There’s something nobody tells you about buying a château in rural France: wait until spring. Just wait.
We had a winter that taught us things. How to heat a room that doesn’t want to be heated. How to make decisions in a language you’re still assembling in real time. How to look at a problem you’ve never seen before and just...begin. It was gray and cold and occasionally overwhelming, and we went through it anyway - figuring things out, getting things wrong, figuring them out again. At certain points in February, still standing felt like a genuine achievement worth acknowledging.
And then…spring arrived, and the château said: watch this.
Here’s what’s been happening inside the walls, out in the field, and deep in the forest that we apparently own but are only now beginning to understand.
The magnolia.
There is a tree right outside our bedroom window that we have been watching since we first viewed the château last fall. Completely dormant then, and stubbornly so for what felt like an unreasonable stretch of time afterward. Sean was convinced from the beginning that it was a magnolia. I, a person who has eyes and could plainly see that it was doing absolutely nothing, was considerably less convinced.
Then in March, every other magnolia within a five mile radius bloomed in full spectacular glory, and ours continued to stand there looking like a considered arrangement of sticks. I started mentally redecorating around a different tree entirely. Something unpretentious. An oak, maybe. Something that wasn’t going to humiliate me with its refusal to perform.
But then…she bloomed.
Not only did she bloom, but she turned out to be a rare yellow magnolia, which I did not know was a thing, and she is genuinely one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen outside any window in my life. All that time I spent doubting her, mentally replacing her with a ‘sensible’ oak, and she was simply waiting for her moment. Playing the long game. Letting the other magnolias go first while she stood there in smug, bare-branched neudity, knowing exactly what she had. A diva move, honestly. A flawless one. I owe her an apology. I have given her one.
We've since noticed that yellow seems to be the château's signature color. Yellow daffodils, yellow marigolds, yellow dandelions, small yellow shrubs scattered throughout the garden. Someone who lived here long before us clearly loved yellow and planted accordingly, and honestly? Same. We'll layer in more color as time goes on, but nothing is getting ripped out for now. The yellow was here first and it has earned its place.
The bluebells in the forest, the pool, the new additions to our flock, the wisteria, the willow, and everything else we’ve been working on this spring - it’s all below for paid subscribers.
If you’ve been reading along and considering whether to join, consider this the invitation.
