Calm. Pure calm. Our hosts continue to be mindblowingly nice and offer to let us stay on another day. So we stay, sprawling all over the farm with only the meandering sun to tell us that time is passing. Everything is perfectly idyllic, sans Snail’s sporadic sneezing in the far off background (it stops every time she passes out to Twin Peaks). Antoine’s parents show me around the place, including the old stone hearth and the dreary hole that past farmers used to torture geese in to make that creamy perfection foie gras.
At some point, in some far, far away land, Zach discovers the number I wrote on a piece of paper and stuck in his pocket the night before. He calls, and I leave to find him in the depths of Toulouse. Such are my duties as band dad.
On the way back to the farm, there are fields of sunflowers stretching to the horizon. I imagine wandering out in them with a blindfold on and wonder if I’d be able to make it back. So I swoop back to the farm, knowing James and Snails will love coming back out here and wandering around. We make it back, and as soon as I’m out of the car, my legs launch me through the fields. Turns out that sunflowers have quite brutal, itchy stalks, and attract bees, of all things. So we float around the perimeter and get all poetic. Well, at least until we get told we’re intruding on private property.
Back at the farm, a plate of baby octopi, picholine and kalamata olives, and a nice bottle of wine greet us.
Freshly opened, it’s pungent and earthy, but with a little bit of time to breathe, it opens up mellow and full, grabbing at the sides of your throat as you swallow- the wine, not the octopi. When the band wants to leave to get some real food, I delay as long as possible to see if I can get Charlie to eat an octopus.
At the end of the day, I’m little disappointed with myself that I’m staring into a computer, but I’m recording music on it, so I figure it’s a necessary, condonable evil. I should be just sitting in the field writing, but my muse says compose, and the computer is the only bastardized instrument I have. My terrible predicament.
I wander inside to go to bed and find this guy crawling about the place. Seriously, when I kicked him by accident, I thought I had hit a cell phone left on the floor. I poked at him for a little bit, trying to get him to walk near my finger without actually grabbing me with his deadly, spiny legs. What beastly coleoptera.
France obviously doesn’t have the noise control that America does, as planes fly over, quite low and screaming, all night long. So much for perfection.
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