Portrait I: Our neighbor
Of the land
“Love your neighbor, yet pull not down your hedge.”
Monsieur Jean-Michel was born in the stone house at the bottom of the field, as was his father, and his father before him. A dozen goats live in the stable that shares a wall with the kitchen.
The house smells of wood smoke and neglect, with the occasional draft bearing manure. It's heated by a stove that eats logs like I consumed peanuts when I was drinking too much, enduring on curses and momentum, and sputtering out once in a while.
The hallways are thin; the rooms are slim. Spider webs conceal every corner, undisturbed by time or pride.
Jean-Michel’s elderly parents left home last month in a Skoda VSL bound for the EHPAD, a nursing home in the next village over. They’re the first to vacate the house alive, and closing in on the end of the line. Cats observed from dusty bedsheets as Jean-Michel packed their things in reusable grocery bags, grumbling, one parent, then the other.
He has an exceptional gut and strong hands, and a face like a carved potato, though our neighbor can’t cook anything that didn’t come in a tin. He speaks in tangled metaphors and voices racist comments that make my stomach turn. Yet, somehow, I care about him.
He is of this land—was born on it, will die on it, and holds little worry for anything else.
He knows who hasn’t spoken to whom since the harvest of ‘96. He knows who got a new Massey Ferguson, who’s selling hay cheap. He’s terrified of vipers and heights, and being alone, and doesn’t know how to use a smartphone.
He had never been with a woman before meeting Anne-Gaelle three years ago. He was fifty-nine. She looks eighty. Her skin is pale, her teeth are not. Her cackles carry inquietude to all who listen. She wears thick glasses and polyester suits that shuffle, shuffle when she paces. But she’s nice enough.
Jean-Michel went to Paris once, on a high school field trip. But in general terms, his maximum radius of travel is an hour in any direction, from the home that leans toward the hill with goats that whine to the wind.
So, this is the mud we walk through, all of us drifting, as a tractor spatters the distance.
And this is the man who makes us wince, and laugh, and carry on anyway, who lives with stories no one asked to be told.
You don’t have to like a home to belong to it, and you don’t have to like a person to know they’re part of your story.
—Lex
Brilliantly described. And I love the photo of his tractors at ease. I can envision him smiling and saying, "someone wrote about me?"