This is our first full spring in the house, and it's brought a lot of what we moved here for. A garden. Bees. Long evenings. What I didn't see coming was walking out of an operating room rethinking everything I'd been taught to believe about the cost of healthcare. But that's where we'll start, because it's the part I can't stop thinking about.

I had surfer's eye in my right eye. The scientific name is pterygium. It came on fast, under a month, and then it started to mess with my vision. Probably from all those long days in the lovely Southern California sun. Either way, it needed to be fixed.

In the US, this kind of procedure can cost around $7,000, depending on your insurance. That's not a horror story. That's just the number if you're uninsured or sitting on a high deductible. Every American knows the drill. You get sick, you get fixed, and somewhere down the line a bill arrives that makes you wish you'd never mentioned it to anyone.

I went to the brand-new eye center in Bergerac. I found the doctor through a local referral, and because it had come on so suddenly, they wanted to see me right away. My appointment was just a few days out. We started with a non-surgical treatment first, and when that didn't fix the problem, we moved to surgery, all of it within about two months. I had the surgery done, and it went perfectly. The doctor was thorough, the clinic was calm, and I left with zero doubt that I'd been in good hands. I was.

Out-of-pocket, without insurance, here: €1,400.

€1,400 versus roughly $7,000. Same procedure. New facility, current equipment, a competent surgeon. The care was everything I'd expect from good healthcare, which is what I've had in the US too. What surprised me was the price.

And that €1,400 was the full out-of-pocket price, paid without French insurance at all. With coverage, the math gets almost comical. Here's the rough picture.

That mutuelle line is the part Americans don't have a frame for. The public system covers most of the cost of most care, and a mutuelle is a cheap private plan you add on top to cover the rest, including copays. Not one expensive policy doing everything. A small layer over a public base, and ours would run less than a fifth of the $500+ we paid every month in the US, before the deductible, before the copays, before the surprise bill.

Here's the part that gets me. Americans are raised to believe healthcare is a trade: good care is expensive, and anything cheaper must be worse. It's why a $7,000 bill feels almost reasonable and "socialized medicine" gets said like a slur. Then you have minor surgery in a spotless French clinic, with a surgeon who knows exactly what he's doing, and you pay a fraction of what we would expect in the States. The care wasn't a downgrade. The wait wasn't long. The only thing that was different was the invoice, and not by a little. By five times. We've since applied for the public system and are playing the waiting game to get it all set up.

I won't pretend France and the US run the same math. They don't. But the thing Americans are sold, that excellent care and a sane price can't share a room, is just not true. I sat in that room. They handed me an espresso in it.

That's not a figure of speech. When it was over, a nurse asked if I'd like a little café before I went. Not a paper cup of waiting-room coffee. An actual espresso, in the recovery area, the way you'd get one at a friend's kitchen table. It came with a madeleine, a little cup of applesauce, and some crackers. Post-op snacks, French edition. I said yes, obviously. I've never been more sure I moved to the right country.

The eye is fine, and the surgery worked. I'd do the whole thing again without hesitating.

Now, the lighter half of the week.

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We've wanted bees since before we bought the property. A 200-year-old farm in the Dordogne with open land and a working garden felt incomplete without them. There are big old trees scattered across the property too, the kind that bloom and hum all spring, which makes the place feel like it was waiting for hives all along. The only questions were when and who.

We found our answer through an apiculteur named Benoît Serre, who runs Le Rucher du Marandou, a human-sized apiary in Saint-Avit-de-Vialard, in the heart of the Périgord Noir. He got into bees in 2012 after rescuing the last surviving hive from his late grandfather's abandoned property. From that one hive, he built an operation that now runs around 250 hives. He knows exactly what he's doing, and he's patient enough to explain it to two Americans who showed up with their equipment assembled wrong. We'd put the hive bodies together backwards. He caught it immediately and didn't make us feel like idiots about it.

You can actually buy his honey. It's in local supermarkets and chains like Intermarché around here, and he sells it online at rucher-marandou.fr. If you ever find yourself in the Dordogne with a spare jar of euros, the spring honey is the one.

The bees are Italian hybrids crossed with local black bees. Benoît calls them hybrids because they're a mix, and he says they're generally good-natured. I called a few of them spicy. He gently corrected me: the ladies have personality. We're choosing to read that optimistically.

Getting them home was its own adventure. Dylan had done almost no research beforehand, on purpose, because he wanted to experience the whole thing fresh. That's very Dylan. I'd kept bees once before, in high school, Italian bees, and I was confident enough in that teenage memory to contribute exactly one useful thing: some baseline knowledge that immediately ran into a completely different French system of hive assembly, connectors, and transport.

Benoît walked us through all of it. He showed us the clip connectors that hold the hive bodies together for transport, nothing like what I remembered. He screwed the entrance shut so the bees could breathe but not escape on the drive home. He talked us through the frame development timeline, what to expect the first week, how to spread the frames as the colony builds out toward the end of June, when to think about adding a super.

At one point he opened a hive to find us a colony and spotted queen cells, which meant the bees were trying to replace their queen and the colony might be unstable. He backed out and found us a different one.

We now have two hives at the house. They're alive and, as far as we can tell, settling in. We go check on them and mostly just stand there watching, which I think is exactly right.

Watch the bee day video here.

The garden beds were already here when we bought the place. So were the trellis structures, a few of them leaning at angles that hint at past seasons of heavy climbing plants. We decided to use what was here this year and figure out what we actually want to build for next year.

This season we transplanted seedlings we'd started indoors, plus a handful of small plants we picked up as one-inch pots. What's in the ground right now: potatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, green beans, zucchini, several kinds of tomatoes, beets, onions, shallots, a lot of lettuce, broccoli, and Swiss chard. The tomatoes are climbing the wire trellis. Everything else is finding its way.

We're also trying a couple of low-tech tricks against the local wildlife. We planted marigolds around the pest-prone plants, which are supposed to keep the bad bugs at bay. And we set up a few empty Bonne Maman jars half buried and half filled with beer, the idea being that the slugs and snails would rather spend their evening in there than on my lettuce. So far, it seems to be working.

The plan this year is simple. Grow food, eat it, learn what works in this soil. Next summer we want more of everything, and we want to do it more naturally: multiple crops together, building soil health instead of just spending it. That's the long version. The short version is we're getting there.