Artnotes: The Wrench

Boat Repair   Blair Pessemier  Acrylic/canvas  12 x 12"  30 x 30cm  175.00

Tied up along the Seine   Laurie Fox Pessemier  Acrylic/canvas  8 x 14"  20 x 35cm  175.00

Garden of the Bungalow  Blair Pessemier  Acrylic/canvas 8 x 16"   20 x 40 cm  175.00

 Hollyhocks  Laurie Fox Pessemier  Acrylic/canvas 8 x 16"   20 x 40 cm  175.00

Tomatoes!  Laurie Fox Pessemier  Acrylic/canvas  12 x 12"  30 x 30cm  175.00

It seems like eons since I last wrote Artnotes:  in fact, it’s just a couple of weeks.  Much has happened, which might dispel any thought you might have that we live a charmed life.   Or maybe we do, just that this time we got the wrench charm.

I am not one to write about a bad turn, in fact, there were many good things which came out of the breakdown of the Villa Borghese (our car) on the high speed A13 highway north of Paris on 24 July:  we weren’t killed by a trailer truck for one.  Towed off the highway by the Police, only to be left for hours in 41/100 degree heat at the side of the road (we never really got our phones to work so well there), with our two passengers and Harika, we survived.   For those more recent subscribers to Artnotes, I’ve already bemoaned the lack of service in France in summer:  well, the car is still outside Paris, awaiting repair and we’ve trained it home to Italy.   We’re hoping for a 15 August repair; the car is still under guarantee.

It was wonderful how kind and generous our friends are:  we stayed on a few extra days with our Paris hosts. We will see them again when we go back to pick up the car.  A Tunisian/Parisian friend treated us to lunch at his restaurant.   An Italian friend picked us up at the train station; another lent a car.  It makes me think of how wonderful it is to be generous, and to receive generosity.  Like Portia’s plea (for mercy), “ It blesseth him that gives and him that takes”.   Thank you, thank you.

We had an extra few days to see two other friends, and we took a very inexpensive place outside the city so we could breathe.  It was a charming two room bungalow in a tiny overgrown vineyard by the Seine.  We both felt that despite how much we loved Paris, it was, health-wise, a good move to seek purer air.   We spent our days finding a car repair shop open in the summer.

Ultimately, we came back to Italy because it’s home: via the train, less than 100 euros each (Harika travels free) – it was actually kind of fun.  We’re having a show of our artwork in Zocca:  A Walk in the Garden.   We are watering our tomatoes, and building a website.  We’d like to remove the wrench charm from our bracelet, but it takes all kinds of experiences to make a life.