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Kalk tablets. While they are intended for use in the washing machine, for ‘protecton’, as the box emphatically states in capitals, Stuart decides that they will do the trick for our glasses. Such is the life of rénovation in a foreign land that improvisation is often the order of the day.
    I spend hour after hour filling the sink with scalding water and glasses, adding a new tablet each time that fizzes and lifts the calcaire cloud. Incroyable . It works. As the sink is stone and I tend to be clumsy, I have to be exceptionally careful. No wonder at all the vide-grenier there are always sets of glasses in odd numbers; there is invariably one missing and rarely the full complement. Too many apéritifs I think, as I continue to wash our collection of mismatched glasses. What is a summer in France if it is not to enjoy the superb wine every evening? Despite it not yet being the apéritif hour, I manage to crack and break another glass against the stone. I carefully wrap the evidence. This is not a task that I would ever embark on at home, washing every single glass in the house by hand. I spend the rest of the day setting our petite maison to rights after a year of being shrouded in dust and darkness.
    I whisk down a year’s worth of cobwebs lurking in the fire-darkened beams of our salon . It is through my devotion to domesticity that new words enter my vocabulary, and so I learn the word ‘to clean’ in our French home: à nettoyer . I learn this from Dominique when I tell her what my matin — morning — will hold. As in previous years, it is only through necessity or as an act occurs that my still-feeble French vocabulary expands, step by step, like a child’s. I whip off the red and white check tablecloth to replace it with a clean one that I have tucked away. Its very pattern is enough to make me smile, for it is oh-so-very French and was a gift from Françoise from her long-ago trousseau. While the patina of our farmhouse table is lovely in its old, scratched way, and dating from WWII as Jean-Claude discovered from a fragment of newspaper tucked away in one of its three drawers, nevertheless, a French table somehow looks naked without a tablecloth.
    I spend the morning as a French housewife, glossing over the fact that I never, ever cook. Stuart, meanwhile, sets off to the troc for the second day in a row. He’s on a mission to buy a new bed for our spare chambre , ready for when all our visitors start to arrive for their French summer. I’m hoping that he will also buy the armoire that we both admired the previous day on our first outing to Brive-la-Gaillarde. The cupboard would fit perfectly along the wall as you enter the guest bedroom, for like many of the oddly shaped nooks and crannies in our old farmhouse, the measurements have to be quite precise. I already have the perfect quilt cover in pristine readiness, French farmhouse red and white fleurs , for when I style and decorate the room. This is the part I most love when we rénovate . I fervently hope that my pretty pink roses will still be blooming when our first visitors arrive, so I can pick them with a flourish. They will be the perfect finishing touch on our new armoire . It was one of the very first things I did on our arrival; pick the graceful buds to breathe new summer life into our home.
    The beauty of the roses, as I glance at our le jardin , distracts me to some extent from the veritable invasion of les mouches . The marauding hordes of flies are something we tend to gloss over when we are far away. Each year when we return, we never cease to be amazed anew at the dreadful swarms of them. How is it possible that they are far worse than in Australia? Oh yes, we have chosen a country life far from Paris. However, it is still perplexing, for there are not any sheep in our immediate vicinity. We learnt during our first French vacances that it is disastrous to buy a house in the French countryside that is