L’Hash de Pigeons

As those cool fall days approach in New England and give warning to the coming of winter, some of you may be envious of the climate we will be enjoying in southern France. One description I read of Toulouse’s climate was “not too hot, not too cold,” which is simply a modest way of saying “just right.” Like other places with “just right” climates, it’s easy to spend a lot of one’s life outdoors here.

We are especially fortunate that both our kitchen and dining rooms have huge French doors that open up to a lovely patio on which to enjoy the outdoor life of southern France. The patio is tiled, spacious and protected on one side with a hedge that includes a fruiting fig tree. The figs just happen to be perfectly ripe and delicious now, and we have indulged in both the white and black fig varieties that grow on the property. The other side of the patio is partially protected by the attractive brick wall of the house. On the patio we eat meals, watch the comings and goings of our neighbors, enjoy the dahlias that line the driveway and marvel at the property’s ancient ruin that doubles as a garage. (If found elsewhere, this particular building would look like a condemned, derelict of a building, but in southern France, it really does look like an ancient ruin that is worthy of protection and reverence.)

It would be nice to stop here and leave you with this lovely image of paradise. Honesty compels me, however, to tell you that this little bit of paradise also happens to be covered with pigeon “hash.” Hash is an honest-to-goodness French word that can be found in my Larousse French-English dictionary. I will leave you to discern its meaning, but suffice it to say, it certainly does make corned beef hash seem considerably less appetizing.

Likewise, the hash covering our patio certainly makes the outdoor living experience considerably less appealing. When we first arrived at our apartment, our patio was hash-free. Little did we know that this was not its normal state. We got a hint that there was trouble in paradise the next morning when we woke up to a fair amount of hash on the edge of the patio. Believing that in paradise this sort of thing would take care of itself, we chose to ignore it and continued in our bliss. The next morning, however, things got a bit more serious. The hash was building up on the edges and edging out onto the patio chairs. Why hadn’t it washed away automatically during the overnight rainfall? Why hadn’t those cute little lizards that zip around eaten it all up?

By this morning, the hash situation was totally out of hand. We started fearing that there would be live bombings while we ate our breakfast. We obviously had to make a move or we would be buried alive in hash. Our unit mobilized, identified a “Green Zone” on the patio that seemed to be relatively safe from the bombing, and moved the table and chairs accordingly. The unit’s commanders then met in the War Room to discuss the relative strategic value of mopping versus sweeping. We chose mopping for our first offensive. We quickly realized, however, that pigeon hash expresses itself in remarkably different textures that must be addressed with varying strategic maneuvers, so we followed up our mopping offensive by a sweep through.

We now see that we are caught in a war without an exit strategy. We’ve considered escalating the offensive by trying to disarm our opponents. We are investigating whether BB guns are allowed under the Geneva Conventions. In the mean time, the bombing continues. I can actually hear the shelling while I sit in the dining room writing this exposé. C’est la guerre.