July 30, 2013
The day starts with a 70-kilometer bicycle ride through the Minervois as far as Aragon and Villegailhenc, starting at 7:30 a.m. Just before the end of the ride we have to mount a hill, and I almost crack. The bicycle I am riding will not allow me to change gears; when I do, the chain falls off. And it makes noises that only bicycles out of alignment make when I stay in the one gear I can manage.
Claude, the olive grower, and club president, saves the day. When I explain why I can't change to a smaller sprocket, he says, "Well, let's stop and we'll change the sprocket while you stop, and the chain won't fall off." Indeed, it does not, and I am able to crest the hill without difficulty, although by the end of the ride, I feel as though I have been on the Bataan Death March. Perhaps because a new rider, my English friend, is a stripling of 31, the older men want to put him on his mettle.
Patrice, the secretary waves his finger at me and says "Today I am your executioner, no?" (Au jourd'hui je suis ton bourreau, non?") He certainly is.
However, Claude's practical solution to getting me up the hill allows me a moment of glory on a hard day. For most of the ride I have been struggling to keep up. By putting the bicycle on the lower gear I need, Claude makes up for all the earlier hours when I thought I'd never stop huffing and puffing.
When I and my guest return home, I knock on Bob and Annabelle's door: the washing machine still isn't running, and Annabelle has offered to let me wash some clothes. While she is emptying her washing machine, I tell Bob, with reference to the ride, that "By the time I leave on September 9, I will either be in the best shape I have ever been in, or I will be dead --there's no in-between."
***
The washing machine repairman comes by just about when I was told he would, three-thirty p.m. Like the plumber David Martinez, David Chabbert is a youngish man who is accompanied by an adolescent boy acting as his assistant. The two of them move the washing machine out of the house and into the courtyard of the house to let the hose drain the water out. After this is done, David Chabbert unscrews a lid on the bottom of the back of the washer and finds...a sodden sleep mask with two ties, rather like Zorro might wear if he needed forty winks. The sleep mask has been living inside the tube a long time, until it reached its end and stopped up the drainage, is the explanation why the machine refused to drain. The machine is brought back into the house, and I pay 40 Euros for the service call. The repairman tells me to go ahead and wash the towels in the machine again, which I do gladly.
Unfortunately, when I return home a few hours later, the machine still doesn't drain. Perhaps Zorro left a few more masks behind.
***
The French term for "hay fever" is "rheum de foins" (literally catahrr-fever). I have "rheum de foins", and I have it bad. The sunflowers and the wine grapes and the fruit trees are all being sprayed and the harvesting of the grapes will be in two weeks for some varieties, continuing through the end of September for the darkest, reddest, most tannic wines.
"Then there are also plants to which people have allergies, in addition to the reactions to the spraying and the extra amounts of plant matter in the air", explains the pharmacist in town. Fortunately, I don't have to have a prescription for an antihistamine tablet, or for a nasal spray. I rode 70 kilometers with a swelled head rather than take an antihistamine, thinking that I would adjust to the environment. By the afternoon, I decided I would have to stop the sneezing attacks and the post-nasal drip and that I wasn't adjusting the environment.
What did people do before medicines that dried out runny noses and sinuses existed? We see Millet's The Gleaners without recognizing that it is a painting about the desperately poor picking up the leavings of the harvest to feed themselves. We forget, too, that some of them probably suffered horribly having to do so, due to la rheume du foins. Oscar Wilde once said he didn't like nature, that it was unnatural, a statement any hay fever sufferer knows rings true.
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