Un déjeuner à la campagne

Last weekend, I was invited to have lunch at a colleague's house. Monsieur C, my colleague, picked me up and asked if I had a bathing suit. His family has a pool, and later I was to discover that there was so much more to their nook in the forested slopes just outside of Chasse.

We pulled onto a gravel road that led into the woods and ultimately their house. We were surrounded by trees, not a neighbor in sight.

Although I never got around to swimming, I did make some other observations (ten to be exact):

1. Monsieur C's 18 year old son runs his own chicken business at the house. The boy was so passionate about raising chickens, ducks, geese, and chicken/duck hybrids that I couldn't help but not be impressed. Some of the birds I saw in those forested coops looked like nature's outcasts, never meant to be seen by the world. I saw ducks with chicken faces and a monster pigeon who looked like the head of the bird Mafia roosting in a barn.

2. A goat was roped to a tree nearby the table where we ate lunch and roosters crowed every once and a while, making periodic awkward silences slightly more bearable.

3. Inside the house were stuffed foxes, badgers, and immortalized snakes kept in fluid-filled jars.

4. No matter how hard one tries to fit in as a foreigner at a French lunch, those around will always seem to maintain that regard of parents looking at a child incapable of serving or putting food in his/her mouth.

5. While the French deem it necessary to mix certain foods together in each fork bite, others are not to be mixed. Meat, salad, and pickle can all go together in one stab of the fork, but when faced with an array of cheeses, it's necessary to taste the lightest cheese first, like Brie, then finish tasting with the strongest.

6. There exist tiny treasures called fraises des bois (wild strawberries) that grow to be the size of a peanut and taste like candy. They flourished within the thickets all around the house and while taking a tour, became an instant snack.

7. Pastis with Grenadine syrup is much more tolerable than the pure stuff.

8. L'eau de vie, or water of life, which is used to make cognac and tasted dangerously close to Hungarian palinka, rested in apricot filled jars on windowsills, until Monsieur C's wife got one down for us to try. Tasting the alcohol spiked apricots that seemed to rest innocently in my glass caused my face to contort in odd ways much to the amusement of Madame C.

9. As their house rested on a slope with a lovely view of the Rhone and an enormous factory on the other side, Madame C. informed me that the old stone paths alongside the river were built for horses to pull boats down the river. I was amused by this image, then immediately felt sorry for the horses of yore.

10. When I left, Madame cut me some salad from their garden, so fresh that it still had ants from the earth crawling over its leaves, some potatoes, and cherries. She invited me back saying that she'd make frog legs for lunch next time.