New here? I’m Kamille. We left California, moved to rural France, and bought a small château in the countryside. This is Castle Diaries, where I write down all the renovation details, stories, and how often it actually goes wrong.

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This post is about a pool that does not yet exist.

We started planning the pool in January, just weeks after buying the château, which tells you something about our priorities and possibly about us as people.

The first pool company came out, walked the property, listened carefully while we explained where we wanted it and how big, and then sent a proposal for a pool in a completely different place, in a different size. Not in any way adjacent to what we’d discussed. So we wrote back with a few small corrections and asked whether we might meet again.

Alas, we never heard from him. Not that week, not any week. Not ever.

Moving on!

So we asked around and found another pool company. We met, talked, brainstormed, and eventually their proposal arrived, and we signed the paperwork that bound all of us together on this project, like a marriage. And like most marriages, the real work began after the union.

We told the pool guy (we’ll call him François) exactly what our goal was, which was for our children to be swimming by the summer. We painted the whole picture, and also told him we were prepping the coach house as a summer rental and it would be wonderful to have the pool ready for guests. He said no problem! He would have it done by July.

Then a legitimate schedule arrived, with the work broken out week by week, every phase laid out in order, ending on a completion date of July 21st. We were over the moon to have an actual schedule like this, which felt like an anomaly among the typical French workflow we had experienced so far.

The first work week came and the team showed up on time, with bells on, and demolished the old unusable pool with tremendous efficiency and speed. It was gone within a few days, and we stood there watching, thinking, “Well, look at this. Look at us. We’ve finally got it all figured out.”

The funny thing is, back in May, the project had already been pushed once, because at that time there was too much rain. François told us that the ground was too wet, and that we needed sunshine.

So we waited for sunshine. And when it finally arrived, it never left.

Be careful what you wish for.

It’s hard to convey how hot it got here without the numbers, so I will give you the numbers. France recorded its hottest day in history on June 23rd, clocking in at 44.3°C (111.7°F) in Pissos, which is in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. Paris hit 40.9°C (105.6 °F). Over 1,000 people died from the heat in this country before June was even over. 845 schools closed. By the time the fifth heatwave of the summer rolled through in mid-August, France had never had a year with five.

We chose northern France in part because we assumed we’d be spared (everybody knows the south is the furnace). We picked the green half, the rainy half, the half with mist, but no region was spared from the heat this year. Ours was just slightly less murderous than the south.

The wildfires were the worst part and thankfully they didn’t reach us. 100,000 hectares (about 247,000 acres) burned in France this summer, more than anything in living memory, and Spain had the largest fire in its recorded history. We were lucky enough that the fires never got close enough for us to even smell the smoke, but I still checked the news every morning like it was a weather report, because that’s pretty much what it had become.

And the heat wasn’t even a wave, really. A wave implies it goes in, and then out again. This came in several weeks long, broke for two or three days, and came back before anything had cooled down. The nights stayed hot, which means you couldn’t open the house up in the evenings. If you opened the windows at 10pm, all you would get was more hot air.

We were told we would be well-protected from the heat inside the stone walls of the château and coach house. And while this held true in the spring, summer told a different story of these old stone homes.

They’re famously impenetrable in the heat. They stand there cool and smug while the new builds down the road cook, and there’s a real, age-old reason for it, which is that the walls are two feet thick and it takes a very long time for heat to get through them. The stones hold in the cold the way a cellar does. Everyone tells you this when you buy one, and for about four days, it’s true.

But it only works to a point. If it’s suddenly 100°F on Monday, you’re fine inside. Tuesday, still fine. By Friday, after five straight days over 100, the stone has been absorbing heat the entire week with nowhere to release it at night. So on Saturday, when the temperature “drops” to 90, the house is significantly hotter than it was on Monday at 100. The walls have become a battery. Everything you loved about the building is now working against you, slowly, at its own pace, and there is nothing you can do to hurry it back the other way.

What was once your savior becomes your enemy.

We had a few truly ugly portable AC units, which saved us, and we adjusted our whole lives to the mornings. Anything outdoors had to be done before 11am, and afternoons and evenings we got very inventive indoors.

So we made the most of it, but this wasn’t the case for everyone. Overall, France caved.

This is a country that has spent decades declining air conditioning on principle, citing the thick walls, the shutters, the seasons, a certain national toughness about discomfort, and general suspicion of AC units making you sick. AC was just for Americans who couldn’t cope (that’s me!). And then this summer the units sold out nationwide, the mid-range ones disappearing from Bricomarche and E.Leclerc and Leroy Merlin within about 48 hours of every heat spike, and installation waits went from three weeks to ten. Yes, the French bought air conditioners, in enormous numbers. Not smugly or ironically or even shamefully, but because it had actually become dangerous.

I didn’t feel vindicated about it. Instead, I felt awful. There’s no satisfaction in watching a country give up a thing it was sort of right about, because the conditions it was right about stopped existing.

Everything went dusty - that’s the texture I’ll remember. Dry and crunchy underfoot everywhere you walked, the grass gone to straw, the gardens absolutely roasted. Every department in mainland France ended up under some kind of water restriction. I found myself actively longing for mist, and dew, and wet leaves and that specific smell, and gutters running, and having to find somebody’s boots. I never thought I would actually miss the mud - the infamous mud I’m always complaining about in my posts.

But the mud didn’t come, because the rain didn’t come.

And still, somewhere underneath all of this, on a spreadsheet on my computer, was a pool completion date of July 21st.

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers, because it’s the details I don’t reveal to the whole internet: what the delay actually was in the end, the guests who checked out of the coach house halfway through their stay and asked for their money back, the promises I made to my 7-year-old and to my nieces that I then could not keep, and where the pool actually stands as of this week.

Castle Diaries is the transparent version of the renovation. Twice a month, plus two additional posts about life in France as an American.

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We had been living here at our new home in rural France for a few months when a neighbor stopped me near the gate and asked what we had planned for the day. “We’re going to Nantes,” I said. “To go to Ikea.”

She nodded, and then asked how many nights we’d be staying.

I told her we were going for the day. Drive down, get some dishes and an armchair, drive back before dinner. She looked at me in much the same way you’d look at someone who had just announced they were flying to Denver for a sandwich.

Nantes is an hour and a half away.

I have thought about that conversation more than she will ever know, and before it becomes the kind of post where an American moves abroad and announces that France has solved traffic, let me say clearly that it has not. Paris has traffic. Lyon has traffic. There are French people sitting on the périphérique at this exact moment having a much worse morning than I am, and if you live somewhere rural in America you probably already have most of what I’m about to describe. I’m also not here to tell anyone that their commute is a moral failing. Plenty of people love the drive! It can be optimized or ameliorated with podcasts, great music, or even a breathing meditation. Not automatically bad.

What I’m noticing is smaller than a country. It’s the 30 kilometers around my house, and what those 30 kilometers have done to my idea of ‘far.’

If you’re new here, I’m Kamille. I write about the culture shocks, the neighbors, and the ongoing project of becoming a local in rural France. Two free essays a month, no charge, no pressure.

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In Los Angeles we had several commutes, and it was considered normal. There was the commute to work, the commute to school, the commute to the good grocery store (which was a different store from the near grocery store and required more forethought). There was a commute to the pediatrician, a commute to a 4-year-old’s birthday party in Pasadena on a Saturday morning, a commute to a work thing we didn’t want to attend and then a second, worse commute home from it at 9pm.

None of this registered as unusual. It was just…the tax. You paid it in 20-minute increments, eight or nine times a week, and you got very good at podcasts, and you developed opinions about surface streets that you would defend at a dinner party.

Here, my kids’ school is 6 minutes away. So is the pharmacy with the green cross that blinks the temperature at you. So is La Poste. So is the boulangerie, and the small supermarket, and the garden store where a man once explained fruit tree pruning to me for about 11 minutes while I nodded along (with the confidence of someone understanding approximately one word in four).

6 minutes. All of it. And I don’t have to leave early for any of it. There is really no version of this drive that goes badly.

For anything bigger we go to the nearest proper city, which is 20 minutes away and which I now describe, out loud, to other adults, as far. Yes, 20 minutes. In Los Angeles that was the drive to grab a decent taco. Here I hear myself say “well, it’s a bit of a trek” and I don’t even flinch.

And the 20 minutes isn’t spent in traffic, because there isn’t any. There’s one roundabout that occasionally contains three cars. The rest is stone farmhouses with their shutters half closed, a field of sheep, a stretch where somebody’s cows graze in the sun (looking healthier than most American humans), and then the road dips and the whole valley opens out, and I have, at least twice, nearly driven into a hedge admiring it.

Yes, that’s what really gets me. Not just that the drive is short, but that the drive is nice.

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Which brings me back to the neighbor at the gate.

An hour and a half is not a commute here. C’est loin. It’s a trip, and a trip gets an overnight bag. It gets discussed beforehand and reported on afterward, at length, to people who ask. If you’re going to hand over three hours of your one life to a car, the French position seems to be that you should get a hotel and a very good dinner out of it, and not just, for example, a washable cover armchair named ROCKSJÖN.

We still do the long drives now and then, for the thing you can’t get nearby, though far less often. And I’ve noticed we’ve gone a bit soft about it. On a trip to Paris this spring, we hit real traffic coming in (true gridlock), and we did all the correct things (a podcast, then music, then the tense silence of two people not saying anything about the traffic), and I could feel my shoulders climbing toward my ears.

That level of traffic used to be a regular Tuesday, and we’d absorbed it so completely that I would have told you, with total sincerity, that it didn’t bother me. Looking back now, I can say that it did bother me, but the difference is that I’d just never had anything to hold it up against.

Happy to have that now. :)

How to Commute Like a French Person (Without Moving to France)

Now, I realize there are few things less useful than the woman who moved abroad and came home with recommendations for everybody. The French people I know who do have long commutes are not ‘enlightened’ about it. They complain (they’re good at that), and then they go and eat lunch for two hours.

It was the geography that did most of the work for us, but something smaller shifted alongside it. We stopped treating the car as dead time to be survived at maximum speed. Nobody needs to move to a hamlet in France with a blinking pharmacy cross to do that, and I wouldn’t offer it as a traffic strategy anyway. These are free, and they work on a freeway anywhere.

Stop letting every podcast be about becoming a better version of yourself. You do not need to arrive at the office having optimized anything. There are people out there making beautiful hour-long shows about mushrooms, shipwrecks, the history of a single word, birds. Choose the birds sometimes.

Try sound instead of talking. Rain, or a forest at 4am recorded by someone with excellent equipment (and questionable sleep habits). It’s strange for about four minutes and then it’s just calming.

Build the playlist before you leave, and put things on it you’ve never heard. Turn the drive into a small act of discovery rather than a rerun. Maybe start with 10 unknown songs, and ask your friends or work colleagues for recommendations. No skipping for the first 30 seconds.

Take the pretty way when you can spare the extra eight minutes. Now, obviously don’t do this every time. Some days you need the freeway and a bad mood, and that’s a legitimate use of an afternoon. But the road past the reservoir exists, and Google Maps will never once suggest it to you.

And every so often, let a long drive be an actual trip. Pick the far thing, the aquarium two hours out, the town you’ve been meaning to see for six years, and give it the gift of an overnight bag and the good dinner. Let it be an occasion sometimes instead of an errand.

The French would never drive three hours for some Ikea dishes, and after three years here I’ve come around to thinking they might be right (though I would like it noted that the armchair has held up beautifully).

À bientôt,
Kamille

Once Upon a Castle is where I write about all of it: the neighbors, the language disasters, the small daily collisions between the life we left and the one we’re building in the French countryside. Free subscribers get two essays a month. Paid subscribers get two more, plus the Castle Diaries, which is the unglamorous working archive of restoring a château without fluent French, a contractor network, or any relevant experience whatsoever.

If this one made you look at your own commute a little sideways, there is a great deal more where it came from.

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Before I owned a castle, I did what any reasonable person does with a dream they’re fairly sure will never come true: I watched other people live it on television.

Specifically, I watched Downton Abbey. I watched Lady Mary ring a small bell to summon Anna, who would appear to dress her and do her hair. I watched Cora eat a flawless breakfast in bed, carried up on a tray by O’Brien, prepared downstairs by Mrs. Patmore, consumed while propped against pillows in a silk nightgown and matching robe, catching up on the day’s events before her feet had so much as touched the floor. I studied this closely, dreaming of such a life.

I’m here to tell you, it is not like that here at our château.

There is no Carson bringing the tea. No Tom to drive us into town. No Daisy to stoke the fires at dawn. It’s just the four of us: me, my husband Sean, and our two small children, rattling around a castle built more than three hundred years ago, along with the forest, the river, and the various woodland animals who were here long before us.

If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in a small château in rural France, restoring it one leak and one bluebell at a time. Castle Diaries is normally where paid subscribers go behind the scenes, but I’m opening this one up to everyone. Pull up a chair.

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The short version, for context: we left California a few years ago, rented a farmhouse in the French countryside while we figured out whether we actually liked it here (we did), and then, with careful planning and stubborn optimism, we bought a small French château. It has two pepperpot towers, a chapel hiding in the woods, a gatehouse that once housed the guardien, and a path that loops the whole property where the moat used to run (back when this place was a fortress and was poised for battles). One of the towers holds our spiral staircase. All of it, every stone and every leak, is now ours to bring back to life.

I do have turrets. What I do not do is throw a long golden braid out the window of said turrets so an evil witch can climb up it (although, now that I’ve spent some real time in an old castle, I’ve started to see that story differently. I strongly suspect Rapunzel’s tower stairs were simply broken (as tower stairs often are), or there was a mysterious leak nobody could get a contractor to come look at, and the hair was a temporary workaround that got badly out of hand. I understand her now. I, too, would rig up something deranged before I’d sit around waiting for the man to call back).

We do not spend our days being laced into gowns and gloves and jewels. Nobody does my hair (sadly). We don’t host neighboring aristocrats for tea, or dress for a staged hunt, or get bored on a Tuesday and ask the stable boy to ready the horses so we might frolic across the grounds. We do not have a night nurse who delivers the children, freshly bathed, for one kiss on the cheek after tea and then spirits them away again.

We do all of it ourselves. Which means that we are, as far as I can tell, every single character in Downton Abbey at the same time. We are the family, and we are the full staff. I am Cora (though in outlook and general spiciness, closer to the Dowager Countess) and also Daisy and Mrs. Hughes and Anna (I do dress my daughter and do her hair) and O’Brien and the nanny, and the list keeps going. Sean is Tom and Lord Grantham and Carson (and, let’s be honest, Mrs. Patmore, because he does all the cooking. Bless him).

Somehow we manage, and somehow we even love it, though I won’t pretend it isn’t a staggering amount of work.

Here is what a typical summer day actually looks like.

7:00 a.m.
Our rooster, Mr. Darcy, delivers his opening remarks. It is a hearty, full-throated cock-a-doodle-doo, and it is our alarm whether we like it or not. We get up and put on our finest château-wear. For Sean this is shorts and a t-shirt with a few holes and some stains, one he has formally designated as already ruined so he can stop grieving it while he works. For me it’s whatever’s clean, and a low ponytail I scrape together so fast I come out looking like a minor founding father (there is no one here to impress but the rooster) and no makeup, because there’s no time, and no point (again, the rooster). Then I dress our daughter and do her hair, which is to say I give her the same fast ponytail (Anna would be appalled).

7:15 a.m.
Sean heads out to the chickens (sometimes with the kids) to feed them and collect the morning’s eggs. The kids thunder down to the cave (the cellar, but “cave” is the French term and makes us all feel more medieval) to feed our two new kittens and clean the litter box (a chore they have very maturely taken up). Sean makes the kids breakfast: usually homemade yogurt he somehow produces from fresh organic milk from our neighbor with fruit, or eggs and veggies with toast (you cannot skip the toast here, it’s just too good), sometimes a fruit and veggie smoothie. I slip away to do computer work while I still have both hands.

8:30 a.m.
Comms. Oh the comms! The genteel château pastime of telephoning French people who do not answer. We call the roofer, for roughly the tenth time, about installing the septic ventilation, so that our front lawn will stop smelling like, well, our stuff. We call the plumber (for the umpteenth time) about the heater, which has been faulty since the day we moved in. We call around for a team to help with the next renovation phase, possibly the gatehouse. None of it is fairytale-esque. Just, what needs to be done for the castle.

9:15 a.m.
The pool crew arrives with a small team to fill in some of the trenches they’ve dug and open a new one to carry the rainwater over by the coach house. Sean makes them coffee and chats with them while helping with and overseeing the work. I take the kids: reading, art, an activity book, the occasional hostage negotiation.

10:00 a.m.
We all go outside! Probably the best part of the day. We water the orchard, Sean mows, we water the flowers in the coach house courtyard, and Sean burns off the weeds that keep pushing up through the gravel (relentless intruders). The kids harvest whatever the vegetable garden is offering that day and do lots of running around. Sean and I plant a new camellia, plus kiwis and blueberries and raspberries, and then we get down on our knees and rebuild the stone path in the kitchen garden (which was all but demolished when the septic was installed a couple of months ago).

12:00 p.m.
Sean makes lunch and we carry it outside. Usually chicken sandwiches, some cut up veggies, apples, and, on a good day, passion fruit kombucha (one of our favorite summer staples). We linger after we’ve finished, and the kids run around while we talk.

1:30 p.m.
I head to the coach house to do the unphotographable work: laundry, organizing and folding linens, setting ant traps (the ants have been relentless during this crazy heatwave), cleaning, and then clipping fresh hydrangeas for the vases, because we have guests arriving in a few days (and I’d like them to notice the hydrangeas and not the ant traps).

3:00 p.m.
Everyone comes inside and collapses. Short naps, or a quiet activity like reading, coloring, watching a YouTube video on the best way to remove centuries-old paint, or staring meaningfully at a ceiling beam (usually what I opt for).

4:00 p.m.
I write. This, in fact, is the slot where my Substack essays get written. Sean goes back outside for more maintenance and loads the van for a run to the déchèterie (the dump/tip) or to the donation drop, because this place came with a heroic amount of stuff to sort through (some of it treasure and a great deal of it not). The kids either help him or stage something elaborate indoors.

6:30 p.m.
Sean cooks dinner and the kids sometimes help, and I steal one more hour of computer work (currently: making the information signs for the coach house rental, a job I did not expect to swallow me whole). We eat at our old French dining table. Sometimes a salad with grilled chicken and ripe peaches, sometimes salmon with rice, and in summer, often, Sean’s homemade ice cream, vanilla or passion fruit or raspberry, depending on his mood and the available fruit. Delish.

8:00 p.m.
Cleanup, pajamas, teeth. The civilized machinery of the evening.

8:30 p.m.
More often than not, it is simply too beautiful outside to go to bed, so we head back out into the long summer light and run around a while longer. The light won’t last, and neither will they being this small. Le sigh.

9:00 p.m. (well… more like 10, in the summer months)
We take our time. A lot of reading, a lot of drawing, all four of us together in the bedroom. I usually fall asleep to an audiobook, always fiction. I have enough non-fiction in my real life.

So, no bell rang. Nobody came to turn down the beds or clear away the tray, partly because there was no tray, and partly because the only staff on the premises were already asleep with a chapter still playing. We’ll be up with Mr. Darcy in the morning. That’s the arrangement.

À bientôt,
Kamille

Castle Diaries is normally for paid subscribers. This one’s on the house. If you’d like the rest of it (the renovation decisions, what things actually cost, the parts I can’t always publish for everyone) plus two more Life in France essays a month, you can join us below. Free subscribers get the next chapter in their inbox either way.

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There’s a little sign that starts going up on doors around here in the third week of July. Fermé or fermeture annuelle. Some are printed, though most are handwritten and taped up crooked, with a reopening date in September that reads a bit more like a wish than a commitment. The boulangerie, the pharmacy, the dry cleaner, the bookshop, the little grocer, the man who was supposed to be building our pool. Gone, all of them, and all around the same time, like the whole country picked a date and I’m the only one who was out of the loop.

The first summer, I didn’t really get it. Now, I know to duck.

We found out the hard way last August, when we were in escrow on the château and trying to get a loan out of a French bank. I’d finally gotten one to take us seriously. Finally! They asked for documents and I would fire every one back within the hour of each request, aggressively American about the whole thing, and then asked when I might hear something.

“Well,” she said, “I’m off on vacation the first two weeks of August. But once I’m back, I can review the file.”

“Okay! No problem!” I said, with a forced smile I had to assemble from spare parts.

I waited, and then followed up mid-month, once she was back (all sun-kissed and refreshed). She told me she’d reviewed the file, but there was just one thing - she now had to bring it to her boss, who was, as of that week, off for the second two weeks of August. So, earliest reply would be the first week of September, probably.

I did the American thing and assumed there had to be a workaround. Some colleague standing in. Perhaps even just one other human being at that bank with a functioning email who was not, at that particular moment, on a beach.

“Everyone is on vacation in August,” she told me, kindly and with a hint of sympathy.

And that was that. Even the bank empties out, and apparently nobody stays behind to keep an eye on things while it does. It delayed the purchase of our forever home by about a month, and we waited it out like the obedient foreigners we are (eventually they said yes, and we got the castle. Ultimately a happy ending).

This year I went looking for a cleaner for the coach house. We’d just finished it and put it up on Airbnb, and I needed someone dependable for the changeovers between guests. Found a local company that does exactly this (cleaners just for gîtes), called them about August, and still somehow managed to be surprised.

“Well, most of them are on vacation in August.”

So August is the month everyone in France wants to come stay at your place, and also the month you can’t find a single soul to clean it, because the people who’d clean it are off being somebody else’s guests.

The pool has been its own saga. The heatwave really did slow things down, I’ll give it that. But the deeper problem was the calendar. It was supposed to be finished by the end of July, which felt safe right up until I remembered what July is followed by. A couple of small delays (which every project has), and there we were in August. August barely counts as a month on the work calendar here. It’s more of a...rumor. Nobody would be building a pool in August. Nobody builds anything in August. It’s the sort of thing every French person already knows and every American has to work out eventually.

July is the really fun part, actually. That’s the month when you keep running into your neighbors and everyone is buzzing with pre-trip energy, dying to tell you where they’re headed and for how long, and there’s a real chance you’ll be handed a phone and walked through the entire Airbnb they’ve booked, room by room. Then, the country takes a breath at the end of July and holds it, and comes back in September with fuller cups and more relaxed shoulders.

One person on holiday is one person on holiday. Sixty-some million of them at once is a different thing, and you can actually feel the energy of it, this drop in the collective blood pressure. The striving and the hustling just stop (so does the bank, apparently).

Once Upon a Castle goes out free twice a month, dispatches from our life in the French countryside as we live it. If you’d like these to land in your inbox, join us.

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The part I kind of love is that everyone is in on it, and nobody apologizes for taking the time. Nobody sneaks it, or pretends it’s a few sick days. It’s expected, employers included, and the law itself is on vacation’s side.

By law, French workers get five weeks of paid vacation, and it doesn’t stop at offering it. The law also makes you take a big continuous chunk in summer, somewhere between May and October. You are, on paper, legally required to relax. Imagine that! Back home (in the U.S.) there’s no such law. None. Zero required paid days off, and the average American takes around eleven days off (and even feels it’s a triumph using nine of them).

For us, the sweet surprise has been the magical vibes of a French summer.

I remember first discovering something different about the light here. It does not quit in the evenings. Still going at 9/9:30pm, and it’s very hard to send anyone to bed while this gorgeous light is putting on a performance. We don’t have the fancy summer camps I’d probably have defaulted to in California, so the kids have just been with us, all day, all summer, and it’s turned into one of my favorite stretches of the whole year. Family is coming this month to spend their holiday here, which means a lot of long dinners outside and, if the pool people ever resurface, a pool.

We even took a trip, which we hadn’t planned to do. Just a small one, to Brittany, eating our way through restaurants and swimming in the pool of the place we rented and making new friends who were visiting from across the world, all while getting a little sunburned. We almost didn’t go, because we’ve been so far down the renovation hole that a trip felt indulgent, almost irresponsible. And then not going started to feel wrong, which turned out to be the best peer pressure I’ve ever caved to. When in France.

The summer evenings we mostly spend on simple things. A bit of fishing in the river (results pending), walks in the forest, board games, long dinners outside. Some nights we just read out loud and draw at the table until 10pm, which is almost certainly bad parenting, and which the kids have loved more than most things we’ve actually planned for them.

The dry cleaner is still shut and I have no idea where the pool guy went, but I’m focusing instead on the relaxed shoulders and the light and the long dinners.

À bientôt,
Kamille

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I kept not letting myself type that sentence, the way you don’t say a baby’s name out loud until it’s really coming. But it’s (finally!) done. The beds are made, the books are on the shelves, and a couple of weeks ago we hosted our very first group of guests, who arrived as strangers and left having found the good knives and the one light switch that makes no sense. Nobody asked for their money back, which in this line of work I have decided counts as a standing ovation.

Needless to say, it went well. Better than we let ourselves hope, which felt like a small miracle given how we got here.

Because, well, we did the entire thing during the worst heatwave France has ever recorded. Ever.

I’m not being dramatic here. June 2026 was the hottest June ever measured in this country. Météo-France put most of the map under red alert, dozens of départements at once, the highest warning level they have. Towns all over the place blew past 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), and one afternoon Rennes hit 43, which is nearly 110. Forecasters kept comparing it to the deadly 2003 heatwave, the one older French people still talk about the way Californians talk about specific earthquakes. That was the weather we chose to carry four bedrooms’ worth of furniture through.

We are American, so of course we had already decided the coach house would have some air conditioning. This is not negotiable for us. It is possibly the most American thing about us, more than the peanut butter, more than the constant apologizing or oversharing. And for once our Americanness saved us (o say can you seeeee!) because we had ordered the AC units early, back before the heat actually arrived, purely out of habit.

Then, about halfway through, one of our units broke, and we realized we needed one more.

So Sean went to buy another one. Sold out. He tried the next store. Sold out. Every store within a hundred-mile radius, sold out (the way toilet paper was sold out in a very specific spring we all remember). Apparently the entire country had come to the same conclusion at the same moment, which is how I learned that the French have, at long last, converted to air conditioning. Centuries of insisting they didn’t need it, and then one June they all cracked at once.

Then I called one last store. A hardware store a few towns over. It rang once and went to a recorded message.

I laughed when I heard it. Then I cried a little.

This one’s for paid subscribers. On the other side: what that voicemail actually said, the full before-and-after tour of all four bedrooms, the kitchen, the courtyard and the game room, the piano that arrived at 104 degrees, and the injury my husband still won’t discuss. Paid subscribers also get the coach house direct booking link before anyone else. Upgrade and come see what we did.

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A few weeks ago I made a phone call that rattled me, and not for any of the reasons a phone call usually rattles a person.

We still own a small property in California, which we rent out as a vacation rental. The glass in one of the windows had cracked, so I looked up a local glass company and dialed the number, already bracing. I don’t know what I was bracing for. I think my body just braces now before phone calls, out of habit.

A woman answered. She was warm and clear. She called me honey, with a little Southern curl. She understood the problem before I even finished describing it. She told me what it would cost, when they could come (an actual date and time), and what I needed to do, which was nothing. The whole thing took four minutes. I hung up and stared at Sean and said, out loud, with the astonishment of a woman who has seen a miracle: “Wow. That was so easy.”

And then I sat with the strangeness of that. Because there was a version of me, three years ago, who would have made that exact phone call and thought absolutely nothing of it. Booking a glass repair was not, back then, a candidate for the highlight of my week.

This is what France has done to me. It has made a competent phone call feel like Christmas morning.

Now don’t worry, this isn’t a sad post.

This is not the one where the American abroad tallies up everything she gave up and dabs at her eyes with a linen napkin she bought at a local brocante. And it’s also not the one where everything is bluebells and warm baguettes and I pretend the hard parts don’t exist.

They do.

The life we chose here is, in a lot of concrete and unglamorous ways, harder than the one we left. I am saying that out here because the pretty photos don’t. But it’s a choose-your-hard situation. Every life is hard somewhere. You just get to pick where.

We picked here. Let me show you the math.

The things that America made easy

America is, among many other things, a masterpiece of convenience, and I did not fully appreciate this until I no longer had it.

In America, the world comes to your door. Amazon arrives the same day, sometimes before you’ve fully changed out of your pajamas. Whole Foods delivers your groceries while you’re on a call. You can buy anything, in bulk, in a single trip, and it will keep for weeks, because a strawberry in America has been engineered to endure.

You can call a company and a pleasant person will answer and solve your problem in your own language and it will cost you four minutes.

You can, in short, live at a certain speed. The systems are built for it. The websites work. The customer service exists. The whole country hums along on the assumption that your time is precious and should not be wasted, and there is something quite wonderful about that, something I miss more than I expected to.

We gave the convenience up knowingly. But that easy phone call had one more thing going for it I haven't mentioned: it was in English. Which brings me to the part of this life that's hard for reasons we brought on ourselves.

The language (which is entirely our fault)

Here is the thing nobody likes to admit about moving to a country whose language you do not speak: it is your fault, and it stays your fault.

We could fix this. We could! We could, in theory, sit down and master the damn language and remove 90% of the friction from our daily lives. That we have not fully done so is fully on us. In our defense, we have been mildly busy: raising two small children, being our own bosses, building a new life, and now renovating a château (which is not, in fact, easy peasy lemon squeezy). But the language is the big one, and it puts us at a disadvantage.

For a long time, every phone call here was a miniature torture session. Fumbling, misunderstanding, the panic of realizing the person on the other end has asked you a question and is now waiting. My greatest rhetorical achievement in French for most of our first year was begging people, in broken conditional tense, to please just send me an email. The French phone call is its own genre of humbling, and I have starred in many episodes.

So when that woman at the California glass company answered the phone and simply helped me, in a language I could fully understand, my whole nervous system didn’t know what to do with itself.

But somewhere along the way, without noticing, I got braver. I now pick up the phone and dial a French number knowing it will likely be a small train wreck, and I do it anyway. That’s new. The old me needed things to be easy in order to do them. This me has made peace with the wreck. And we’ve improved with the language, probably more than we give ourselves credit for. It’s still not easy. but I’ve stopped needing it to be.

If you’re new here: I’m Kamille, an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband Sean and our two kids. Once Upon a Castle is where I write about the life, the renovation, and the ongoing education of two Americans who thought they knew what they were getting into. Subscribe to follow along.

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Which brings me to the part I don’t usually get into: the actual trade, the one the pretty photos don’t show. What we gave up and what we got. The money, the exhaustion, the extravagant Christmas caroling costume I once pumped breast milk under in a parked car, why my berries now stage a full science experiment on the counter, and the reason we’d choose this hard all over again.

The rest is for paid subscribers.

Paid subscribers get four posts a month: two Life in France essays like this one, and two Castle Diaries renovation entries from inside the walls. Come stay awhile.

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It’s the Fourteenth of July again.

I first wrote this one last Bastille Day, back when roughly twenty people were reading Once Upon a Castle, and I’m fairly sure half of them were related to me. It remains one of my favorite things I’ve written here, and almost nobody saw it. So today I’m setting the table again, with a lot more chairs.

Here’s what a decade of American Fourths taught me, and what one holiday on a French beach undid.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I lived in Venice Beach, California, a place where the Fourth of July arrived each year like a sunburned tidal wave of shirtless barbecues, frat-party energy, cheap beer, and more than a few loud declarations of independence. Rooftop parties blasted music. Roman candles were launched with questionable aim. Someone always ended up doing something patriotic and deeply ill-advised on a skateboard or electric scooter. It was loud, it was lawless, and it was about as subtle as a bald eagle crashing through a Monster Energy ad. Unmistakably American.

I used to brace for it every year. The endless fireworks, the gridlocked beach traffic, the terrified dogs, the babies (mine included) waking up screaming at 2am from yet another illegal explosion launched off a neighbor’s rooftop. And the day-after cleanup, which looked like a Bud Light commercial had detonated on the sidewalk.

New here? I’m Kamille, an American raising two kids in a French château and writing it all down, one holiday at a time. Come along, it’s free.

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Enter: le Quatorze Juillet

Here in France, the national holiday is Bastille Day, or le Quatorze Juillet, as it’s actually called by the French. It commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789 and the symbolic start of the French Revolution. Think of it as France’s version of the Fourth, only with fewer flags and considerably less shouting.

Each year, we spend it in Étretat, a stunning town on the northern coast famous for its cliffs and much less famous for its complete lack of drunk people yelling “FREEDOM!” into the night. And during our first trip there, the contrast just about knocked me over.

Start with the tone. It’s the national holiday, and nobody is dressed in French flag garb. Not one tricolor outfit, unless it happened by accident. No red-white-and-blue face paint, no truck flags, no themed sunglasses. I think we were the only people even attempting to color-coordinate (American habits die hard).

That doesn’t mean the French aren’t proud. Oh, they are. They are deeply proud to be French. They just don’t yell about it. They don’t chant it. They don’t need to. The evidence is in the lifestyle, the UNESCO-recognized cuisine, the vacation policy, the universal healthcare, and the fact that people all over the world will climb over each other to photograph a single croissant on a tiny Parisian café table. France doesn’t have to shout to prove the point.

We started that Bastille Day with an early-morning adventure, using the low tide to slip through a secret cave to a hidden beach on the far side of the cliffs. It was surreal and magical. Definitely an experience we won’t forget.

After that, a slow lunch, a hike to the top of the opposite cliff, a wander through gardens strung with art installations, ice cream, and a long lingering dinner. Then we joined the crowds gathering on the beach, not for a rave, but to watch the fireworks unfold across the sky and down into the ocean.

And when it ended?

Nothing. No chaos. No rogue fireworks. No one drunkenly lighting off M-80s at midnight. Just quiet. We went to bed. The children stayed asleep. The dogs stayed calm. Nobody’s car alarm went off. It was, hand to heart, the best night’s sleep I have ever had on a national holiday.

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As for the Fourth of July, we kept that one small too. We stayed home at our French farmhouse, made homemade red, white, and blue ice cream (vanilla, raspberry, and blueberry, if you’re curious), and lit a few sparklers with new neighbor friends. No flags. No frat boys. A little nostalgia, a few smiles, and an enormous sense of relief.

It’s not that I don’t love America. I do, probably more than I realized before I had this much distance from it. I just don’t miss the noise, or the 2am explosions, or waking up to a lawn that looked like the aftermath of a beer commercial.

Today it happens again. The sky over some French beach will fill up, everyone will watch, and then the whole town will simply go home and go to bed. So will we. Not a single dog will lose its mind.

Merci et à bientôt ✨
-Kamille

If you’re new here: I’m an American writer restoring a 17th-century château in rural France with my husband and two kids, and Once Upon a Castle is where the whole muddy, magical story lives. Two free essays a month, four per month for paid subscribers. Pull up a chair.

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Restack this if it made you feel something (that’s genuinely how new readers find this little corner of the internet). Or share it with someone who:

• Still has mild PTSD from rogue neighborhood fireworks

• Has always wondered what Bastille Day is actually like

• Thinks patriotism could use a rebrand

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P.S. Paid subscribers get four posts a month, including Castle Diaries, the renovation journal I keep from inside the walls. And next week’s paid post is a little more personal: why we chose a life harder than the one we left, on purpose.

At my daughter’s dance performance last month, I spent most of it watching her watch the teacher.

Not the choreography. Not whether she hit the counts or kept the beat. Her face. She kept her eyes locked on the teacher at the front almost the entire time, the way you’d watch a magician you were determined to catch in the act.

The other little girls did what small children do at a recital, which is roughly forty percent dancing and sixty percent scanning the audience for their parents, waving, adjusting their tutus, occasionally forgetting there was a routine happening at all. My daughter was somewhere else. She was studying.

I’ve seen the same thing in my kids’ jiu jitsu class. Both of them. There’s a moment in every class where the instructor kneels down to demonstrate a move, and I can find my two children in the group without trying, because they’re the only ones with their eyes glued to his hands. The other kids fidget, whisper, pick at the mat. Mine watch like there’s going to be a test.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to convince you that my kids are gifted and the rest are hopeless. The other children get the moves. They're bright, they're quick, they pick it all up fine. They're just doing it with their ears, catching the instructor's words while their eyes drift off, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do when the words happen to be your own language. That's the shortcut my two didn't have for a long time. Nobody ever handed them the option to look away.

We moved to France when they were two and four years old. Ten days after we landed, both of them started at an all-French school, where not one person, teacher or child, spoke English. I would love to tell you this was a gentle, carefully phased, expert-approved decision. It was not. It was the deep end. We threw them in, and then I drove home and spent the afternoon fairly certain I had broken them.

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When you're very small and dropped into a room where you understand nothing, you can't coast. You can't half-listen and catch up later, because there is no later, there's only the next thing you also don't understand. So they did the one thing still available to them. They watched. If they couldn't follow the words, they read everything else instead: the hands, the faces, where the other children were heading, how loud a voice got and why. They turned their eyes up to full volume, because sight was the only sense that still worked.

Their French is excellent now. Better than mine, a sentence I say with a completely straight face (and a small internal scream).

But the watching never switched off. It's in them now, the way a first language gets into your bones. So my children read people frighteningly well. Well beyond what their ages should allow.

During the heat wave last week, Sean was low. The garden was taking a beating, it was too hot to do the outdoor work he actually loves, and he was discouraged in the way that’s specific to him, which is to say invisibly. My husband does not announce his moods. He doesn’t complain. Whether it’s a virus or something heavier that’s settled on him for a while, you have to know him for years to catch it, and even then you mostly miss it. I have missed it plenty of times myself.

At dinner, I caught our son watching him. Not saying anything. Just watching, the same way he watches the jiu jitsu instructor. Later, brushing his teeth, he turned to me and said, “Daddy’s sad about something. I can see it in his face.”

He was right. Of course he was right. He had read it off a man who gives almost nothing away, across a dinner table, at five years old.

It isn’t only with Sean. They clock it in strangers, in teachers, in their family members over a grainy video call. They catch a shift in someone’s face before a word has been said about what’s wrong. They’re working off hand gestures and posture and the exact volume of a sentence, the whole channel of information the rest of us mostly stopped reading the moment we could rely on words to do it for us.

I didn’t give them this. I couldn’t have if I’d sat down and tried. It’s the accidental souvenir of a French village school and parents who made a big decision in a bit of a panic and then panicked some more in the car afterward.

Sometimes now I catch myself at the edge of a class, watching them watch, and I think about the version of me from three years ago, white-knuckling the steering wheel, convinced she’d ruined everything. She’d be relieved. She’d also, I think, be a little annoyed that the thing she agonized over for months went and turned out fine without her.

We're an American family raising two kids in a small château in rural France, and I write it all down here twice a month, free. The renovation, the forest, the chickens, and the slightly reckless decisions like this one. If you'd like the next one to find you, come along.

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And I understand the question, because I asked it too, quite obsessively, for about a year before we moved. I had spreadsheets. I had tabs open comparing the prices of butter, gas, and housing. (The butter situation alone could be its own post, but I’ll spare you.) I wanted someone to just tell me the number, similar to the way you want a doctor to give you a diagnosis instead of “let’s run some tests.”

Here’s the honest answer, the one nobody gave me, and the one I’ve now lived inside for long enough to trust: it depends entirely on what you’re buying.

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Because France will silently bankrupt you on some things and then hand you others, the big things, the things that actually shape a life, for a fraction of what they’d cost back home in the U.S. And once you understand which bucket is which, the whole picture flips.

Let me show you what I mean. We’ll start with the part nobody warns you about, which made me slightly cranky for the first six months.

The Small Things Will Get You

Stuff is expensive here. Things. Objects.

If you want to order something off the internet - a lamp, a standing mixer, a Dyson vacuum - you will pay for it, and then you will pay again. France has real import duties and shipping costs that make the casual Amazon-it-by-Tuesday lifestyle expensive and, frankly, a little embarrassing. The thing arrives, you do the mental currency conversion, and you feel like a person who has made a poor decision.

In Los Angeles, I could fill a cart with eleven things I didn’t need at 11pm and have them at my doorstep before I’d had a chance to regret it. Here, that same impulse comes with a tax (a literal one), plus a shipping fee that sometimes costs more than the item. Furniture shipped in, electronics, the random household whatever, a lot of it runs higher than the American equivalent.

And it isn’t only objects. Gas will make your eyes water, priced by the liter (which softens the blow right up until you do the math and realize you’re paying close to double what you did in the States). The autoroutes come with tolls that really stack up over a long drive. Driving here is not the cheap part.

But you also don’t have to drive nearly as much, because the trains actually work. They’re fast, clean (enough), frequent, and they go everywhere, big cities a couple of hours apart, tiny villages on a sleepy regional line, the whole country stitched together by rail. The thing America typically priced as either a luxury or an impossibility is, here, just the slightly boring way everyone gets around.

For about a month I had minor tantrums about the prices of the things. And then I started to suspect it might be doing me a favor.

Because the friction can actually be helpful. The system is gently, bureaucratically discouraging me from buying eleven things I don’t need at 11pm, and it turns out I don’t actually miss the eleven things. (Well, most of them.)

But then there’s the part that makes even the things bucket more complicated than “France is pricier,” and it’s the part the spreadsheet version of me never accounted for.

Unless You Buy Them the French Way

France solved the expensive-objects problem about two hundred years ago, and the solution is that the entire country is one enormous, rotating, gorgeous secondhand sale.

The brocantes. The vide-greniers (literally “empty-the-attics,” which is the most charming possible name for a yard sale and tells you everything about how the French feel about clutter). Nearly every weekend, in nearly every region, people lay out the contents of their grandmother’s house on folding tables in a field, or in front of the village church or castle, and you walk through it with a coffee, and you buy a hand-blown glass decanter for the price of a sandwich.

I once wrote about a chair. A beautiful, curved, vintage rush-seat chair I’d been admiring on the website of a very tasteful Los Angeles site selling French treasures, where it was listed at nearly $300. Months later, at a brocante forty minutes from our house here in France, I found a set of four of its nearly identical French cousins, propped around an old French table.

They were €25. For all four of them.

Sean carried them to the car with the rare smugness of a man whose wife had, for once, come home with a bargain. I let him revel in the smugness.

So the small-things bucket is real, but it has an escape hatch, and the escape hatch is more beautiful than the thing you were going to buy new. You just have to be willing to dig, to spend a little more time, to travel a bit, and to drive home with someone’s deceased grandmother’s chairs strapped to the roof.

Now. The big things. This is where it stops being close.

This is where I open the books. Everything below, the $6,000 question, the school that costs less than a dinner out, the house that changed our lives, is for paid subscribers. If you've been curious what this life actually costs, this is the post that answers it. Upgrade to read the rest, and to get every Castle Diaries and the deeper essays I keep behind the curtain.

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What nobody warned me about were the small things. The ones you can’t find on a “Moving to France” checklist because they’re too specific, too odd, too subtly wonderful to make the official briefing.

About a month ago I wrote about ten small French things that still feel like magic, and you loved it, which tells me I'm not the only one collecting these. Here are ten more that snuck up on me, the ones too specific for the official briefing.

1. The eggs are not in the refrigerator. Anywhere.

The first time I reached for eggs at the grocery store and found them sitting on a regular shelf, room temperature, next to the flour, I assumed something had gone terribly wrong. A power outage. A forgetful stock boy. A French health-code situation I did not want to be a part of.

No. The eggs here just aren’t refrigerated, because they’re fresh enough and unwashed enough that they don’t need to be. We have our own chickens now, so most days this is a non-issue (the eggs come from approximately forty meters away). But every so often we hit a baking streak, or company arrives, and I find myself buying a carton off a warm shelf like a local (which I apparently am now).

2. You’re allowed to keep the bread that’s already going stale, and the moldy berry is your problem.

In Los Angeles, we did Whole Foods deliveries for a while. Once I opened a carton of raspberries and found exactly one with a spot of mold on it. I reported it (to Amazon, because that’s who we placed the orders through) and received a full refund for the entire carton. The whole thing took four minutes and felt like justice.

Here, the bread you buy in the morning is a rock by the day after tomorrow, because there’s nothing in it pretending otherwise. You buy it, you eat it same day or the next, that’s the arrangement. And the berries? I once carried a half-moldy carton of blueberries up to the man at the boutique organic shop here in our little French village, pointed at the offending berries, and waited for my apology.

He looked at me, and then looked at the berries. “Oui, c’est normal,” he said. Yes. Normal. Toss the bad ones, eat the rest with your lunch, why are we still talking, madame?

I’ll get there.

3. The pharmacy is where you go to be taken care of, not just to pick up your meds.

Early on, my son had a cold, so I did what any prepared American does: I googled the French equivalent of Tylenol Cold, marched into the pharmacy, and asked for Doliprane like I was ordering at a drive-through.

The pharmacist did not hand me a box. She asked - what was it for? A cold. What were the symptoms? I listed them. How old was my son? I told her. Then she went off down the aisles and came back with three different things, one for each symptom, and walked me through every one in a low, calm voice that made the whole exchange feel less like a transaction and more like a small ASMR consultation. A saline spray for his nose. An herbal cough thing. Liquid Doliprane for the fever.

And the boxes are small. Five to seven days’ worth, because the assumption is that you will get better. No Costco bottle of 500 tablets. France gives you a little, because a little is what a passing thing requires. They do this with food too, among other things.

4. The stone walls are the air conditioning.

Our first canicule (the gloriously medieval-sounding French word for heat wave), I panicked and ordered one of those ugly portable A/C units off Amazon, the kind with the elephant-trunk tube you wedge out a window. The temperature climbed into the 90s. We ran errands, came home sweaty and braced, and I walked through the door of our 300-year-old farmhouse fully prepared to crank the thing to maximum.

It was cold inside. Truly cold. I asked Sean if he’d turned the unit on before we left. He hadn’t. We checked. It wasn’t on.

The walls are that thick. They just hold the cool the way they’ve held it for three centuries. (Winter is a different conversation, and we survive it, barely.) Just last week I stepped into the coach house we’re getting ready to rent, it was 91 degrees outside, and within a few minutes I was putting on a wool sweater. In June. Inside.

5. In autumn, the men with guns are a scheduled event.

We arrived in August. By September, a text came from our landlord: Don’t walk in the forest today. It’s La Chasse. Shortly after, gunshots. I called, mildly alarmed, and learned that a group was hunting wild boar on the property, which is both a sport and a public service here, since the boar are everywhere and they destroy crops and agricultural land.

Later I looked outside and saw several men in full orange regalia, hats and vests and serious faces, with hunting dogs, parked directly next to our car. La Chasse is its own institution, taken very seriously by the people who do it, down to the last button of the costume. When La Chasse is on, you stay inside, you don’t wander into the trees, and you certainly don’t interrupt. Nobody warns you that “stay out of the forest, the hunt is on” will become a normal autumn text in your phone, right between the school schedule and the boulangerie hours.

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6. The cow manure is a love language.

We live surrounded by fields and pastures. Before we moved, I really wondered how I’d feel about that, and I’ll be honest: sometimes, depending on the season and which way the wind is going, you smell it. The manure. Spread across the crops.

But here’s what I didn’t understand until I’d spent a few seasons downwind. None of this is waste. The manure goes back into the soil to grow the enriched feed for the animals, around and around, and the whole countryside runs on these small exchanges. The farmer comes and mows your field and keeps the hay to feed his horses through winter. Someone brings their sheep to graze a neighbor’s overgrown patch, and now the sheep are fed and the field is mowed and no money changed hands. Farming here isn’t the industrial machine I knew of from back home. It’s family-owned, everywhere you look, deeply respected, and woven into daily life without a single strange connotation attached. So yes. Sometimes it smells. I’ve made my peace, and then some.

7. Cheese is dessert, and I owe my mother’s friend an apology.

When I was about eleven, a friend of my mother’s took me to a fancy restaurant for my birthday. At dessert she said, “Oh, I’ll order,” and proceeded to order a cheese log. A cheese log. I was a child raised on orange cheddar and string cheese, sitting there having pictured a slice of New York cheesecake or, at minimum, a fancy cookie, and instead a wheel of cheese arrived to mark the happy end of our meal. I was devastated. I remember it vividly, the betrayal of it.

Well, I get it now. In France, cheese is sometimes the treat, the thing you close the night with, treasured enough to stand in for the sweet. I still love a crème brûlée. But every so often it's a small thrill to end the night the way that once horrified me at 11. The cheese log finally has my full respect. It just took twenty-some years and moving to France.

8. The dark stays dark, and you can see everything.

I knew the countryside would be dark, with no light pollution, and the whole sky alight with stars each night - the type of dark where you tip your head back standing at your own front door.

What’s specifically different here, at least in our village, is that the streetlights run on a timer. In the depths of winter they don’t come on until 8:30 in the morning, which means you can stand outside at 8:15, in a village, under a full sky of stars, waiting for the school bus.

I don't know why they're set that way. Energy savings, maybe, or nobody's bothered to change them since 1994. Whatever the reason, it buys you a few more minutes of stars before the day starts, and it makes the school run feel faintly like a night mission.

9. The property has a night shift, and we’re not on it.

Some of this isn't French so much as rural, and I know that. A remote corner of the world with enough trees and dark will hand you wildlife wherever you are. But I came from Los Angeles, where the wildlife was coyotes eating small dogs and a raccoon that once held our trash cans hostage. So when the night-vision camera we set up out of pure curiosity gives back a full parade of magical woodland creatures (foxes, deer, badgers who look exactly as ridiculous and adorable as you'd hope, owls, rabbits going about their rabbit business at 3am), I take it personally, as a gift.

And then there are the things that simply grow here without anyone’s permission. There’s a cherry tree down by the river that I’m about 98% certain no one planted, and it’s strong as ever, tall and entirely self-made. We didn’t put any of this here. It was here. We’re just lucky enough to get to watch it, and now care for it.

10. Going from vous to tu is a graduation, and you don’t get to set the date.

This one undid me a little. French has two words for “you,” the formal vous and the familiar tu, and when we arrived I was baffled by the whole system. When do you switch? How do you know? Is there a ceremony?

What I’ve learned is that the switch means something, especially for us (the obvious outsiders). Moving from vous to tu tells you exactly where you stand in someone’s life, how much warmth, how much familiarity, how much you’ve slowly become part of things. We almost never make the jump ourselves, because we still don’t feel qualified to know the moment. But when someone does it to us, it lands like an achievement. Like a door opening.

It can happen with anyone, and faster than you’d think. We brought our former postman, Olivier, a fresh pain au chocolat from the kitchen now and then in our first months, and stopped to chat whenever he came by, and within weeks we were on tu. And just after we moved into the château, a neighbor we’d never met came to the door to tell us when we’d be coming to her house for our introductory visit (also not optional, also wonderful). The next time we saw her, she told us to use tu.

We did. We do.

À bientu,
Kamille

This is the free side of the château: the eggs, the stars, the man unbothered by my blueberries. There's also a paid side, where I go deeper into the renovation itself, what's breaking, what it costs, what we've found behind the walls. Either way, I'm glad you're here. Subscribe free below, or upgrade if you want the whole unfiltered story.

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If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château, and currently learning that nothing here happens on the timeline you imagined. Paid subscribers follow the renovation in real time in Castle Diaries, which is where this one lives.

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About a week ago, Sean and I stood in the middle of the coach house, surrounded by half-built furniture and cleaning supplies and a green carpet I have personally declared a war crime, and looked at each other, and I said:

What have we been doing this whole time?

We have lived at this château for six months. Six months. And we are only now, in a sweating panic, trying to get the coach house ready to rent in July. If we had started the day we arrived, we would be finished. We would be sitting in lawn chairs. We would be relaxed people.

Instead, we are people surrounded by Allen wrenches, cardboard boxes, and years of accumulated dust and grime.

Here is how we got here.

The plan that wasn’t the plan

When we bought the château, we knew we wanted to renovate the coach house eventually. We did not know in what order any of this would happen, because nobody hands you an order of operations when you buy a 17th-century building. You just start, and the building tells you what it wants, usually at the worst possible moment.

Early on, we decided the coach house should come first. A full renovation, done properly, to turn it into a place we could rent and actually support this life. Smart. Responsible. The kind of decision that makes you feel like an adult.

Then we met with the contractors and architects, and they explained, kindly, that the renovation could not begin until roughly seven months after we signed. Seven months of permitting and scheduling artisans before anyone so much as picks up a hammer. Which meant the real work might start this winter. Maybe early next year.

So we had a choice. Let the coach house sit empty and beautiful and earning nothing through an entire summer and fall. Or spruce it up enough to rent it now, before the real renovation, and make some income while we wait.

The coach house, it turns out, is in great shape. It needs updating (see: the carpet, my nemesis), and it has not been properly cleaned in years, so we have done deep cleans that I will not describe in detail out of respect for you. But the bones are good. It’s genuinely rentable.

So we decided: we rent it this summer, as-is-but-prettier, and renovate it properly after.

Which sounds simple. It was not simple, because of a decision we made on purpose, knowing it would make our lives harder.

We could have just thrown it all together

The easy version of this is obvious. Jump on Amazon. Fill a cart at IKEA. Furnish the whole place in a weekend with cheap things that look fine in photos, rent it for a season, then throw it all out when the real renovation starts.

We couldn’t do it.

Partly because it felt like a waste of money, buying a houseful of furniture we’d discard in a matter of months, then buying all new things after. But mostly because it felt like a waste of things. Furnishing a place solely with cheap, mass-produced things and then sending all of it to a landfill (or a charity shop, where it becomes someone else’s eventual landfill) is exactly the kind of disposable churn we moved here partly to get away from.

So we made the harder choice. We’re furnishing the coach house with pieces we actually love. The forever pieces. The ones that will stay through the renovation and beyond, because we chose them to last.

This is, to be clear, the slow and more expensive and time-eating choice. It is the reason we are in a mad dash instead of a leisurely stroll.

Here is where I take you inside the coach house, and show you what we’ve actually been building (and the piano we did not plan to buy, and the pool that nearly didn’t happen at all).

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Some are funny. Some are not. Most are about things I'd never thought of as American at all, until the question itself made it obvious that everywhere else, people simply do it differently.

Here are some of them.

If you’re new here, welcome. I’m Kamille, an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband and two children. Once Upon a Castle is where I write it all down. What you’re reading is partly free.

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The birthday party

For our daughter’s first birthday party in France, we went full American. We bought the wine, ready for the French parents. We cleaned the house (which mostly meant moving every visible pile into one room and closing the door on it). We set up extra chairs. We laid out enough food for a small wedding, because “birthday snacks” in the American dialect means a full dinner lightly disguised as crackers. We were ready for fifteen adults plus their children. We were so ready.

The first family arrived. The parents stayed in the car. They waved. The child got out, walked up to the door alone, and the parents drove away.

I decided it was a fluke. A scheduling thing. Then the second family did the same thing. Then the third. By the fourth I had stopped opening wine. By the sixth I was standing in my kitchen in front of three trays of charcuterie I had spent a morning assembling, doing the math. Did they coordinate this? Did we do something? Is our French worse than we feared? Have we offended a grandmother we haven’t met yet?

We found out that day that, in France, parents do not attend other people’s children’s birthday parties. The party is for the children. This is not a charming way of putting it. It is the literal job description.

When I explained the American version later, my French friends asked (in the tone of people conjugating a difficult verb), but where do the parents go when they’re at the party? Are they with the children? Yes. The whole time? Yes. They considered this. And they eat? Yes. The children’s food? Yes. And the cakes? Yes. One of them looked at her husband and said something I’m fairly sure was the poor things.

We were the poor things. Nobody had told us.

The smile

Sean has a wonderful smile. I say this objectively as his wife and somewhat less objectively as the woman who married him partly for it. He smiles at cashiers. At neighbors. At the man at the déchetterie who weighs our garden waste. At dogs. In America this is so unremarkable that the only way to stand out would be to stop.

A few months in, a French friend pulled me aside, glanced around once, and dropped her voice to the register reserved for things you're not certain you should say. My husband wanted me to ask you something, she said. He’s been wondering - why does Sean smile all the time? She searched for the word. Is he…making fun of us?

No! I said. Sean is just American.

I said it like it cleared everything up. It cleared nothing up. She nodded politely and did not believe me. Later a different friend, who had clearly been drafting this conversation for weeks, explained the local physics. Smiling at strangers reads one of two ways here. Either as weak, in which case the merchant charges you more, or as smug, in which case people assume you know something they don’t and are enjoying it.

You should smile less, she told Sean, kindly, the way you’d mention he had spinach in his teeth. It’s my New Year’s resolution, he replied.

He has not smiled less. He smiles at exactly the same rate. The only thing that’s changed is that we now serve it with a small side of explanation from time to time.

We should grab coffee

A French mother at the school gates told me she’d spent a semester in Los Angeles in her twenties. She talked about the Getty. She talked about the Santa Monica Pier. Then, with a confusion that had survived two decades fully intact, she said: but I couldn’t make friends. Everyone was friendly. Everyone said let’s grab coffee sometime. I never heard from a single one of them again. Is that normal?

Yes, I said. I’m sorry, but yes.

I want to defend us, because we do mean it. We genuinely want to grab the coffee. The problem is the coffee has to be scheduled three weeks out, and by week three the calendar has Tetris-ed itself into a shape where the coffee is losing to a deadline, a school pickup, and a dentist appointment. So the coffee gets bumped. The coffee always gets bumped. We should really do that soon becomes next time you’re in town becomes a like on an Instagram post six years later.

It’s a strange way to be friendly, she said, and she was right, and she was being friendly while she said it.

The drugstore

Same woman, same conversation, one more. My host family sent me to the pharmacy, she said. They sent me to a place called CVS.

I waited, because I could feel it coming.

It was not a pharmacy. There was medicine, yes. But also lawn chairs. Toys. A wall of things for your hair. A refrigerator of sandwiches. A refrigerator of beer. The pharmacist was at the very back, behind a counter, like she was in witness protection. I had to walk through the whole store to find her. I felt like I had wandered into the wrong building.

The French pharmacy is a genuinely different category of object. It is small and bright and almost whispery. A green cross outside, a pharmacist inside, and maybe forty-five carefully chosen items on the shelves, every one of them medical, most of them recommended to you personally after three pointed questions about your symptoms. You do not buy a lawn chair there. You do not browse. You describe what’s wrong, you’re told what to take, you pay, you leave. The whole thing takes four minutes and has a strange dignity to it.

The American CVS, by comparison, is a fever dream. I had stopped noticing this. I'd stopped noticing it so completely that the first time I walked into a French pharmacy, calm and bright and the size of a living room, I was the one who felt like I'd walked into the wrong building.

The scheduling thing

I’ll spare you the full version of this one, because I’ve already written a whole essay about how French appointments arrive pre-decided. I'll only say that when Sean, freshly landed and still half in California, sent a French acquaintance his Calendly link, the man wrote back, having apparently registered the link as a decorative element, with one line: I am available Friday at 14h00. That was the email. No slot to select, no buffer, no acknowledgment that any link had been sent (he clearly had not viewed it). He had named a time he would be free, on the assumption that Sean, if also free, would appear, and if not, would say so. He was, of course, completely right. We had brought a small piece of American scheduling infrastructure to a country that examined it, found it unnecessary, and returned it to sender.

These are the easy ones. The ones I can tell at a dinner and everyone laughs, including me, because nobody at the table has to defend the American version. The drugstore is the drugstore. The smile is a lot. We can all agree.

There’s another category. These come later, after the kids are in bed and the wine has been refilled and the conversation has drifted somewhere that, in America, you'd have been raised to steer it away from at a dinner party. They’re asked more carefully. Lower voices. They’re the ones where my friends actually want to understand, and where I don’t always have a good answer, and where I’ve heard myself start to explain my whole country and stop halfway through because I’d lost the thread of it myself.

Those are below.

The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers. It’s the half where the questions get harder and I get more honest: the one about my children’s schools that I answered faster than I meant to, the dinner where a French couple put down their forks, and the single question I have never been able to answer. Paid subscribers also get two extra essays like this each month, plus Castle Diaries, where I document the renovation in real time. If you’ve been on the fence, this is a good one to climb down on.

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We take the train a lot here. France makes it easy to: the TGV will fling you across the country at three hundred kilometers an hour while you eat a sandwich, and the regional lines connect even the small villages, and the whole thing is, by American standards, quite civilized.

I like the train, and I want to clarify that because what follows is three stories in which the train and I were not on speaking terms. All three are true. I have recovered from exactly none of them.

The Time the Train Left With My Husband On It

We were coming back from Strasbourg, where we’d been visiting my sister and her husband. We had a system. We always have a system, seasoned travelers we be. I would take the kids and the backpacks and duffel bags and get off at one door. Sean would go to where the big suitcases were stored and get off by that door. We had rehearsed this. We were professionals.

The train pulled into our stop. I got off with the kids. We stood on the platform. We waited.

It was a crowded day, where what seemed like the entire population of eastern France apparently also needed to disembark at exactly our station, and the crowd coming off Sean’s door was thick and slow, a river of people and luggage inching toward the platform. I watched the door. I watched the river of people. I watched the river keep flowing, and flowing, and then I watched the door close.

I would like to tell you I handled this with dignity. I did not. I left my children and our bags on the platform and I ran. I ran to the train and I started banging on the door with both hands as it began, slowly, to move. I was yelling. I’d like to say I was calling out, but I was yelling (screaming?), the way you yell in a film right before the credits, when the lover is being carried away on the train and the music swells. There was a SNCF worker on the platform and I was yelling at him too, that my husband was on the train, my husband was still on the train, in the tone of a woman reporting a kidnapping.

By now my kids had registered the situation. The train was leaving with their father visible inside it, and they were sobbing. A kind woman materialized to comfort them, which I only noticed later, because at the time I was fully occupied delivering my grievances to the SNCF worker, who looked at me with enormous gentleness and said, “Je suis désolé. The train has to leave on time.”

The train has to leave on time. In France, that is a point of pride, and the schedule does not bend for one American family. The train left on time. My husband was on it.

If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château and routinely humbling ourselves in public across the entire French rail network. Subscribe and come along.

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I called Sean. He was somewhere past the platform, and he explained between breaths that he had really tried, he had pushed toward the door yelling that his family was outside, that he had to get off, but everyone had their own bags and their own stops and their own agendas, and you cannot exactly leave two large suitcases on a departing train to go chase your wife. He had not made it. The doors had won.

So we made a new plan. I took a breath, redistributed the bags across both shoulders, and decided that for the next few hours I was going to be the kind of person who has this handled. The train's final stop was about an hour up the line. Sean would ride to the end, then ride the whole thing back, and I would collect him that night from the bus station near our village. Fine. Solvable. Except now I had every soft bag we owned, because Sean had only the rolling suitcases, which meant I layered myself in backpacks and duffels like a pack animal, like a donkey at the start of a long journey, and I herded two tear-streaked children into the station.

They were hungry. They had to pee. And I learned something I had managed to avoid learning for years, which is that I almost never travel alone with both kids, and there is a reason for that, and the reason is logistics. There is no older sibling to “just watch them for a second” while you buy a snack. There is just you, and two small people, and a quantity of luggage that requires its own postal code, and a daughter who needs the bathroom on the far side of the station.

I could not get all of us and all of the bags into a single station bathroom. It was physically impossible. So I did the thing every parenting instinct I own screams against: I scanned the little waiting area for the most trustworthy human available, identified an older woman calmly reading a newspaper, and asked her if she could watch my son for two minutes while I took my daughter to the toilet. She said bien sûr, of course, with the warmth of someone who has watched many children for many strangers. I speed-walked my daughter across the station with my heart going like a hummingbird, and it was fine. It was completely fine. He was exactly where I left him, with the nice newspaper woman, unbothered.

Then we went to the parking garage, and I discovered that Sean had the long-term parking ticket in his pocket. On the train. Heading the wrong direction.

So I did what any reasonable woman with two traumatized children and seven bags would do, which is squat near the garage exit like a raccoon until some innocent person walked out, and then lunge for the closing gate to slip us inside. I want you to picture this - four backpacks (two on my back, two on my front), three duffels looped around my neck and shoulders, two children with tear-streaked faces, one mother performing a heist on a parking structure. We found the car, which felt like a small miracle. We got to the exit, pressed the help intercom, explained the situation to a disembodied French voice, and were eventually released into the night.

I drove the kids the hour home. I fed them. And later that night, we drove out together and picked up their father from the bus station, returned to us by the same rail system that had taken him, only slower.

Everyone was safe. Everyone was fed. My children now know that their mother will, if pressed, break into a parking garage.

The Time I Walked the Entire Length of a Train. Twice.

You’d think I’d have learned to respect the train after that. I had not learned. I had merely become arrogant.

We were heading to Paris to catch a flight to California for a family visit, which meant we were traveling with the luggage of people who will be gone three weeks. Sean had already studied the platform and identified the exact spot where our specific train car would stop. He was confident. I was confident in his confidence.

I should explain something about French train cars, which is that they are labeled the way state secrets are labeled. The car number lives on a small digital screen that you can only read if you are standing directly in front of it at an angle known to physicists, and even then it’s faded, and the seat numbers inside are the same, hidden in tiny print in inconvenient places. Most trains have eight cars, with car 1 at one end and car 8 at the other, but which end is which depends entirely on the direction the train pulled into the station, so you have to check every single time, and the checking is exactly as easy as I have just described.

But again, Sean was confident. Our seats were in car 8, and we were standing where car 8 would open. The train arrived. The doors opened. We got on.

Sean went off immediately to find a luggage rack big enough for our suitcases. I took, as always, the backpacks and the duffels and the children, and we went to find our seats. There was a woman in one of our seats. This happens constantly. I smiled, showed her my ticket, explained politely that she was in my seat.

She looked at the ticket and said, kindly, “No. This isn’t your seat. You’re supposed to be in car 8. This is car 2.”

My heart sank to somewhere around my shoes. I called Sean and told him to start moving toward the opposite end of the train with the giant suitcases. And then I began the long march. The kids and I set off through every car, the entire length of the train, in the heat, in the crowd, while people were still settling in and stowing their bags, which meant that every car we entered required a small crowd of strangers to sigh and move their things out of the aisle so that this sweating American woman and her two grumpy children could pass. Between every car is an automatic connecting door that opens for roughly two seconds before closing, so the choreography was: hold the door open with one outstretched arm, send both kids through, let it close, reopen it, send myself through. Repeat eight times. It took almost twenty minutes.

We reached the very last car, the absolute opposite end. I found our seats. There were people in all four of them.

I pulled out my ticket again. I showed it to a woman. And she said, with great pity, “Yes, but you’re supposed to be in car 8. This is car 2.”

Wait. What?

I told her, no, this could not be car 2, car 2 was at the other end, I had personally just walked the entire length of France to get here. She looked at me in a way you look at someone who has had a small break with reality and told me, gently, that I had it backwards. Untrusting now, betrayed by the universe, I asked three other people around us. All three said the same thing. We were standing in car 2. Car 8 was at the far end. The end I had just come from.

I wanted to sob. If I had been alone I would have given myself permission. Instead I told the children we were going on another adventure, in the voice of a woman who has fully left her body, and I called Sean, who was on his own equally cursed journey somewhere in the middle of the train with the suitcases, by this point so far away he may as well have been in a different country.

We turned around and walked all the way back. And do you know who we passed on the return trip? The first woman. The one who had been sitting in my actual seat. The one who told me the exact wrong information. She saw me coming and called out, “Oh, désolée! I was wrong!”

I could not look at her. I could not.

The strangers in the cars, who had been mildly annoyed to move their bags for us the first time, were now deeply annoyed and also visibly confused, watching the same family promenade past in the opposite direction. What is happening with these people? Is this a traveling rail family? Do they simply enjoy this? Is the journey itself the destination for them?

But what I cannot stay mad about is the fact that it is confusing, and there really was a giant number “2” displayed inside our actual car 8, except it didn’t refer to the car at all. It was a number for something else, maybe the stop, maybe a code known only to SNCF and God. I had no one to blame but my own credulity. She was wrong and confident, and I’d taken her confidence as fact and walked a marathon on it.

What I learned, I learned permanently: trust, yes. Be open, yes. But verify. I took one stranger’s certainty and treated it as gospel, and it cost me forty minutes and most of my will to live. I have not made that mistake since.

The Time I Got Shushed in First Class

We bought first-class tickets once. The price difference for this particular route was about twenty euros total, and we decided to treat ourselves.

I should manage expectations: first class on these trains is not a different planet. It’s usually upstairs, with a slightly nicer view and slightly bigger seats. The ride was going to be almost four hours, so we settled in for the long haul and deployed the full arsenal to occupy the kids: coloring books, activity books, stickers, drawing pads, pens, snacks, drinks. The children were being, by any honest measure, lovely. They colored. They talked quietly to each other. My daughter hummed her favorite song under her breath while she drew.

Then I heard a shush.

I heard it once and didn’t place it. I heard it twice. By the third time I started turning around, because it had begun to dawn on me that the shushing was directed at us, which made no sense, because we were not loud people, we were a coloring family with a quietly humming child. I looked behind me. A young woman with a book, radiating irritation.

“Are you shushing my kids?” I said, irritated right back.

“I’m trying to read,” she said.

“They’re children,” I said.

I mean, come on. Are two small children supposed to maintain silence for a four-hour train ride? That is not a reasonable expectation in any country, and anyone who has ever had a child, French or American, knows it. After our little exchange the shushing stopped, but it was replaced by an upgrade: enormous, theatrical, full-bodied sighs every single time one of my children made a sound, including speaking.

We’ve since pieced together what happened. There’s an unspoken expectation in first class that it stay quiet, almost library-quiet, which we just did not know, because the first couple of times we’d ridden up there, there had been other families around us making exactly the same amount of human noise, and it had been completely fine. The difference this time was that there were no other families in our car. We were the only source of sound on the entire upper deck of this car, which made us the protagonists of one woman’s ruined afternoon. (Quiet in public is a genuine French value, and it's a hill I've already chosen not to die on elsewhere.)

So we made a decision, and it has held. We ride second class now. We have accepted that we are second-class people, and second class comes with a freedom first class does not: the freedom to speak, and hum, and exist, at the volume of a normal family, with no one nearby paying twenty extra euros for the right to be furious about it.

What I’d Actually Tell You Before You Get on a French Train

If you take nothing else from my suffering, take these. They are the field guide I wish someone had handed me before any of the above.

Split your luggage with the kids in mind, not the bags. Our old system put one parent with the rolling suitcases and the other with the kids and all the soft bags. It works right up until something goes sideways and the parent with the kids is also wearing four backpacks and three duffels. Whoever has the children should carry the least, because the children are the load. Everything else can be dropped, dragged, or abandoned. The children cannot.

Check which end car 1 is on. Every single time. The car you board depends on the direction the train entered the station, and the numbering reverses accordingly. The little digital screens are nearly impossible to read, so confirm before you commit, and do not start walking the length of the train on a stranger’s confident say-so. Ask three people first. I learned that one the long way.

Build in real platform buffer, and have a “if we get separated” plan. Trains stop briefly and leave exactly on time, on purpose, as a point of national pride. If your family is splitting between doors, agree in advance on what happens if someone doesn’t make it off: who goes where, who has the car key, who has the parking ticket. Especially the parking ticket. And keep your phones charged, because when it falls apart, and occasionally it will, the only thing that saves you is reaching the person on the wrong end of the train immediately.

If you’re traveling with young kids, skip first class. Pocket the twenty euros. First class carries a ‘quiet’ expectation that your humming, coloring, perfectly normal children will violate the moment your car happens to be empty of other families. Second class is louder, cheaper, and far more forgiving of the fact that you brought human children onto a train.

Pack the entertainment arsenal regardless. Coloring books, stickers, snacks, drawing pads. It may not stop a stranger from sighing at you, but it will keep your kids happy for hours, and a happy kid is the difference between a long ride and a long ride you’ll be writing about for years.

The train is still my favorite way to travel in France. I just check the car number four times now, and I never let Sean carry the parking ticket.

À bientôt,
Kamille

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There’s a distinction nobody warned me about before we moved here, and it took about six months of living in France to notice it, and another six to understand why it mattered.

America, in my experience, is nice. Aggressively, exhaustingly nice. “Love your dress!” “We should totally get together soon!” “Oh my gosh, your house is amazing.” The social currency of niceness is abundant and widely circulated, and most of it costs nothing and means approximately nothing, and everyone knows this, and we all participate anyway because the alternative is standing in awkward silence at a party, and we’d rather die.

France is not nice.

France will let you walk around with spinach in your teeth. Except, no, wait. That’s exactly wrong. France is the one that tells you about the spinach.

That’s the distinction. Nice is staying quiet so nobody feels uncomfortable, while kind is saying the thing, because the person deserves to know.

I didn’t fully understand this until France showed me what the other option looks like.

Before any of that, though, there was the avocado.

A few months after we moved here, I was at the weekly outdoor market, doing what I had done in every Whole Foods produce section for the previous decade: gently squeezing an avocado to see if it was ready. A man working the stand crossed the entire distance between us in approximately two seconds.

“Madame,” he said. “Non. S’il vous plaît.“

My French at the time was the kind of French that could understand a stern correction faster than it could understand anything else. I froze, mortified, with the avocado still in my hand.

“Ne touchez pas les avocats. Si tout le monde les touche, ils vont tous pourrir.“ Don’t touch the avocados. If everyone touches them, they all go bad.

I thought: how rude.

I was, briefly, the American who had decided the French market vendor was being unnecessarily aggressive about a piece of fruit. I put the avocado back. I considered leaving. I started workshopping the story I’d tell about this later.

Then he said, more gently: “Madame, c’est pour quand, l’avocat? Aujourd’hui? Demain? Le week-end? Je vais vous donner le bon.“

When would you like to eat it? Today? Tomorrow? This weekend? I will give you the correct one.

I stood there for a moment.

He was, of course, right. The system in front of me was better than the system I had brought with me. He knew his avocados. He had been ripening them for a living for probably longer than I’d been alive. And his logic was actually unanswerable: if every person who walked into the market that day squeezed every avocado looking for the ripe one, every avocado would arrive at its eventual buyer bruised, half-handled, and carrying the fingerprints of a dozen strangers. The American produce-paw is not a quality-control method. It’s just a slow communal degradation of food, performed with great confidence.

He, on the other hand, had a system. He asked when I wanted to eat the avocado, and he gave me the avocado for that day.

It was perfect.

I told Sean I had been corrected at the market and that the correction had been deserved. He said he was sure that would never happen to him.

A few weeks later, Sean was at the grocery store buying honey.

He was in line at the checkout, holding a jar of perfectly reasonable organic (bio) honey, when an older woman behind him looked at it, looked at him, and said: “Oh, non. Vous ne devriez pas acheter ce miel.“

Sean, who had not asked for an opinion on his honey, blinked.

“That’s not the local honey,” she continued, in the tone of someone correcting a small but important error. “The best honey is over there.” She pointed. Then, before he could respond, she reached out, took him gently by the arm, and said: “Venez. Je vais vous montrer.“ Come. I will show you.

She took him out of line and walked him across the grocery store. To a different aisle. She located the correct honey. She handed it to him. And then, because she had his attention now, she told him about the man who made it. Where he lived. The village. How long he’d been keeping bees. The fact that he loved his bees, which she said with the seriousness of someone reporting a medical diagnosis. She did not know Sean. But she had decided, on the basis of approximately four seconds of observing a stranger’s honey selection, that this required intervention.

Sean came home with the correct honey and a slightly stunned expression.

In America, a stranger commenting on your grocery cart is grounds for calling a manager. In France, it’s a public service. She wasn’t being nice. Nice would have been letting him buy the wrong honey and saying nothing, sparing them both the awkwardness. She was being kind. Sean was about to walk out of a French supermarket with subpar honey, and she had the information that could prevent it, and she gave it to him with both hands. Possibly literally.

That was strangers.

Then there were the people who actually knew us.

Below, paid subscribers get the rest of this essay — the lunch invitation that turned into a Christmas in Paris itinerary, the friend who showed up with a translator the day our son got sick, the QR code I scanned at my kitchen table that made me cry, the teacher who texted us photos every day for weeks, and a running list of things French strangers have told us, unsolicited and correctly, that we have not yet had room to share.

If you’re new to Once Upon a Castle, paid subscribers get six posts a month: two more essays like this one, two château renovation diary entries from inside the walls, and access to everything in the archive. Come stay a while.

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I’m writing this from a house whose septic system is currently being installed. The digger is outside. The trenches are open. There is mud where there used to be lawn. And somewhere beneath all of it, a team of French workers is trying to solve a puzzle that began long before we got here and is, frankly, weirder than anyone warned us.

If you read the last Castle Diaries, you know we were planning to leave the château’s septic alone. The wink-wink advice, the friend who said just wait until it breaks, the comforting French tradition of pretending the rule doesn’t exist until it inconveniently does. That was the plan.

The septic had other plans. Let me walk you through how we got here.

Sign One: The Bubbling

One day, someone (#someone) flushed a toilet on the second floor. Almost immediately, the toilet two floors below it began to bubble.

If you have never been in a house when a toilet started bubbling without provocation, I want to assure you that it is not a sound that fades from memory. It is the sound of something that should be moving in one direction moving instead in another. It is, in plumbing terms, the sound of an emergency politely clearing its throat.

That can’t be good, Sean and I said to each other, in the tone of two people who already knew it wasn’t good.

What it meant, we learned, was that the septic tank was full. Full enough that anything we sent into it had nowhere to go and was, instead, looking for alternate exits. The polite term is needs pumping. The accurate term is whatever you do, do not host a dinner party this week.

We called someone. We left a voicemail. We waited. They were, presumably, on vacation, as everyone in France is at all times. We held our breath (in more ways than one).

Sign Two: The Ceiling

A week or so later, my mom flew in from California, and my sister and brother-in-law (who live in the east of France) drove over with their new baby. We were all settled in the living room on the ground floor (the fire going, a glass of wine, the kids underfoot, the baby asleep, the works) while my sister was upstairs taking a shower.

And then, the ceiling started raining.

I want to be clear about what I mean by raining. I do not mean a weak drip. I do not mean a faint trickle. I mean a tropical-storm-style downpour, directly onto the sofa, of an amount of water that suggested the entire upstairs shower had decided to relocate. Sean and the kids grabbed every vessel in reach (bowls, large copper pots, a cast iron skillet, a waste bin) while I sprinted up two flights of stairs screaming my sister’s name with what I now realize was the full energy of a horror movie protagonist, while her infant was sitting downstairs, which I had failed to consider in the moment. (Sorry, baby. Sorry, sister.)

I found her mid-shampoo. She was alarmed. I told her to turn off the water. I escorted her, in a towel, down to my shower so she could finish. We called a septic pumping company.

This brings us to the truly French part.

The Tank That Nobody Could Find

The pumping team arrived, equipped and ready. They asked where the septic tank was.

We did not know.

This was, I will admit, a bit embarrassing, and a piece of information we had assumed someone would have given us at some point. We searched the papers from our purchase. Nothing about a tank location. We called our realtor, who confirmed cheerfully, with no real concern: Oh yes, the former owners didn’t know either. That’s part of why it’s non-conforme. It’s basically unknown.

I asked her where she thought it went, then. Where everything had been going. For years.

She said, equally cheerfully: It probably just runs straight into the river.

The river is beautiful. The river is the reason I have spent the last six months imagining the kids swimming in it, the kayaks the previous owners left behind getting actual use, picnics on the bank. The river was not, in that vision, also our septic output.

The septic, suddenly, became priority #1.

The Plan, and Why the Plan Did Not Survive

Replacing a septic system in France is not a project you just start. There is a process. You commission an étude de filière, a formal engineering study that determines what kind of system your property can support and where it should go. The study gets approved by SPANC, the local public office that regulates non-collective sanitation. (Yes, there is a French government body whose entire job is overseeing septic systems. Yes, this is incredibly French. Yes, I have learned to love them.)

Our study said: gravity-fed system, install behind the château, discharge toward the river side of the property. No pump needed. Relatively straightforward.

We got the approval. We hired the team, led by a man named Jérôme and the expert digger, Pascale. Excavation began.

The first thing they found was the old tank. Small and very old, and completely full. It had been sitting beneath our lawn for who knows how long, holding who knows how much, communicating with no one. The team removed it with the efficiency of people who have removed several of these in their careers. The mystery of where it had been was finally solved.

Then the real trouble started.

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. You’ll get: why the engineering study turned out to be wrong, the €3,500 decision we paused the entire project to think through, the discovery that our upstairs shower and sink were not connected to the septic system but to the rainwater drainage (yes, really), the ancient brick-and-flint stone trench the team found running toward the river that nobody can fully explain, and where things stand right now — still mid-installation, still mid-mystery.

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But every so often I'll be doing something completely ordinary, buying bread, walking past a house with a name on a small stone plaque, picking up the kids, and I'll have to physically stop and remind myself this is the regular Tuesday now.

It’s the small things that do it. This post is a list of ten of those things. The ones that don’t make it into the moved-to-France-and-everything-changed essays because they sound too tiny to mention. But they are not too tiny. They are, in fact, why I'm still here.

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1. Bonjour. Always. First. Before anything else.

There is a scene at the opening of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast where Belle walks through her little French village and everyone is popping out of windows and doorways calling bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, BONJOUR! at each other in a kind of escalating chorus, while she winds through them with her nose in a book. There goes the baker with his tray, like always...

That was not an exaggeration. That is my life now. I am basically Belle.

I may not have her innocent youth, and I am not in love with a hairy beast (well, kind of). But I do often have my nose stuck in a book (or my ear stuck in an audiobook, or my eyes…stuck in a Kindle? The phrase has not modernized well), and I am sometimes regarded by the locals as a little odd. To be fair, this is mostly for my Americanness rather than my bookworminess. The bookworm part they actually approve of.

You do not walk into a French shop and ask where the lentils are. You walk into a French shop, you make eye contact with whoever is closest, you say bonjour, and then you ask where the lentils are. If you skip the bonjour, the lentils will not be found. Sometimes the lentils will, in a dignified way, never have existed.

This applies everywhere. The bakery. The waiting room at the doctor. The school office. The post office. The hardware store at 4:55 on a Friday when everyone is already mentally on the weekend. You acknowledge the person before you ask the person for anything. Every time.

I love this so much I have started doing it back in the United States, where it makes me look mildly unhinged. A Whole Foods cashier in California once thanked me with the wary tone of someone politely declining a religious pamphlet.

The kid version of this is even better. At our village school, every child at pickup walks up to the teacher at the door, says au revoir, and is sent off by name. It takes about four seconds per child. Multiply that by every school day, from age three, and you start to understand why French teenagers behave the way they do. (I wrote about that part here.)

2. The bread. Just…chef’s kiss

I am not talking about a loaf of square bread sealed in plastic with the structural integrity of upholstery foam. I am talking about a round boule that you ask the boulangère to slice for you (tranchée, s’il vous plaît) and that she slides through a small machine in the back without breaking stride. I am talking about a baguette that you carry home under your arm and that is meaningfully shorter by the time you walk through the door, because you cannot help yourself, and neither can your children.

A friend of ours came to visit last fall. She’s diabetic and wears a continuous glucose monitor (one of those small white discs that lives on the back of your arm and tattles in real time). She ate baguette with us at lunch on her first day, the way you do, and then she pulled out her phone and just stared at it. Her glucose had barely moved. She told me it had never not moved like that in her 60 years of life. We sat there at the kitchen table looking at her phone like it was a magic eight-ball.

I cannot fully explain this. The bread is older. The flours are different. The whole supply chain is built around the boulangerie down the street rather than a factory in another time zone. Whatever the reason, here’s the lived experience: I eat bread every day, I do not feel like a bloated goat, I have not been visited by guilt in approximately two and a half years, and I would like to formally apologize to every premium loaf I dismissed for most of my adult life.

The boulangerie is the heart of the village. You go in the morning. You greet everyone. You leave with something warm. You are slightly more of a person than you were five minutes ago.

3. The friendliness (yes, really).

I know. I know what you’ve heard. I heard it too, for thirty-some years, and then I moved here and the rumor turned out to be mostly about Paris in August, mostly about waiters who simply do not feel they owe you a performance, and mostly leftover from a feud the French and the British have been running since before the invention of central heating.

What I have actually found, in our village and the ones around it: pharmacists who walk me through every obscure tincture like I’m a beloved cousin, teachers who do not care that I butcher chèvre chaud, neighbors who knocked on the door with a duck. I wrote a whole piece about this when we’d been in our current village for three months, and the short version of it is: if you say bonjour first and you try a little, you will be astonished how warm a country with a reputation for froideur can be.

4. La brocante. The whole attitude toward old things.

A brocante is a flea market, but calling it that is like calling a wedding a party. It misses what’s actually happening.

What’s happening is an entire culture that has decided, collectively, that old things are not embarrassing. A chipped Limoges plate is better than the new plate. An embroidered linen sheet with someone else’s grandmother’s initials in the corner is the sheet you want. The little brass bell, the dented copper pot, the silver fork with a slight twist in the tines from a hundred years of being washed by hand. All of it has value, because it has lived. It has history.

We bought a croquet set at a brocante last spring. It is one hundred and fifty years old. Some of the mallets have hairline cracks. One or two of the balls are missing entirely. We played with it on the lawn on Easter Sunday, with gaps mowed into the grass, and I have rarely been happier with a purchase in my life.

In America, it often felt like old was “a problem to be solved,” in furniture and in faces. Here in France, old is the feature.

Here is the other thing, which I did not fully grasp until I started living here.

When we lived in Los Angeles, I used to scroll through shops like Elsie Green and Amber Interiors and Olive Ateliers the way other people scroll through Zillow. I would look at a single wooden farm table for $4,200 and feel a kind of yearning that was not entirely healthy. I assumed the prices were the prices. I assumed this is what beautiful old French things cost.

They are not the prices. Let me show you an example.

Here is an oak dining chair currently listed on Olive Ateliers for $295.

Here is its near-twin, which I bought at a brocante about forty minutes from our house, in a set of four, for €25 total (yes, for all four).

That math is correct. The chair I am sitting in right now to write this cost approximately six euros.

I do not say this to drag the shops. Those shops are doing the actual work — sourcing, restoring, shipping, photographing, listing, marketing, and absorbing the customs nightmare that is bringing antique European furniture into the United States. The markup is the price of that work, and it is fair. I have used those websites to dream for years. I will probably use them again when I am back in California visiting and I want to buy a friend something small and lovely (like a French candlestick).

But living here, the math is different. The same objects are just...around. In barns. On lawns. At Sunday markets where the seller is also eating a sandwich. Old, in France, is also affordable, which may be the most magical thing about it.

5. The naming of houses.

Drive five minutes outside any French village and you will pass small stone plaques set into walls, hand-painted signs on gates, brass letters above doorways. La Maison Neuve. Les Tilleuls. Le Petit Moulin. La Roseraie. The new house. The lindens. The little mill. The rose garden.

Every house has a name. Not a number (although it usually has one of those too, at least on paper). A name.

I cannot tell you how much this changes the experience of looking for someone’s address. You are not driving to 47 Rue de Whatever. You are driving to the little mill. You are looking, in the dusk, for a sign that says Les Tilleuls and a row of lime trees. You arrive somewhere and you know what it’s called and the place has, immediately, a story.

Our château has a name, and every time we use it on a piece of paperwork, the person on the other end smiles slightly. Ah oui. Très joli. They have already imagined the house, and maybe the stories.

6. L’apéro. The whole social grammar of it.

The apéro is what happens between the day is ending and dinner has begun. It is the engineered pause. The cultural decompression chamber.

It is also, structurally, a small party that breaks out approximately one hour before dinner, requires almost no advance planning, and is governed by rules that I am still learning. There is a bowl of olives. There is saucisson sliced thin. There is something to drink that is not water but also not a full glass of wine, a kir, maybe, or a pastis, or a small glass of something cold. There are two or three little crackers per person, which everyone eats slowly while standing or sitting near each other and talking about nothing of consequence.

It can be casual. It can be elegant. It can be a folding table in someone’s driveway. It can also, and this is the great risk, last three hours, accidentally become dinner, and end with someone going inside to get a tarte they had thought they were saving for tomorrow.

The first time we hosted neighbors for apéro I made the rookie American error of putting out approximately four times too much food. They ate it all and then we still had dinner. I have since learned restraint. (See item nine.)

Halfway through the list, and a quick aside. If you're enjoying this, the easiest way to keep these coming is the free subscription, one essay a week, straight to your inbox, no algorithm in the middle. There's also a paid version for the readers who want the renovation diaries, the château tours, and the messier parts of building a life here. Either one is a kindness.

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7. Les grandes vacances. The national exhale.

Every August, France closes.

I do not mean this metaphorically. I mean entire businesses tape a piece of paper to the door that says Fermé pour les vacances. Retour le 1er septembre. I mean the family bakery, the family butcher, the hardware store, the family dentist. I mean the doctor and sometimes also the replacement doctor. I mean the bank branch and the post office and the place that fixes the dishwasher.

Paris empties (of locals). The coast fills. Whole families decamp to the same seaside town or countryside house their grandparents went to, and they go there every year for the rest of their lives, and their children’s children will probably go there, too.

The first August I lived through this I thought it was insane. Where are the people. Why is my pharmacy closed. Who decided this. The second August I started planning around it. The third August I closed my own laptop on July 31st, looked at it for a long moment, and went outside.

Vacation in the American sense, this is not. It’s the thing your real life is arranged around. A national agreement, renewed annually, that for one month nobody is going to pretend anything is more important than lunch.

8. The culture of discretion.

This one took me the longest to see, because the absence of a thing is always harder to notice than the presence of one.

French elegance, the actual kind, has almost nothing to do with what you can afford and almost everything to do with what you choose not to do. You do not over-explain. You do not over-decorate. You do not over-praise. You do not over-display. Nobody walks into a room and announces what they paid for the thing they are wearing (unless it was a bargain, and in that case it’s time to brag). Nobody mentions the brand.

If something is beautiful, it does not need to announce itself.

I noticed this most clearly at a friend’s house, an old farmhouse with stone walls and beams the color of dark tea. The kitchen had one extraordinary copper pot hanging from a hook. One. Not seven. Not a pegboard arrangement curated for Instagram. One pot, very old, very loved, hanging exactly where it was used. I stood there looking at it for longer than was probably normal. That’s the whole move, I thought. Pick the one good thing. Hang it where you can see it. Stop there.

I am working on it.

9. The everyday petit.

The French add petit to almost everything. Un petit café. Un petit dessert. Une petite promenade. Un petit apéro. Une petite visite. Un petit moment.

It is not literal. The coffee is not measurably smaller. The dessert is, frequently, not small at all (for French standards). Petit is a softening. It is a way of telling the universe (and yourself) that whatever you are about to do is a small, manageable, charming thing rather than a large, complicated, time-consuming thing. It lowers the stakes. It makes everything more intimate. It makes you, almost imperceptibly, a slightly more relaxed person.

You are not going for a walk that will take an hour and require sunscreen and a water bottle and a charged phone. You are going for une petite promenade. You are not making dinner. You are putting together un petit dîner. You are not having people over for what will become an evening you have been secretly preparing for for three days. You are having them over for un petit apéro.

I now use petit in English, which sounds insane, and I will be doing it forever.

10. The old people, who are still in the village.

In our village, the older residents are everywhere. At the boulangerie at eight in the morning. On the bench outside the Mairie at eleven. At the café at twelve-thirty. Walking dogs. Playing petanque near the village square. Driving small cars at speeds that are technically legal. Watching everything.

They know everything. They know which house had the wedding in 1968. They know where the original well was on our property. They know which family planted banana trees in our potager. They know which corner of the field never freezes. This is the part of the deal you don’t read in advance. In a small French village, your house has a biography, and you are merely its current chapter.

I love this. I love it for them, for the visible, greeted, woven-in dignity of growing old somewhere that still has you in it. I love it for my children, who say bonjour to grandmothers at the boulangerie and have absorbed, in some preverbal way, that old people are not a separate species kept in a separate building. And I love it for me, because I would like, very much, to one day be the woman on the bench outside the Mairie, watching everything, telling some bewildered new American where her well used to be.

There are more, of course. There is the way the church bells still ring the hours and most of us no longer notice. There is the fact that you can buy four kinds of butter at the smallest village shop. There is the bonne soirée you say to absolutely everyone after about 6pm. There is the post office, which I dreaded for about six months before realizing the staff comes around the counter to help you use the self-service machine. The post office here is, somehow, pleasant.

I'll get to those. For now, the church bells just rang noon, and the bonjour-ing is about to start at the boulangerie without me.

Bonjour,
Kamille

If you’d like more of these (the small things that don’t make it into the bigger essays, the village rumors, the slow restoration of a 300-year-old building, the chickens, the bluebells, the brocante finds), I’d love to have you along. Free essays twice per month. A paid version for the readers who want the whole story. Either way, thank you for reading.

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Follow our story

When we bought the château, we were told, politely, officially, on paper, that the septic system was non-conforme. That meant we had one year from moving in to replace it.

We were also told, off the record, with a small smile and a bit of a shrug, that “no one will really come check.” Wink wink. France is full of these moments. The official rule is one thing. The unofficial understanding is another. The two coexist peacefully, the way two cats coexist when neither wants to acknowledge the other is in the room.

A friend of ours, a fellow château owner, came over for lunch shortly after we moved in. We mentioned the septic situation. She tilted her head and said, “Does it work?“

Yes, we said. It works.

“Then why replace it?” she said. “Wait until it breaks.”

This is excellent advice, financially speaking. It is also the advice that everyone in our part of France has apparently been giving each other for several decades, which is how you end up with a region full of buildings whose septic systems are roughly the same age as the buildings themselves, all very much non-conforme, all working fine for now, all being sold from one owner to the next with the same small smile and the same shrug.

We were on board with this plan. We were going to wait until it broke. We were going to be sensible.

Then it began acting up. Loudly. Persistently. In ways that turned out to be much weirder than we’d been warned.

That part of the story deserves its own post, and it will get one. But dealing with it forced us to confront something we’d been somewhat ignoring: the coach house has its own septic system. A separate one. Also non-conforme. And unlike the château, the coach house has a deadline that cannot be ‘shrugged’ at.

The Deadline

We are opening the coach house for short-term rentals this summer. This is the first piece of the property to come online as a working gîte, and the timeline is real and tight. Everything that has to happen before guests can sleep here has to happen very soon, and the first thing on that list, the thing nothing else can move forward without, is a septic system.

The coach house has been sitting here for a few centuries without one. Or so we assumed.

When the team arrived to install the new system, the first question they asked was: where is the existing one?

We did not know. The previous owners had not known. The papers from the sale did not say. (Are we sensing a pattern?) They started digging in the general area we all agreed seemed most likely, and eventually unearthed it: a very old, very small tank that someone had installed at some point and then, as far as we could tell, never mentioned to anyone again.

Then they started the actual installation. And that is where the trouble started.

The Walnut Tree Situation

Before the digger could begin its real work, there was a problem in the way. The problem was a walnut tree.

It was not a thriving walnut tree. It had been planted at some point in a spot with too much shade, by someone who either didn’t know or didn’t care that walnut trees prefer sun. It had grown sideways trying to find some, leaning at an angle that made you tilt your head when you looked at it, the way a dog tilts its head when it hears the word ‘treat.’ And it was sitting exactly where the pipes needed to go.

I had assumed this meant the tree was going to die. Sometimes things have to die for septic systems. This is the order of the world.

But the man operating the digger looked at the tree, then looked at us, and offered, quite casually, to replant it. Apparently this is the order of France. We walked the property together looking for a better spot, and he pointed to a place I would never have chosen on my own, in the orchard area, full sun, plenty of room, no other trees competing for the same light. Then he dug it up, carried it over, planted it, staked it with reinforcements to hold it straight, and patted the soil down with the care of someone whose grandmother was watching.

The tree is now standing upright. In the sun. Vertical for perhaps the first time in its life. It is much happier now (and so am I).

I have lived in places where if a tree was in the way of a pipe, the tree’s last day was today. The tree’s last day, here, became the first day of a much better life.

The Permission Cascade

The next problem was the road.

Our property is up a small road, and across that road is one neighbor’s house. To get the septic line where it needed to go, the pipes had to run under the road. The road, it turns out, does not belong to the commune. It belongs to a woman who lives up the hill, and she had to sign a document giving us permission to dig under her road.

We asked. She signed. Everyone was very pleasant about it.

We thought we were done.

Then we found out that the specific five centimeters of the road we needed to dig under did not belong to her. It belonged to the neighbor across the way, because at some point a property line had been drawn that put approximately the width of a smartphone of road into his lot. So we needed his permission too. For five centimeters.

He also signed. He was also very pleasant. France is full of moments like this, where something that would be a nightmare in the States becomes a small piece of paperwork and a friendly exchange, and you walk away thinking that was much easier than it had any right to be, and also I cannot believe we just got permission to dig under five centimeters of someone’s gravel.

Pas Esthétique

Then came the vent.

Septic systems need to vent. I now know this. I did not know this last month. The vent is a pipe that goes up, releasing whatever needs to be released into the sky, and the question becomes: where on the building does the pipe go?

The team wanted to run it straight up the main wall of the coach house. A tall, fat, very visible and very ugly pipe, climbing the side of a beautiful stone building like ivy if ivy had no aesthetic interests whatsoever.

I said no. Specifically, I said "pas esthétique," which translates roughly to "over my dead body, but politely."

This kicked off an hour of standing around pointing at different walls. Every alternative had a problem. That one’s not high enough. That one’s too close to the window. That one is the wrong side of the building. I started to feel like the unreasonable one, which I was, by the standards of septic installation. By the standards of a 17th-century coach house, I was exactly correct.

We finally found it: a spot tucked next to an existing pipe on the side of the old fournil, the little bread-oven house that sits behind the coach house. Out of sight from anywhere a guest would look. Aesthetically (mostly) invisible. Functionally fine.

The team said yes, this would work, but it required a roofer to come in and route the pipe under the roof tiles before placing the vent. We did not have a roofer available. We had not been able to get a roofer on the phone for months.

I assumed this meant we were back to the giant wall pipe.

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. You'll get: the small miracle that happened that afternoon, the trench-of-opportunity moment where I had a surprisingly useful idea, Sean's contribution (which is very Sean), and the before-and-after photos of what our beautiful green courtyard looks like now that it is a mud field. Plus a preview of what's coming next, including the much bigger septic story unfolding at the château itself.

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Someone left a comment on one of my Substack Notes a few days ago that said Europe has always been behind the United States. In terms of being with the ‘times’.

I’ve seen versions of this comment before, sometimes about Europe broadly, sometimes about France specifically. The underlying claim is consistent. America is winning, the other side is trailing, and the difference between them is a question of speed.

I replied: I’d argue they’re not behind. They just picked a different finish line. The US is winning a race Europe opted out of running.

I’m going to narrow what I said in that reply. I cannot speak for Europe. I’ve never lived in Italy or Spain or Germany or anywhere else on the continent. What I can speak to is France. Rural France specifically. And the rest of this essay is about that, because that comment and my reply has been sitting in my head, and I think it’s the closest I’ve come to articulating something I’ve been trying to say for almost three years.

I am not an economist. I have no credentials to evaluate national systems. I am a writer who moved from Los Angeles to a small château in rural France with her husband and two children, almost three years ago now. What I can report on is what I’ve watched, what I’ve felt, and the slightly mortifying rearrangement of almost everything I thought I wanted.

Two finish lines

Here is what my American measuring stick used to measure: how much money we made, how impressive our jobs sounded at a dinner party, what cars we drove, what neighborhood we lived in, how many milestones our kids had hit early, whether we looked like we had it all figured out.

This wasn’t even conscious. Nobody in my life sat me down and said here are the metrics for success in the United States. Follow them blindly. I hadn’t really chosen the metrics. They were what everyone around me used, so I used them, too. I would have told you, with full sincerity, that I valued family and time and rest above all those things. I would have (thought I) meant it. I also would have continued to organize my Saturday around the playdate that would help my child get into the right preschool. The said values and the actual measuring stick were not the same.

My husband and I dreamed about cars. Specifically, we dreamed about a Tesla, or an Audi SUV hybrid, or a pretty BMW. The kind of car that would act as a signal at the school dropoff line. The signal was: see us? We are doing the thing. We are people who can afford this car.

We also dreamed about a house. A house in the right neighborhood, with the right number of bedrooms, near the right school, with the right finishes. We wanted to be on the upward trajectory we’d been raised to understand as the meaning of an adult life. Climb. Earn more. Buy the better version. Show up at the gathering looking like you’d ‘figured it out.’

Then we moved to France, and gradually, without permission, the measuring stick I’d been using started to register as a measuring stick rather than as reality. Which is the only way I know how to describe what’s happened in the last two and a half years.

If you’re new here, I’m an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband and two children. Once Upon a Castle is where I write about the château, the renovation, and the ongoing reorganization of two Americans who thought they knew what they were doing. What you’re reading is free. Paid subscribers get six posts a month: two more essays like this one, two château renovation diary entries, and access to everything in the archive. Come stay a while.

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What the French seem to measure with

The first time I noticed something was off was at a hunting lunch. I was sitting next to an older gentleman, trying my best to converse in French, and at some point I asked a typical American question, which is whether he had any children.

He said yes. Then he told me about the four of them.

He told me where in France they each lived. He told me how beautiful each region was — what the landscapes looked like, what was particular about each town. He told me how many children each of them had. He told me about the beautiful grandchildren. The conversation went on for some time.

He did not tell me what any of them did for work.

This was not a man avoiding the topic because his children were struggling, or because he wasn’t proud of them. He was a well-to-do gentleman who used to live in Paris. If his children had been engineers or surgeons or executives, he could easily have led with that. He just didn’t. He was bragging, but he was bragging about the regions and the grandchildren. The professions did not come up because the professions were not, in his framing of the conversation, the point.

I have since had this experience several more times.

People I’ve met here, including people who own properties significantly grander than mine, drive cars that look like they’ve been driven for twenty years and probably have been. They wear clothes that are not new. Their houses are full of furniture that has been in their families for generations, not because they’re sentimental but because the furniture is fine and there’s no reason to replace it. They take their vacations seriously and at length. They eat well. They host. They walk after dinner because the light stays out until nine-thirty in summer and ending the evening early would feel wasteful.

It’s a different theory of what days are for.

The currency of flaunting here, when there is any flaunting at all, is experiences and moments. The last vacation, a particularly good cheese someone discovered, a wedding they just attended, a hike they took on Sunday, the new baby in the family. The moment that signals the life.

Paris is its own animal, and the wealthy in any country find ways to signal. But the ambient pressure to consume, the constant low-grade signal that you should be acquiring more and better, is genuinely lower out here. I can feel the absence of it in my body.

A reader of mine, Nataliya, put this more cleanly than I could in a comment on a different post. She wrote: America supports consumption. France supports life. She nailed in five words what I've been chewing on for almost three years.

What I want to tell you next is who this country actually treats as its kings, what I said when someone asked what I'd do with a windfall, and what my scoreboard looks like now that I've been keeping a different one for almost three years. Those three small observations are how the measuring stick stopped being an idea I was entertaining and became the way we live.

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There’s no “what works for you?” No choreographed back-and-forth where both parties pretend to have equally complex schedules and eventually land on something neither of them wanted in the first place. You get a time and a date, delivered with the laid-back authority of someone announcing the weather.

Bonjour,

Your appointment is Monday at 8h15.

Cordially,
French Person

RECEIPT:

You can try to move it, of course. But you’re basically asking for a big fat (French) favor.

If you're new here, I'm an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband and two children. Once Upon a Castle is where I write about the château, the renovation, and the ongoing education of two Americans in rural France who thought they knew what they were getting into. What you're reading is free. Paid subscribers get four additional posts each month - two more essays about French culture and life from the inside, and two chateau renovation diary entries documenting the detailed renovation, in real time. Come stay a while.

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The email that contains your fate

The first few times this happened, I assumed I’d missed a polite French nuance. Surely “Your appointment is Thursday” meant “Would Thursday work for you?”

It did not.

“Your appointment is Thursday” means: your appointment is Thursday. If you can’t make it, you may attempt to renegotiate, but you should understand you’ve stepped into a universe where access is a privilege and the calendar belongs to the person behind the desk.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to stop reading this as rude and start reading it as something else entirely.

Why this is (a little bit) logical.

There’s a logic to it once you stop fighting it.

Work flexibility is baked into the culture here in a way it simply isn’t in America. A doctor’s appointment isn’t treated like an extravagant lifestyle choice requiring advance apology. You say, “I have an appointment” and the response is essentially: yes, of course, that’s life. Nobody asks you to schedule around your lunch break or find a time that doesn’t inconvenience anyone. You have an appointment. You go.

There’s also a different assumption about what counts as considerate. In America we think we’re being thoughtful by asking for availability - by opening up the calendar and letting the other person choose. Here, the thoughtfulness runs the other direction. I have solved the scheduling problem. Here is your slot. You’re welcome. The ten-email chain to find the perfect overlap of two calendars is not, here, considered a good use of anyone’s time. People would rather eat lunch.

The nerve.

When access is genuinely scarce (and in rural France, certain specialists and tradespeople are genuinely scarce), you take the slot you’re given, you show up, and you don’t perform pickiness you can’t afford.

The ‘we’re coming tomorrow’ people.

Then there’s the second phenomenon, which is adjacent but considerably more chaotic.

This one happens with tradespeople, particularly the ones you’ve been chasing for weeks. You email politely. You call, you text. You wait. You begin to wonder if you’ve been blocked for being the annoying American squeaky wheel. You make peace with the silence. You move on emotionally.

Then suddenly, out of the bleu:

Bonjour, nous venons demain. (Hello, we are coming tomorrow.)

No “does that work?” no preamble, no explanation of where they’ve been. Chasing them does nothing. What works, apparently, is giving up - at which point they sense the shift in energy and appear.

I spent a long time finding this infuriating. Now I see it as a variation on the same theme. The assigned appointment and the sudden "we're coming tomorrow" are cousins. Both are saying: here is when this is happening. Before, they weren’t confirming because they didn’t have availability. Now they do. And if you say "actually tomorrow doesn't work," you lose the slot, you lose the momentum, and you lose them - back into the silence from which they briefly, mysteriously emerged. So you clear your calendar and you say d’accord and you stop asking questions.

Our first exposure to all of this.

Our first real encounter with this energy happened before we’d even fully arrived.

We’d just flown in from Los Angeles with everything we owned, hauling a small mountain of luggage through the airport. We were waiting at oversized baggage for our two car seats. One came through. The other didn’t. We filed a claim at the counter. “When we find it, we will call you,” they said.

We went home, and waited. Three days passed without a word. On the fourth day I called them, sat on hold until I had mentally redecorated our entire kitchen, and eventually reached someone who confirmed: not found yet, sorry, we'll be in touch.

I hung up, dejected.

Less than an hour later, while we were having lunch in the garden, a van pulled up the drive. A man climbed out holding our missing car seat like he was delivering a prophecy. No warning. No tracking notification. No “would this afternoon work?” Just: here it is.

I stood in the garden blinking in the sunlight and said merci approximately eight times. Maybe more.

(merci. merci! MERCI. mer-ci. …merci. mErCi? merciiiiii.)

That was my first clue. Silence in France usually means something is still in motion somewhere. Then it shows up solved.

My inner project manager meets France.

In America, scheduling has taken on a vaguely moral dimension. Being organized means planning ahead. Caring means confirming. Professionalism means the rapid response and the Calendly link and the calendar invite with the Zoom link already embedded. The administration of things has become, somewhere along the way, the thing itself.

Here, the performance is optional. What matters is whether the thing actually gets done, and whether everyone gets to eat lunch and keep their weekend intact.

I’m not trying to romanticize chaos. It is a genuinely different operating system, with different assumptions baked in about what time is for and what counts as respect. It gets considerably easier to accept when you’re three glasses into a long lunch and nobody is doing that thing where they pretend to listen while secretly replying to an email under the table.

What we’re actually doing differently now.

A few things we’ve learned, for anyone navigating this:

If you get a slot, take it. Assume it’s the good one. Don’t hold out for something that fits better - in rural France, the next available might be months away and it will also arrive without warning.

Leave buffer in your calendar. If you stack your days like dominoes, France will knock them all over. Nothing important gets scheduled after a “we’re coming tomorrow” text.

Brace for the clumps. Nothing for weeks, then everyone appears on the same Tuesday. There’s no system for predicting it and no point pretending otherwise.

Keep your humor close. Not because everything is funny, but because it’s the cheapest coping mechanism available and it travels well.

The weird upside

What I didn’t expect was how much being assigned appointments would start to do something to me. Over time, being taken out of the negotiation has started to take me out of the performance of it, too. The constant managing of everyone’s time, the confirming and re-confirming, the anxiety of the unanswered message - a lot of that has simply stopped being part of my day. And I didn’t realize how much energy it had been taking until it wasn’t there anymore.

I still like knowing what day something is happening. I still like clarity. I’m not fully French and I’m not pretending otherwise.

But I am learning.

Even if the learning is happening, as most things here do, without my consent.

If you've lived somewhere that runs on this kind of scheduling logic - France or otherwise - drop it in the comments. The more unhinged the better.

À bientôt,
Kamille

Once Upon a Castle is where I write about this life - the château, the renovation, and what it actually looks like to trade everything familiar for something completely unknown. Free subscribers get two posts a month. Paid subscribers get six - two more essays like this one, two renovation diary entries from inside the walls, and access to everything in the archive.

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We were going to bake things. Learn new songs. Do projects. Have picnics every day. Go to a film, visit a restaurant, build something with our hands. The list was long and optimistic, like all school holiday lists are - drafted by people who have temporarily forgotten that life takes longer than expected and that two small children have their own opinions about how time should be spent.

We did about half of it. We’re not sad about this. Our son had a birthday this month, and if you’ve ever tried to plan a themed birthday party for kids while also living in rural France with a septic installation happening in your garden, you’ll understand where the picnic time went.

He wanted a science-themed party.

This is not as straightforward as it sounds. The party decoration universe - online shops, party supply websites, the entire industry of themed birthday infrastructure - operates on a fairly fixed menu of acceptable children’s interests. Dinosaurs. Unicorns. Princesses. Woodland creatures. Space. There are approximately forty-seven variations of space available at any given moment, in every color combination, at every price point, shipped to your door in three days.

Science is not on the menu.

Which is why we tried. “Hey, how about a space party? Rockets! Stars! The universe! It’s basically science!”

“No,” he said. “Science. Which can include space,” he added generously, “but is not just space.”

Drat! Almost had him.

The crown situation.

I had bought him a birthday crown from Etsy years ago - adjustable, beautiful, and something we kept because we (I) loved it and because I was certain it would still fit. He wore it every birthday. I loved that crown possibly more than he did.

This year he looked at it and something had shifted. He was older now. More mature, and refined. And apparently that comes with stronger opinions. He wanted a science crown instead.

I want to be clear that a science crown is not something that exists on Amazon.fr. I looked. It does not exist anywhere within reasonable shipping distance of rural France on less than two week’s notice.

So I made him one.

I found our most science-adjacent wrapping paper - constellations and planets, which is space-themed rather than strictly science-themed, but we were working with what we had. I cut seven A4-sized sheets with scissors, did some origami folding magic, glued it with one of the kids’ school gluesticks, and held my breath.

It was actually quite good. He wore it for the entire party (voluntarily).

I’m choosing to count this as one of my finer achievements. (Watch me make it here - it took about fifteen minutes and was relatively easy on the crafting scale.)

The septic situation.

One week before the party, we received a phone call from the septic company.

Not a “when would work for you?” phone call. A “we are coming Tuesday” phone call. Two days before the party. We had been trying to schedule this for months - the coach house septic had to be installed in the kitchen garden area, which meant we couldn’t start any garden work until it was done, which meant the whole spring planting timeline was sitting behind it like a very patient queue. We couldn’t say no.

They came. They dug. A large excavator appeared in what was supposed to be our kitchen garden. Trenches opened up across the grounds. A substantial septic tank materialized in the landscape.

We thought briefly about a septic-themed party. We could give the children test tubes and hard hats and have them analyze the bacteria in our drainage. Very science-adjacent. Very on theme.

We decided against this.

The excavation was finished two days before the party and it looked, I want to be honest here, quite ‘industrial.’ Dirt everywhere. Large tubes. A construction zone aesthetic that was not exactly what we had envisioned for a child’s birthday party at a French château.

We told ourselves the children would be looking up at the beautiful property rather than down at the torn earth. This turned out to be correct, mostly because we gave them a treasure map and sent them into the forest.

If you’re new here, I’m an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband Sean and our two children. Once Upon a Castle is where I document the renovation, the life, and everything France keeps teaching us. Paid subscribers get Castle Diaries, where I write the real version in real time. Come stay a while.

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The party.

Sean, who is absolutely science-minded in a way I am not, was enthusiastic about the theme from the start. His vision: a treasure hunt, molecular structure building, a volcanic eruption, lab coats, safety glasses. All of it. For six-year-olds.

We procrastinated, as one does, and assembled the actual plan the night before.

Here is what we made:

A list of objects to find, with each child’s name written on the back in invisible ink. We provided black light pens. The children had to find their own name before the map was revealed - which meant they each held their paper up to the light with the focused intensity of tiny detectives, which was probably one of the best moments of the whole day.

The map itself was something else. Sean took an overhead photograph of the property, turned it into a hand-drawn illustration, and then we brought it into Canva to mark the locations of the hidden objects. Then - and this is where we became ‘those parents’ - we printed it, soaked it in tea water until the paper darkened and crinkled, glued beautiful wrapping paper to the back, and Sean burned the edges with a lighter.

It looked like something you’d find in an old chest in a château attic. Which, given where we live, felt appropriate.

The objects the children were hunting: small handmade atoms - oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, sodium - which our own kids had spent the previous day coloring and decorating. They were scattered around the property. The kids also needed to find molecular structure diagrams and connecting sticks, which would allow them to actually build the molecular models of vinegar (well, the acetic acid in vinegar 🤓) and baking soda once everything was assembled.

The hunt went well, mostly.

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