photo taken August 2009

one year ago: Oh, The Expression!
two years ago: Off And Running

Back when I posted THIS picture for a caption contest ~ Charlie with a champagne cork ~ a reader named Rhedrose left the comment: “I am happily intrigued with why, in the wilds of Wyoming, Charlie apparently has such a familiarity with champagne corks. What ARE y’all doing up there?!?”

Well.  When I graduated from high school, I didn’t go to college; I moved to France.  I lived in an attic (really) outside Paris and it was one of the most horrendous experiences of my life.  The trauma, however, though significant, was not enduring, and the few glorious things I did experience while in France have stayed with me.  I had a ménage à trois.  I fell in love with cheese.  Such clichés, I know.

I also was introduced to champagne, in a manner that exuded a casual, elegant, nonchalance.  Which might seem a contradiction but it’s not.  I worked as an au pair, and the family always had a case of champagne at hand, and always had a bottle open in the fridge.  Always.  To my 18-year-old mind, the perpetual bottle of champagne seemed so decadent, so romantic, so “je ne sais quoi,” and I vowed, once I got the heck out of there, to adopt the tradition as soon as I was legally able.  However, when I did reach the age where I could stock my fridge with champagne, I could not afford to.  I was a starving student, then a starving artist.

Now I live in Wyoming in a very rustic manner, drive a beater truck, and am usually clad in dirty jeans.  However, while I do not have cases of it, nor a bottle in my fridge at all times, I will, upon occasion, buy champagne for no reason.  And Charlie loves the corks.