Bastille Day beer and mowing

Since it is Bastille Day today, I imagine having a dinner of some sort of roasted wild bird with a buttery sauce, paired with an elegant red wine. I would wear an Hermes scarf and might smoke after dinner. But instead, we are vegetarian and live in Whitmore Lake, so we are having rice pilaf and sauteed kale, with Oberon beer (brewed in Comstock, MI).
A Google search on "bastille day whitmore lake" turns up mention of a 2009 Bastille Day race in Fenton, Michigan, but not much else. Apparently the residents of southeastern Michigan are not lining up to play boules.
My partner Jeffree is mowing the yard. This makes me wonder why mowing the grass seems like such an American activity. I imagine the French who do not live in Parisian apartments to have meadows of wild grasses and flowers instead of lawns. While romantic, this notion does contain a grain of truth if the number of titles listed on Amazon.com under "American lawn" are any sort of evidence (exhibit A: "The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession," by Virginia Scott Jenkins).

Ah, the travesty of the manicured lawn... but just to be clear: our lawn is far from manicured. It has many weeds in it, since it is never chemically treated, and the flower beds are taken over by poison ivy--another problem the French do not have. Per Wikipedia: "Many Europeans who hike in the US and Canada are surprised to find that such a hazardous plant exists so commonly on the continent." Indeed! I am also surprised--constantly.

This brings me to the other Michigan hazard: the mosquito. The Wikipedia article on the mosquito does not tell me how prevalent it is in France, but I did uncover an interesting article from last summer about the French spraying farmland to kill mosquitoes who were at risk of crossing the channel into England: "French officials launched the commando operation after insect experts warned that as many as six billion mosquito larvae had started hatching in swampland near the France-Belgium border--– less than 100 miles from the south coast of England." I wondered for a moment why the French would care if their mosquitoes ended up in England, and then I realized (ah, the tangled web of the Web) that the article I was reading was from the Telegraph, so clearly they were worried about the potential migration, even if the French had other motivations.

Nevertheless, here's to the French, poison-ivy free and drenched in buttery silk! Vive la revolution! (don't know yet how to insert accents in this blog, so I apologize for the lack thereof)