Sept. 23, 2003, 3:49PM
A homey feeling in French village

By LEON HALE
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle

TREMOLAT, France -- It's 6 o'clock on a day that's been bright and a lot warmer than I thought the European weather would ever be in September. The neighbors keep telling us they can't remember days this hot, so late in the year.

We're sitting in the back yard of the little house we rented in this village, on the banks of the Dordogne River.

Just the other side of the wire fence, half a dozen hens are clucking and scratching and pecking in the flower bed. Birds we haven't yet seen sound a good bit like our white wing doves back home. We hear the laughter of neighborhood children.

We can pick grapes off the vines here in the yard, and a peach tree is dropping fruit in the grass. I hadn't tasted a tree-ripened peach in years and had forgotten the richness of the flavor.

My partner and I are staying here a couple of weeks to satisfy a curiosity, to get a hint of what it's like to live in small-town Europe.

So why France? Why not Germany? Spain? Italy?

That's because we knew this village, and liked it, from an earlier and brief visit, and we wanted to come back. Also because my partner gets along, as the saying is, in French. She struggles sometimes, but charges on in earnest and finds out what we need to know. And she can read road signs. Trying to drive through France without knowing road signs would be, I'm convinced, suicidal.

We're not roughing it, by a long way. This is a stone house, like most of the structures in the village. It's probably around 300 years old but renovation has provided a functional kitchen, including a dishwasher, and a bath and a half. A pleasant parlor has a television that's of no use to me. My partner listens to it for French practice.

The sweetest surprise has been the telephone. When I finish one of these reports we plug the laptop computer into the phone line, punch in a handful of digits, and (so far, at least) in less than 10 seconds the column is transmitted to the Chronicle.

That may not seem miraculous to you, but to me it does because not so long ago I was still having trouble transmitting my stuff to the paper from my home inside Loop 610.

Here in town we have one church, one bar, one hotel, one school, two restaurants, a small grocer, a bakery, a beauty parlor, and the homes of around 500 people. The buildings are stone, some a mild yellow color, others sheathed in off-white stucco, and almost all with red tile roofs.

The village stands on almost level land near the river but the countryside nearby rises up, in forested hills and rocky cliffs and twisting roads. Stone houses perch on land so steep you wonder how they ever got built up there.

Morning and evening we walk around the village, trading nods and Bon jours and Bon soirs with other strollers. Everyone is polite, the village so calm. Any crude noise -- a sudden truck or motorcycle or low-flying airplane -- is a great intrusion because the sound echoes among the stone buildings.

The French language is an impossibility for me. I like its sound and rhythm, but the words of a French sentence, as I hear them, run together into one long string of bubbly noise, signifying nothing. To become a French speaker I would need to go back to school.

Therefore I'm pleased that our next-door neighbors are English, and seem to understand the Texas language well enough. They are Karen and Andrew Calvert, the owners of this house we've rented.

Vacationing in the area a few years ago, the Calverts decided they wanted to live here, and rear their four children. They moved out of England and bought property in Tremolat. Their kids are in public school and speaking French like natives.

The town of Le Bugue is about a 15-minute drive east of here. Friday I'll tell you about going there for our first experience in a French supermarket.

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