I'll be honest: fire season was on the short list of things I thought we left behind in Los Angeles. France proved otherwise. Heatwave after heatwave, fires in the southwest, and my California instincts came roaring back like they never left. Also in this issue: the eclipse we watched from the farm and a garden that has officially won. Here's what's been happening.

Before we get into it: Part 1 of our summer in France is up on YouTube. It covers May and June, our wildest stretch yet. Pride in Paris, dancing at Fête de la Musique, planting trees and picking cherries at the farm, Dylan learning to drive a tractor, and surviving the first canicule of the summer together. We also made some pretty important choices, but you'll have to watch to find out what exactly.

It's the closest thing we've made to what daily life here actually looks like.

Now, the hard part.

This has been the summer of heatwaves. Four of them, by our count, including the one arriving this weekend. Every time one broke, the forecast was already promising the next. The French have a word for it, canicule, and we've used it more this summer than just about any other French word we know.

The heat has impacted everything here in France this summer, from the green hills around us going brown to the crop harvests the farmers in the village are worried about. It's hard not to ask the question out loud: is this an omen of what's to come?

We know the drill by now: shutters closed by mid-morning, everything important done before noon, and evenings outside because the house holds the heat until well after 9:00 PM. We did finally do something about the inside part, though. We had heat pumps with air conditioning installed at the house. (Yes, we became the Americans who put mini-split cooling in a French farmhouse. No regrets.) With the way these summers are trending, it stopped feeling like a luxury and started feeling like infrastructure.

With the heat came the fires. They've burned throughout the Southwest, France in general, and all over Europe; the ones outside Bordeaux made the news.

As a Californian in a fire season, you remember on a different level how to react. I spent 18 years in Los Angeles. I've watched hillsides glow orange from the freeway. I know exactly what the sky looks like when it's not just haze, and the smell of smoke on a dry wind flips a switch in my brain that no amount of French countryside can turn off.

What surprised me is how useful that switch turned out to be. Fire prep is not really part of the culture here the way it is back home, at least not among anyone we've talked to. In California, it's a reflex. So the reflex took over:

Nobody moves to the French countryside expecting to import their fire-season habits. But the southwest of France is hot, dry, and getting hotter, and the skills work either in France or California. Getting the property more fire-ready is a bold item on our project list. If you're in this region and you've never thought about it, consider this your nudge. The list above can serve as your starting point.

Now the better sky story.

On Wednesday evening, August 12, the sky over the Dordogne put on a show. The path of totality ran through Iceland and northern Spain, so we didn't get the full blackout here, but we got close enough that the whole property changed. The light went almost hazy and amber, the shadows got strange, and all the animals in the area seemed to sense the change on a global scale.

We watched from the farm, eclipse glasses from the local pharmacy on, standing in the yard like a couple of kids on a field trip. There's something about watching an eclipse from your own patch of countryside instead of a crowded city park. No traffic, no crowd, just the sky doing its thing over the barn.

Meanwhile, the garden has no idea anything is wrong. From the heatwaves to the sky changing seemingly by the day.

The tomatoes are coming in faster than we can eat them, give them away, or invent new reasons to process them to save for later. The zucchini we planted in the spring has gone from "cute little plants" to "industrial supplier." The basil is thriving. We are now the people who show up to a neighbor's house holding vegetables, which I have come to understand is a rite of passage in the French countryside.

And that's before the rest of the goods: watermelons, beets, figs off the tree, several types of pears, a few species of apples that are almost ready, cherries earlier this season, plums just now ready to be picked, and a pumpkin so big it needed the wheelbarrow to leave the garden.

The garden handled four heatwaves better than almost anything around it, and the reason is the weeds. We left the weed cover in place around the beds, and it kept the soil moist through every canicule. The over-manicured lawns and tilled field rows at the farms and fields near us, on the other hand, dried out and browned. Our slightly shaggy approach turned out to be the winning strategy. I'd love to pretend like it was planned but it was just me losing the battle against the weeds without mulch this season.

The grass, for its part, slowed way down in July and never picked back up, which took mowing mostly off our plate. (The new Husqvarna lawn mower we bought in the spring has more than earned its keep. That review is still coming, I promise.)

If you've been reading since June, you've already met the bees, and Benoît, the apiculteur who set us up with our two hives. The update: they made it through their first summer, both alive, both busy, and a little more opinionated than they were in June. We're not touching the honey this year. Year one is for them. (That's the plan at least.)

Benoît runs Le Rucher du Marandou in the Périgord Noir, and his honey is the real thing. Go buy Benoît's honey 🍯: rucher-marandou.fr

New here and missed the hives arriving? Our bee video has the whole story.

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We moved here for a slower life, and mostly we've found it. But this summer was a reminder that you don't get to pick which parts of a place you inherit. You get the fires and the heatwaves, the tomato overload and the heat that causes it. The whole deal. Tomatoes on the counter, go-bag by the door, I'll take the whole deal.

A year ago this week we were packing a house in Los Angeles into a container and trying to explain to a 12-year-old German Shepherd why his bed was in a box. We landed in France the first week of September 2025. I'm writing this from the patio with a watermelon we grew on the table and bees working the tree above me. I don't have a bigger point than that. It's been a year and it worked.

One more thing before I sign off: we're heading back to the USA and Los Angeles. More on that when we return.

More from France soon,
Andrew