La crève et les plantes

J'ai attrapé la crève. Je tousse. J'ai le nez qui coule et les yeux qui pleurent. Je suis à plat. Et puis, depuis le changement d'heure dimanche, j'ai l'impression qu'il fait nuit tout le temps. Hier matin, il a plu comme vache qui pisse pendant au moins trois heures. C'est novembre, quoi...

So that's what's going on here. A bad cold. I got it from Walt, just as he was getting over it. We can't figure out where he got it, except that about 10 days ago we spent half an hour in a crowded wine bar down in Saint-Aignan having a glass with friends. Crowds! You can have them. And November — you can have that too. Besides, today is a Catholic holiday: the Day of the Dead!

Weather forecast for tomorrow afternoon

Otherwise, when it's not raining, I've been out trying to continue cleaning up the yard and garden. I've raked more leaves. I've brought in more of the potted plants that spent the long dry summer outdoors. Do you keep potted plants? They are a lot of trouble, but I can't stop myself. In San Francisco, a lot of plants in pots could stay outdoors year-round, because the temperature never went down to freezing. Here, they have to come back in for the winter.

One of the best improvements we've made to this house since we moved in was to have the little front porch glassed in. Now we have a sun porch where we can keep plants during the cold months. This past summer I bought a couple of wooden shelf units, and Walt bolted them to the wall on the sun porch a week or two ago. That gives a lot of room for pots.

A lot of my potted plants have sentimental value. They've been given to me by people I'm close to: CHM, my mother, our friend Gisèle on the other side of the village, and Josette, the woman who sold us our house here. They replaced plants that we had in California, many of which made the trip across the U.S. with us when we left the East Coast for the West in 1986. When we left California in 2003, we had to leave all the plants behind.

The new loft space with its four windows
gives me a lot more space for houseplants.

Thanks, however, to a cousin in N.C., my mother, and CHM, I still have potted plants that were my grandmother's before she died back in 1977. They are little Sansevieria trifasciata ‘Hahnii’ plants that moved with me from North Carolina to Washington DC and now to France. It's a long story, and a long history. I had given some cuttings to CHM when we left California, and some to my mother when we stayed with her that year. CHM brought me some cuttings from back there after we were settled in Saint-Aignan, and my mother did the same. Now I've got two or three pots of them growing again.

There's something about bringing potted plants in and keeping them going over the cold winter months that feels very positive, optimistic, and satisfying. Especially when you have a bad cold and it's raining buckets outdoors.