even stopped in the middle to share a small chocolate cake from the bakery, which was completely delicious. After our hike we usually get back around 7:30 or 8 and go straight to making dinner and then measure the flour to be made Monday morning, as the week begins again.
In my time being here I’ve not only found flour in my bellybutton, but I’ve found that I love living in the quiet solitude of the countryside, I love reading constantly (I’ve now finished A Picture of Dorian Gray, Alias Grace, and am in the middle of 1984, after which I will read The Trial by Kafka), I love baking cakes in the afternoons, I love taking long walks or runs or a mixture of both just because I feel like it, I love being up with the sun, and I love just being surrounded by peaceful people living a peaceful and fulfilling life, no matter how simple it is.
The view from my bedroom window
French Countryside near Chatillon, France
Daisy (in French a "marguerite") after an afternoon shower
Little yellow flower (these are EVERYWHERE)
Notre Dame de Chatillon (Our Lady of Chatillon) - I run by her everyday
Le Chemin du Pain as you come up the driveway
View of Moulins at sunrise
Moulins - where I first met Francois, Nathalie, and Heather
Local legend says Joan of Arc lived here (Moulins)
Tartes Bio Aux Legumes (Organic Vegetable Tart - personally made by moi with the exception of the crust!)
Heather selling bread at the Moulins market (this was around 11am when we'd already sold half of what we'd brought)
More tartes, pizzas, and even a regional potato pie with creme fraiche specialty (on the bottom left)
