16. Recloses recluses

I have always been a bit of a firebug, ladies and gentlemen. Well, I say a bit, but...

I almost burned down our neighbors' house when I was little. A friend of mine and I sneaked into their basement. My mom found us there because of the smoke billowing out of the cellar door from the cardboard boxes we were lighting on fire.

Being forced to apologize to my neighbor, though terrifying, did not cure me. I carried two boxes of wooden matches around in my pocket always; the cardboard book kind were useless, hard to light and no good as tinder. I had them in my pocket when I was playing soccer a couple years later (well, football, actually; we were in England at the time). When I blocked a goal with my thigh the two boxes, or maybe all those match heads themselves, rubbed together and burst into flame.

I remember even then being too prudish to shuck my pants in front of all those people (how embarrassing to be in my underwear!). So I walked/trotted across the green to our house, holding my pocket- with smoke pouring out of it- as far away from my leg as I could, hoping I could get inside and in the shower before my parents saw me. I think it was my aunt, sunbathing in the yard, who caught me. I couldn't come up with a believable reason for why I had been carrying matches around that didn't get me in trouble. Turns out it is actually quite hard to lie with your pants on fire.

On the other hand...

This event and its memento- a burn scar on my thigh- tempered my pyromania. I stopped randomly setting things on fire. But I still think the stuff is awesome and fascinating. At Megan's parent's house in the summer I'll stay out at their firepit long after everyone else has turned in, poking and prodding the fire with a good stick, strategically adding branches and logs, watching the mesmerizing, rolling white orange glow in the coals.

I thought I understood fire. I thought that while I had not mastered it (my belief in the mastery of fire oxidized along with my undies and some skin on a soccer field in England) I knew its ways, its mode d'emploi. But over the Christmas weekend just past I have been humbled.

Megan and I went to Recloses for Christmas  (pronounced ruh-close). It's a tiny town about an hour's train ride south of Paris. We have a friend, Louis, who lives there and was away visiting family in Israel. He has offered his place to us before, but this was the first time the stars aligned to allow us to take advantage.

It is everything that Paris is not. It is remote: lovely woods, dark and deep, are almost right across the street from our cottage and surround most of the village. The village itself is completely devoid of commerce. Every business in the place dried up and blew away years ago. There's no grocery store, no bakery, no pharmacy. Louis lives in a little cottage that's one of three house enclosed by a wall, looking out on a shared flagstone courtyard and a field out back with a goat and a sheep.

The cottage has a living room and a kitchen downstairs, and then a bedroom and bathroom upstairs. There are electric heaters in places along the walls, but the real heating comes from the wood stove in the living room.

We spent a good bit of our time in Recloses with the family living in the small house across the courtyard from Louis's cottage. They are truly lovely people. Shahar, the husband, picked us up at the train station, saving us a long walk through dark woods, and took us to a grocery store to lay in supplies for the weekend. He introduced us to his wife, Tali, and their two daughters Shaie and Ziv, five years old and fourteen months, respectively. We met their dog, Lilah, and the three cats that roam the compound whining and purring.

He also introduced us to Cecile, the owner of the estate, who lives in the larger, central house. It was Cecile that showed me how to work the little cottage's wood stove. The thing is a cylinder stood on end, maybe a foot and a half in diameter, with a little door at the bottom and a lid on top. I did not know then that this thing would come to dominate my time in Recloses.

That happy orange glow at the bottom means it's working. 

This is how Cecile gets the thing going: put three logs about the size of your forearm in it. Ball up some newspaper and jam it in there. Toss in a couple of lit matches. Within minutes things will be crackling merrily. “When you feel it is time,” She said, “Around ten minutes or so, you close the door at the bottom to slow the airflow so it burns longer.” I would learn that there is much more to it than that.

Shahar invited us over for the lighting of their menorah and we met his family. Megan followed him into their house while I was making sure the fire was going good and steady. She walked in the door and ran into Ziv, the baby, who demanded to be picked up. So Megan met Tali, Shahar's wife, while already holding Tali's daughter on her hip. Shaie, the five year old, liked us immediately and became our constant companion throughout our stay. Her parents speak Hebrew to her, but she spoke to us and her dolls in French. Shie had made their menorah at school of little colored blocks with small holders for birthday candles. In the blinky glow of their Christmas tree they lit the candles and we had some soup Tali had made and drank some wine we had brought over. Shaie had a little glass with us. Ziv screeched happily in her little chair. We talked about Recloses a bit, how they had come to be here, about Shahar's business, and how we had come to be in Paris. We took our leave when it was bedtime for the young ones and Shaie was being grumpy about missing out on company time.

I had gotten the fire Cecile started going bright and hot, but the little house had been cold and empty for about a week when we got there. When I closed off the stove's airway completely so we could go to bed (don't leave a fire unattended, ladies and gents!) the stove was hot but had failed to take the chill out of the walls.

That night Megan and I piled every blanket in the place on the bed. I wore socks to sleep in, something I never do because I hate having my toes feel constricted while I sleep. We survived the night, but first thing the next morning I went to the stove to get it going. I did just what Cecile had done the day before and waited for things to start crackling.

Seen prior to the addition of the entire New York Times
 in a vain attempt to make it work

My attempts were pitiful. Cecile had done it with half her attention, going on about something else while she did it. It took me most of the morning, devoting attention to it every few minutes, to get it to where the grudgingly glowing ends of the logs stayed orange, much less get them to flare, to suck hungrily at the air intake. I went through an entire newspaper, piles of punkish tinder, numerous matches while I arranged and rearranged the logs, trying to optimize the airflow from hatch at the bottom to the pipe up to the roof.

I mixed loosely balled wads of newspaper (for quick burning) with tightly balled wads (for hotter, coal-like smoldering) arranged around the logs. I made clumps of twigs and shredded bark and old leaves wrapped inside a sheet of newspaper (a sort of pot pie for the flames).

When the fire finally sank its teeth in, when the air flowing through rose in pitch and started to sound like a jet engine, when lifting the top lid showed twisting sheets of flame relentlessly caressing the logs, I don't know what I had been doing or how things had been arranged. But it worked. I'd done it! For the rest of the day I periodically fed it logs and kept it happy.

Once I'd gotten the fire going and felt comfortable leaving it to its own devices, Megan found Shahar in the courtyard and asked directions to the forest. Across the street, down an alley, and boom: foret sauvage. Paris has parks with carefully arranged plants and grass you can't walk on, and it's got the Bois de Bologne, a thoroughly tamed and gentle wood bordering the western edge of the city, where you can usually still hear freeway and you're rarely out of sight of other people. But the forests of Fontainebleau, of which the woods around Reclose were a part, are entirely different. There are trails, some of them large enough for trucks, running through it, but it was wild enough that Shahar warned us against leaving the paths lest we be mistaken for game by hunters. Both entities roam the woods, apparently; Shahar won't take Lilah, their dog, into the woods without a leash, and Dizzy, one of the cats, is missing an eye from an encounter with a hunter. We saw neither hart nor hunter while we were in there.

Pretty

Amon Sul

Whaaah! Angelic voices calling out!

Whaaaah! Angelic voices calling out plus hottie!

A path in a forest is a metaphor for...something something

Moss is, like, really cool the way it makes everything
 look more comfortable, you know? It's like clouds, but on the ground.
 And green.

The woods weren't exactly yellow,
but there were two paths and stuff...

When we got back, Shahar and Cecile and Shaie were getting ready to take Lilah for a walk. We joined them for a tour of the village. Cecile explained how one by one all the businesses had closed down, pointing at one little house with a low wall surrounding a front courtyard and saying what a wonderful restaurant it had used to be. We saw an old church that was only open for services occasionally because it had no permanent priest; we saw a field with some horses that stared at our lack of treats reproachfully. Shahar expounded on Cecile's wizardry in helping them cut through the kevlar tape of French bureaucracy to secure certain details of their stay.

So, is the car like an old guard dog, waiting to jump out
 at you if you pass the gates, or is the car being slowly
 eaten by  some sort of tree/jellyfish hybrid?

And these trees look vaguely Lovecraftian, with their bulges, and their branches
 splayed out like grasping fingers. And in a church yard, too.

When we returned Tali invited us to lunch, which would be ready in an hour or so. The stove had diligently warmed the downstairs room and sent cozy trailers up the stairs and across the bedroom. No socks for me tonight. Shaie came over for a while and Megan told her stories while I fiddled with my new master, the fire.

Mmm, flesh-toastingly warm

And that is how the weekend went, pretty much.

There was a lot of this kind of thing. Megan was somehow able to
 ignore the stove's constant demands, though. Why can't she hear it?
"Feed me!" It calls.

We ate with Tali and Shahar and Shaie and Ziv at least once a day. Shaie hung out with us a lot, either watching movies on Megan's computer or having a cup of coffee with her. That's a funny little girl. I took a picture of her and Megan said, “Oh that's very cute.” Shaie replied, “Of course, because I'm very cute.” She was very forgiving with my French, and I had a good time trying to speak with her.

"Bien sur, parce que je suis tres mignon."

We napped and read, walked. I pandered to the wood stove like it was some sort of jungle idol, lavishing it with sacrifices of logs and tinder. Each new day I supplicated anew, pleading with it for the magical Whoomp! that told me I had pleased it and it would now burn well.

I don't have a good enough camera for it to show how there's like a reverse tornado
 of fire swirling and twisting around in there. It's magical, hard to force your eyes
 away, you just want to reach in and touch it...and see? That's how it gets you!
 Crafty, crafty fire.

One evening while we were together, eating Tali's excellent cuisses de canard Shahar asked us a riddle: “In 1937, a man died of old age. His obituary read that he was a decorated veteran of the First World War. Services would be held the following Sunday at the local cemetery. Why was it impossible for this to happen?” Do you, Dear Reader, know the answer?

Our time in Recloses was made wonderful by this family. They were warm and friendly, selflessly reaching out to help or include us in their life. I am very glad to have met them. We had gone to Recloses looking to escape Paris' bustle for a few days and stretch out and relax, and we got to do that. Meeting these wonderful people was an added bonus we could have never expected.