There’s a feature of the iPhone that I have a love/hate relationship with: that little square that pops up on your home screen, showing you what you were doing this time last year, or 5 years ago?
Sometimes these photos get automatically turned into clever little videos…with themes, like images of my kids through the ages...set to music. The iPhone knows its customers, and those videos always turn me into a teary-eyed sap.
Anyway, yesterday this photo popped up and wrecked me a bit.
This is a photo of the most exquisite donkey I think I’ve ever seen. I had to lure him out of his stable with all kinds of gentle flattery a few years back, explaining that I just wanted a better look at him so I could take his picture and capture his greatness.
I don’t know about you, but the donkeys I’ve seen over the course of a lifetime never look like this. Normally, they are dirty and matted, with a cloud of flies swarming over their heads.
This donkey looked more like a well-groomed house pet.
This sweet soul lived at Le Ferme de Mélusine Restaurant, a countryside roadside stop my brother-in-law introduced me to a few years back, which was a combination restaurant/petting-zoo.
My brother-in-law took us here because he thought our kids would get a kick out of it, but I was the one who fell hard for the place.
It had just a few items on the menu, as most great, middle-of-nowhere restaurants do. Nothing too fancy, but the usual suspects were represented.
After doing a quick scan of the place to make sure there weren’t any ducks waddling around, I went for the Parmentier de Canard, a twist on the classic Hachis Parmentier but made with duck.
Just to be clear. I love petting zoos. But eating the pets at the petting zoo would have been a bit much for my American taste.
My husband Philippe is fond of telling me, “You must think fish are square and swim in the sea wrapped in plastic.”
Yes, I’ll admit Americans can be a bit disconnected from their food source. Shop at any major American supermarket or Trader Joe’s, and the connection is purposely left a bit vague. That’s how we like it.
This joke, that my husband whips out as a refrain from time to time, all started about 30 years ago when we took a trip to Portugal. We stumbled into a local farmer’s market where I saw a bunch of live rabbits for sale and remarked, “Oh, look, they sell pets here?” to which he burst out laughing, saying, “Those aren’t pets! That’s dinner!”
Me: “Oh”.
Anyway, after you place your order at the roadside-restaurant-petting-zoo, you are invited to visit the animals. There’s a magical quality to the place if you time it right and get there as the sun is setting.
We made the rounds, peeking into each enclosure and saying hello to everyone. In some cases, it felt as if the animals were peeking into our enclosure to say hello to us.
There were goats and chickens, sheep and roosters, a happy little menagerie of sorts, co-mingling in their habitats, all looking back at us; curious to know how we fit into the mix.
There was also a sheepdog who, we were told, was afraid of the sheep (and the goats, and the roosters, and the donkey). He was on the other side of the fence observing the activity from the safety of his own backyard. We were told the owner of the restaurant lived in the farmhouse.
I don’t know if you’ve seen those videos on Instagram of sheepdogs running as fast as cars, in pursuit of a 300-head flock?
So it was a little hard to grasp that this poor thing was afraid of a handful of sheep and a few friendly goats?
The waiter dismissed the dog with a wave of his hand, “That dog is totally useless”, which, of course, made me want to throw my arms around this gentle creature and kidnap him back to L.A with no ransom note left behind.
At this point, we were still living in the States, coming to France for summer vacations, so of course everything about the French countryside seemed charming and idyllic. (I hadn’t spent a winter here yet.)
Dinner was served, and I must say I was quite impressed by the quality of the meal. Mine was delicious! And of course, the cute little dish it came in only added to the charm.
After we finished dinner, we sat at our table, swirling our wine and enjoying the view and the murmur of the animals settling in for the night.
We were the last customers. So we struck up a conversation with the waiter. We lavished all kinds of praise on the restaurant and congratulated him on creating such a unique place, to which the man replied, “It’s up for sale at the end of the season.”
If ever there was a record scratch moment, it was now.
To which I replied in my barely functioning French, “You’re selling this restaurant?”
You should know, at this stage in my French acquisition journey, it probably came out more like this: “You to sell restaurant? This one?”
“Yes, Madame, the restaurant and the farmhouse”
“But what about the animals? What will happen to them?”
“They will be included in the sale if the new owner wants them.”
I practically blurted out, “Yes, of course I want them!”
I was having a bit of an out-of-body experience that, in my mind, lasted about an hour, but it was probably more like a split second.
You see, while there, I had already imagined myself as the owner of the place. Living in the charming old farmhouse with the sheepdog curled up at my feet in front of a roaring fire in the winter, flipping through cookbooks and glossy food magazines, planning out 8 weeks of summer menus and freshly baked desserts for the visiting tourists.
There are also times in my marriage that mimic an episode from I Love Lucy.
In case it’s not obvious. I’m Lucy, and Philippe is Ricky.
Philippe has saved me from so many hairbrained ideas in my day that he should be awarded some kind of medal of honor for active duty. Half-baked ideas that would have, without a doubt, led to certain financial ruin (crumbling French chateaux for sale, Bed and Breakfast schemes and the like)
But I couldn’t resist whipping around to the end of the table, rubbernecking over the gaze of my in-laws and children, to lock eyes with him over the thought of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in the hopes that I could engage him in the dream.
To which he air-mouths back (overly annunciating every syllable so there would be no mistake) “Don’t. Even. Think. About. It.” Full-stop.
As we drove home that night, navigating our way out of a pitch-black abyss (street lamps aren’t a thing in the French countryside; apparently that’s what your high beams are for), I couldn’t stop thinking about the place.
It was the trifecta of dream scenarios!
An old farmhouse
A charming restaurant
Farm animals!
Everything I’d die for rolled into one!
For Philippe, of course, it was a trifecta of nightmare scenarios.
Old farmhouse + a restaurant in the middle of nowhere + farm animals.
I guess you couldn’t script a disaster story any better, and he knew it. This is his superpower.
It must have been the farm animals. He’s not exactly a bleeding-heart animal lover like I am. He’s more of an “animal appreciator,” meaning he appreciates animals when someone else is taking care of them.
The summer came to an end, and we went back to L.A.; then returned to France the following summer. I was determined to find out what ever happened to this restaurant?!
I’d ask locals about it, again with my “still developing French,” and they’d look at me kind of puzzled, “a restaurant with animals?” Then laugh it off, like “crazy foreigner.” What is she talking about?
I was beginning to think this place was like some sort of Shangri-La, with a dandy of a donkey and a sheepdog afraid of sheep. It didn’t seem real. But I was curious about what had come of the place. Did anyone ever buy it?
I had given up thinking about it until one day, a year or so after we moved here permanently, my daughter asked me to drive her to a friend’s house.
After 20 minutes of swirly, twirly countryside lanes, the kind where you have to hold your breath when one of those ginormous agricultural trucks comes whizzing past you, and just pray that if this is the end, death will come quick…I saw it!
Shangri-La! The restaurant and the farmhouse! Neatly closed up, no animals in sight or cars in the parking lot. Not even a For Sale sign or new paint job. But other than that, it hadn’t changed a bit; it was just as I remembered it, but clearly not open for business.
I’ve run through all the scenarios in my mind; maybe the owner decided to keep it rather than sell? But then wouldn’t it be open? It’s high season, and it’s still closed. Maybe new owners did buy it, and they’re just getting ready to reopen, still flipping through magazines and planning their menu.
Or maybe nobody saw the great potential, only the great potential for disaster, and now it’s stuck in limbo, waiting for some young, enterprising couple to take it on! I truly hope that’s the case.
But for now, I drive by from time to time, checking up on the place to see if they need my business, or a helping hand, or if a For Sale sign suddenly appears.
Maybe the iPhone knows this is coming! In some sort of AI-generated knowingness, it served up these photos just in time to reignite my passion for such a truly catastrophic idea! Yes, that must be it!
Patiently waiting for next steps…lol!
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