Welcome! I’m so happy you’re here!

They say home is where the heart is. But what happens when your heart tells you it’s time to leave everything behind?

Let me tell you a little about the little old lady . . .

I’m Carolyn Smith-Kizer. Clinical Herbalist, history detective, wood-fired cook, and the American woman who bought a 170-year-old stone house in a French village of 653 people for €23,000 — at an age when most people are settling in, not setting out.

The village is Clugnat, in the Creuse, smack dab in the middle of France. The house is on the Rue Martin Nadaud — named for a 19th century mason who became a politician — which tells you something about the kind of place this is. The stones here remember things. The river remembers things. Even the gate post has a story carved into it, if you know how to read limestone.

I didn’t come here because I had it all figured out. I came because the dream refused to let me alone.

I had twenty years of clinical herbalism practice behind me. Twenty years of French Colonial historical reenactment. A late husband who was a biblical scholar and believed that how you say a thing is inseparable from what the thing means. And a Boise State University interpretive reading voice that apparently helps French speakers learn English, which I did not see coming.

What I do here:

The History Detective series follows the trails written into the ordinary objects and stones of rural France — a hitching ring, a gate post, a faïence plate, a factory on a river that nobody remembers anymore. Every episode is a small investigation into the things that transmit rather than trash, the things that survived when they had no particular reason to.

The Restoration documents what it actually costs — in time, money, lime plaster, and stubbornness — to bring a 170-year-old stone house back to life on a fixed income with a cane and a walker.

The Kitchen Garden at Clugnat grows the plants Charlemagne put in his garden in 812 AD, because some things are worth growing for thirteen centuries.

The Kitchen runs on a wood-fired range and the conviction that the table is a statement about what you believe hospitality is.

Reading English with Carolyn [coming] is for anyone who wants to hear the English language the way it was meant to sound — through poetry and prose read slowly, clearly, and with twenty years of interpretive reading behind it.

And at atcharlemagnesbehest.com I go deeper — the history, the medicine, the plants, the Carolingian thread that runs from 812 AD to my garden right now.

This place transmits rather than trashes.

So do I.

Making the old ways new again. ♥

about the little old lady and how she cooks