Chanel our French Bearded Collie

We never were intending to get a dog while in France, but when friends of ours could no longer care for their Bearded Collie, we became the proud owners of Chanel.  She was a french dog, after all, and needed a good french name. She came with instructions on what to feed her.  Fresh vegetables and fruits and certain kinds of meat.  I thought this was really amusing, and bought her dog food.  When dinner time came she met it with total lack of enthusiasm and a look of “Is THIS what you’re giving me for dinner?”  Eventually we fed her table scraps in with the dog food and that was much better. 

She was a quiet, devoted pet and everyone loved her.  While we were living in France, she always looked groomed with her long shiny coat brushed and tidy.  But she did not look like this when we moved back to the farm. The dirt was attracted to her and wouldn’t come off easily.  Brandon brushed her for a while, but then gave up.  It was so much work and it never lasted long.  She was never meant to be a farm dog. She turned from a coquettish little beauty into a ‘swamp thang’. 

Chanel lived for twelve years.  At the end, back at farm and years later, I noticed Boy wouldn’t leave her side.  By the time I got her to the vet, the blood infection had progressed and there wasn’t much the vet could do, so we had to put her down.  It happened while I was busy packing up to move from the farm in 2002, and I felt guilty that I hadn’t noticed it earlier.  It was a very sad time.

Madame le Bar Tender

Behind our house in Boinville on the other side of the little river on the main country road, was a small bar in a courtyard of an old house. It was owned and run by ‘Madame’’. Outside the bar were weather worn tables under the large looming branches of the trees. There were pigeon cages everywhere.  Oh Madame was a picture of the past, with a kerchief around her head and a long apron hanging over her very french working dress. She was a short old lady with a smile you’d want to hang on your wall. She was beautiful!

The bar had been a bar for a hundred years and not changed much over time. It was a place where travellers passing by could come and have a drink and a croissant.  But not just any drink.  We walked over one day to sit at one of the picnic tables in the garden and have lunch. Damon ordered a coke.  She chided that coke wasn’t good for you, have something else. We found that was just too funny.  Don ordered a drink and she reprimanded him that straight alcohol wasn’t good either, so have a beer or some wine.

Ian Visits

My step brother, Ian Roberts, came to visit us at Chèvre Chou.  He was an established artist, even back then, and he talked of one day having workshops in France in a grand chateaux.  I encouraged him and said, why not?  You can do it if you want to. He eventually did hold workshops every spring in Provence and Italy.  This was to play a part in my life later on.

The Berlin Wall

It was November, 1989 and the Berlin wall, constructed in 1963 to separate east and west Berlin, was finally coming down. This would allow families to reunite who had been separated by threat of death, for over 25 years.

Don had queasy feelings about the Germans and hesitated to go.  But by February, he was ready and we piled the kids into the car and went to join the ‘wall peckers’. 

Armed guards who the day before shot anyone venturing into ‘no man’s land’, (the space between the Berlin wall and the smaller wall on the east side), and today were acting as tourist guides.  The look of confusion on their faces did not escape me.  They just couldn’t smile.

We came equipped with our chisels and hammers.  That wall was never meant to come down. It was hard.  We enthusiastically did our bit at chipping away at it to gather our treasured pieces into our own little bags. The strangest phenomenon occurred. People with spray cans would spray the walls and before the paint was dry, men in business suits and attache cases would appear.  They had chisels and tools in their attache cases. They began immediately to chip away at the freshly painted parts of the wall. It all seemed so strange. We deserved the title they gave us, ‘the wall peckers’ as the bits came off in small pieces and we could but chip away at it. We managed to get a few jars of the hard stone as our loot. 

We visited east Berlin and passed through Check Point Charlie.  It was just a little white building, but had quite a history after the war in its special role as a check point between east and west Berlin.  I thought it was a big mistake when they removed it when it really belonged in a museum. I thought it was a mistake too, that the Germans completely removed the wall.  Parts of it could have kept the wall peckers coming for years. But it was removed in its entirity save for a small section very quickly within a few months of the declaration that it was to come down.

At Check Point Charlie, we were given passes to go into east Berlin.  I think we were supposed to hand them back in but I ended up keeping mine.  Back at the farm, I framed it. We went to a restaurant in east Berlin.  It was dreary and poor and hadn’t yet adjusted to the freedoms and plenty of the west.   When we ordered coke, the staff said they had some but it was just for the staff and they wouldn’t sell it to us. This reflected the mentality that they had to live with, hoarding and miserliness.  It was evident that not only was coke not easily acquired, but they didn’t realize yet that they could get all the coke they wanted.