We recently had to replace our house exhaust fan and I was astonished at the sound level rating for this new device on its normal setting: 15 decibels. For comparison purposes, a pin dropping rates 10 decibels while a whisper is 30; so it’s pretty quiet. A second surprise was that although there’s an exhaust outlet in both bathrooms and in the kitchen, there’s only one motor mounted in the attic and connected to each room by duct work. In every house in the US in which we lived each room had its own independent fan/motor, all of which we replaced anytime that we moved because they were always so loud. By chance, the same morning we were preparing to do the work in our attic, I saw in the newspaper that noise levels were being addressed elsewhere in the country, but with a twist.  Continue reading “Country sounds”

Long before we knew that one day we’d be living in France, we were regularly watching films made here. We had a home theater in our house in Atlanta and every week a new DVD would show up in our mailbox that we would save for the weekend. Often these took place in Paris but occasionally we were treated to countryside scenes with fields of sunflowers and lavender, quaint villages with stone houses beside babbling mill streams, or large family gatherings around dining tables piled high with food and drink. No matter the location, these films had something in common, at least in our house: they were all in French of course but we always turned on the subtitles in English. We’re not fans of dubbed films where the words you hear don’t match the lips of the actors who are supposed to be saying them, so subtitles were the only way to comprehend what was going on. So, after living in France for 3 and a half years, that’s all changed—right? Continue reading “I don’t understand”

Growing up, I remember the days when there would be a knock on the door at least once a week from someone trying to convince my mother to buy something, be it encyclopedias, cosmetics, household cleaners, burial plots, or brushes of all kinds. When I met Bill he had already purchased from one of these salesmen a powerful vacuum cleaner that a friend said would “suck the drapes right off the windows” if you got too close to the wall, and he was right! But then as we moved around the country the knocking stopped. The houses we lived in were all set well back from the street so it was going to take quite an effort just to get to our front door but not everyone was deterred. We could generally recognize members of religious organizations as they approached but a simple shake of the head through our partially-opened door would always send them away. In France, our street isn’t a lot wider than the cars that pass down it so our front door is easily accessible to everyone with a product to sell, a magazine to subscribe to, or a quick way to heaven. Continue reading “They had us at “bonjour””