From France to 'La Maison Francaise'

Some houses wear eccentricity as graciously as Her Majesty wears a mantle. La Maison Francaise is not one of these houses. Rather, she swaddles herself in eccentricity with the clumsy charm of a gawky colt. Or at least, this is what I would like very much to believe, for since the end of August, this strikingly peculiar little house has been my home, and that of the delightful Stacey Weidemann.
 We take a certain pride in our character laden abode.
Permit me to offer you a tour?
Painted a buttercup yellow, and shoved into the side of an embankent, with precarious and spindling decks tacked swayingly onto either side, our house exudes an indefinable aura of 'ramshackle' and 'thrown together'. Enter, and the first thing which will catch your eye is a door. 
This door was not always present. It is a recent, and more than welcome addition. 
Before the door, there was a gaping doorway, a cobweb hung stairwell, a crooked, neck-breaking descent of wooden stairs, and the shadowy, fearful depths of The Basement.
This gray opening leading to the vast netherworlds of our maison excercised a peculiar magnetic quality, dragging my unwilling gaze each time I passed it, clutching me with vertigo as I stared across the twilit expanse, peopled with shrouded objects which grew in terror and mystery as the light waned.
To be home alone at night was to face all the horrors of that gaping doorway to the basement, through which anything might, at any moment be expected to come. We joked about the basement- about the crazed murderers and mysterious creatures which lurked hidden in its dark recesses, but the joking was tinged with panic. This was a basement, huge and harrowing, which made such loathesome lurking seem to dangerously near the realm of the probable.
The door has brought blessed relief. I could almost caress it with pleasure when I pass through the once perilous hallway to the kitchen and meet no menacing shadows, but rather this sturdy, cheerful panel of polished walnut, securely deadbolted in place. 
The basement has many interesting characteristics, but one of the most astounding is The Graffiti room, a half finished room covered with bright yellow posterboard on the outside, with a vast assortment of graffiti applied in sharpie to the cement blocks of the interior. The graffiti appears to have been planned and encouraged, but is difficult to make sense of. On one block someone named Dave scrawls "Whoa! Great bar!", and on another, a childish scribble reads "Thank you grammy and grampa for a great thanksgiving it was a good thanksgiving and I liked the turkey love Tanisha"
On the other wall, is lettered "Mark is in love with Katie!", and beside it, in a different hand, "Katie is in love with Mark, too!"
Perhaps the mystery of this room will never be solved, certainly not by a team of amateur archaeologists such as us.
And now we find ourselves in the kitchen. The upper walls are a creamy golden yellow like blatantly artificial coloring in margarine. The lower, a unique, ephemeral shade of dull pinkish orange which was advertised as 'rhubarb', and which I confess to being intensely fond of.
Artificial brick paneling adorns the more businesslike area of the room, which is growing more pleasant and useful by the week. First, we had a refrigerator, and this was good. Next we had a stove, of which only the gas burners could be used, and this was also good. Then came a strip of countertop propped on two of the sturdier of the old cabinets which once occupied this cuisine. Then came enormous piles of sawdust (which have since gone of to the nearest landfill, and an old porcelain sink hanging awkwardly halfway in and halfway out of a new rectangular hole in the center of the counter, like a portly woman wedged into an innertube. Someday this sink will perform the full duties of a sink, but for now it is merely a sort of promise, or IOU, or status symbol, reminding us that we will not always wash our dishes in the little sink in the bathroom, and that better things are on their way.
Gradually, the screwdrivers, and wires, and boxes of nails which filled our kitchen cabinets are giving way to Stacey's quaint dishes and the various food staples which make life palatable.
The floor is of an experimental vinyl known as 'floating flooring', which is not attached to the plywood beneath. As a result, it's inclined to bubble, and tremendous care must be taken in moving heavy objects. My father advises us not even to scuff our feet.
The laundry room and N'importe Quoi room are a sharp step lower than the kitchen, which they both connect to. I haven't the faintest idea why. The laundry room, sponge painted in baby blue, with a ragged wallpaper border representing clothes on a clothesline, is the new resting place of all tools and construction materials, recycling, filled trash bags, and any other unsightliness which can be crammed in. The reason? It has doors, which close, and latch. Rather closetlike, they are.
The N'importe Quoi room is a textured and dusty ivory around its top half, with dark wood paneling around the bottom. Bookshelves are built into one side of the room, and at the other is a door leading to the outdoors, the purpose of which we have never understood. At present, it is a mausolem of dusty and unwanted furniture and abandoned cardboard boxes- little more. If something is neither tool nor trash, yet you're not sure where to set it, by all means, pile it here.
Let us proceed to the living room.
The half nearest to the kitchen is a square alcove outlined in white chair rail, with elegant white panel designs of a classical appearance ornamenting the lower section of the wall. The other, is merely the home of our aged couch, and Stacey's two chairs. The carpet is a dull industrial gray, continuously pilling and shedding, which embitters my existence, and clashes defiantly with every colour in the house. The whole thing is painted in a very soft delicate turquoise shade, which I find charming, but which was less alluring to the man from Suddenlink who installed our wifi.
"This color looks like something my wife would have picked out", he remarked conversationally. "I've never understood her tastes in colors. Me, I couldn't stand to have a room this awful greenish-blue shade. It would make me sick. But my wife just loves that sort of thing- even turquoise jewelry, which I won't buy for her. You know her, she'd wear it, and I just can't bear this color. Not that I'm criticizing of course. My wife's a good woman, and she would have painted a room this awful color too if she had the chance. But it's sure not what I would have chosen."
In the alcove with the wainscoting, which is currently bare of furniture, there also hangs a fanciful crystal chandelier, a relic of the mysterious former occupants, about whom we grow increasingly curious.
Another chandelier, the crystals arranged in a different style, adorns the hallway, which is also painted in 'rhubarb', and one wall of which is covered in majestically textured wallpaper with delusions of Versailles.
The bathroom is dominated by the shower, which is tall and imposing- so tall, that our shower curtain, though the normal height, seems painfully short and inadequate. The shower head can be seen, arching triumphantly high above the sad little curtain. The faucet is jammed in directly under the sky-scraping shower head, and so to turn on the water it is necessary to stretch one's arms to their farthest hight.
We like it here. I like it here.
But to be honest, it's not France. And now that our time in France has ended, I find myself missing it more even than I believed possible.
Missouri is... midwestern. Dingy, commercial, and nearly devoid of sidewalks (Alright, so I'm a bit bitter and shrill on the topic of sidewalks at present)
When I think of France now, I have a dizzying impression of beauty and fragrance, cloudy skies and swaying masses of lilac and white wisteria, lovely, gracious old buildings, and cobbled streets, the shimmering waters of the lake, the warm, crusty, golden charm of the little corner bakeries, the breathless wonder of learning to take refuge in beloved and reassuring arms, the bus moving through the rain in a rainbow blur, the women draped in their enormous scarves, pink roses clambering over warm stone walls, the cold, lofty majesty, the compelling silence, or ravishing music, of the stone churches and cathedrals, with their enormous windows sparkling like a kaleidescope of gems-  the nerve wracking noise of the train stations... Oh, France has burned itself on my senses like a brand, and I'm shocked now by the harrowing ache, the tender grief I can't help lavishing on each crumpled receit and faded bus ticket which remind me.
While unpacking clothes last week, I happened upon a shirt which had lain unnoticed in a pocket of my duffel bag since I crammed it there during my last week in Angers. I buried my face in it, and Angers struck me like a wave- it breathed the aroma of the lavender assouplissant I'd washed my clothes in, a bit of the precious rosewater I was forced to discard in London airport, the peculiar odor of the dorm room and its drawers, the sunshiny breeze the shirt had dried in, while hanging from my window, Greg and his mother's sweet laundry detergent... I found myself weeping into the garment, overwhelmed by an unexpected sensation of being physically transported back.
And so, transitioning into everyday life in the U.S. is challenging, because emotionally, there's still a... dizzying gulf between I, and the life I left behind nearly a year ago now. Normal eluded me when I tried to return to it, perhaps because my reluctance to return was so evident. I still feel lost here- curiously disoriented and out of place.
But since life is a continuous pattern of change and uprooting, and loveliness such as the loveliness I so painfully remember, and am dazed in remembering is always fleeting, and frequently illusionary, perhaps none of this is so strange.
And so, I am thankful for the transition, however rocky in spots, back to the world of cows, and corn, and ditches where sidewalks should be, and into our funny and intensely individual yellow mansion, wobbling smugly on its stilts, and demanding to be noticed.
Hopefully now, even you friends who are not lucky enough to have met it, will notice it, with all the humorous and head-shaking attention it deserves. The French house is off and running! Et donc, bienvenue!