Le Pere Jordan

It's been a "Journey" since I've felt I had the freedom of time, or the mental bandwidth to write anything. The fact that two years have passed since our last trip to France, that ended in a Medical Evacuation back to the US, is hard to fathom.

I now feel slightly guilty saying that there are some positive aspects to our life, in view of everyone else's  struggles.

My husband will always be "The Artistic One".

When friends ask him what he's up to, he  speaks about painting and possible upcoming art shows. His easel, paints and a fresh canvas are still where they were in our family room/Art Studio, although I have moved things over a bit to facilitate the passage of TAO with his walker frame.

He no longer paints or reads. He sleeps a lot and then sits and watches TV from the kitchen table. When it's not too hot we sit on the covered patio and watch the wind move the tree tops and the dogs run the fence to bark at delivery drivers and people walking by.

As I sit with him, I share videos, from my Facebook feed, of silly cats, redneck creative transportation solutions and familiar regions of France.

The image above is a stained glass window he designed and had made for our French house. The character "Old Mr Jordan" gave TAO hell seventy-plus years ago when he let the cows wander into the wrong field. He also sat in the barn with him in winter and carved wooden clogs, while telling stories about the village. I've heard more stories about him than of TAO's father.

TAO had sketched this image, which we still have,in pencil, long ago. You can see the rolling hills in the distance. The fence line takes your eye where the Artist intended.

When discussing subject matter for this tall bathroom window, I thought this image would honor a World that meant so much to TAO and be relevant to the surroundings.

The house is under offer. It's unlikely we'll ever go there again.

TAO's eldest daughter has been fantastic, shouldering the responsibilities of finding and making arrangements with an Agent, a Notaire and even going to the Department of Construction Permits to have them give the final signature on a project that was completed a decade ago.

She's had all of our paintings moved safely into storage for us. I told her to let her siblings choose any that they might like for themselves and to give away any furniture and household stuff that the potential new owners didn't want.

The one thing I wanted to remove and keep was this window. Unfortunately, the craftsman that came to try to extract it found it was installed in a way that can't be undone.

We now have a small chip of blue glass as a souvenir and these beautiful photos, taken by she who would be my Step-Daughter, if she were younger and I were older.

 

Pipe Dreams & Reality Checks

The Artistic One does not live on the same planet as the rest of us. He inhabits a place (in his mind) where rules and plans are for sissies; where bank coffers automatically stretch and replenish to meet the demands of checks written and where traffic citations can be ignored with impunity, especially if you have lost the paperwork, so considerately supplied by the kind police officer, and not updated the address on your drivers' license that, "Oops!" you can't find anyway. (That will be a post for another day; mandatory "one-on-one" time with a traffic court Judge and French translator, July 17th).
A declaration, made as a New Year's Resolution, that "This year, we will close up our business for a month and spend the whole month of July in Europe" seemed far-fetched at the time; Clients were not knocking down our doors to place orders; the phone was ringing with reminder calls from those nice folks at the finance, credit card and utility companies and an over-abundance of rainfall was paralyzing the construction projects of our industry, already mired in the general economic morass. 
Not seeing any value in being the Killer of Dreams at that time, I embraced the idea with a few "If everything goes our way" and "I hope we can afford that" disclaimers. I even spoke to the dog-sitter and had her pencil in the time slot, just in case of a miracle.
Well... Here we are...June already. How time flies when you are having fun! On the plus side, we are still standing. There's even some positively hopeful energy in the air as far as work is concerned. (We have three Venture Capitalists in our client portfolio; one High Tech and two Medical and Green Energy crossovers). The big boys are getting their confidence back.
In addition, some of Hubby's paintings have been selling through the gallery on the East Coast. Checks are slow in trickling in from that source and there is much whining and attempts to get the gallery percentage to increase above the negotiated 50%. "Paint it yourself!" is the answer to that one.
Hubby has been invited to show some canvases in Paris again in September; in the exhibition space under the pyramid in front of The Louvre. The exhibit is called "Grand Masters of Tomorrow" and there will be no living with the Ego now, but it did give me a reasonable and non-confrontational excuse to broach the possibility that it might be better to postpone our (Imaginary) trip until September and take care of everything at once.
This time, I actually believe that it might happen, although maybe three weeks rather than a month is more likely. The dog-sitter is booked up for other canines on the new dates so I have to find a solution for my girl Diva who is too old and fragile to go to the kennels. Tickets will cost a chunk less then and a large number of those nice tourists and their children will have their noses in their school books or back to the grindstone.
We are not yet surfing the waves but we have progressed from drowning in a stormy sea to doggy paddling towards a distant, but visible shoreline.