Boîte aux lettres

French mailboxes--at least some of them--have two slots. One slot is for local mail; the other slot is marked simply Autres Destinations, other destinations. If your mail isn't going to the local region--in our case, the Alpes-Maritimes--then it doesn't matter whether it's going to Addis Ababa or Akron or Arles. It goes in the second slot.

I love the two slot mailbox. It is so French: at once so efficient--pre-sorting the mail, as it were--and so fussy, demanding just a little extra attention on the part of the mailer. And then there's what it has to say about the importance of the local, the classification of where you are standing at this moment, where you live, versus other places. The French are people of place, and many stay in the same place not just for a lifetime but for generations. The names you see on village war monuments, from wars a century ago, are the same names you see on store fronts today. There's a sense of locality that has had centuries to develop. Either you're from a place, of a place, or you're not. Either your mail is local, or it's not. Addis Ababa or Arles: what does it matter which? Neither place is here.

I'm an inveterate purchaser of post cards. Everywhere we go, I choose a few with particular people in mind. I'm a less inveterate sender of post cards. We get home and they go on my desk, and then the stamps, if there are any, are downstairs, or I can't find the right address book, and before long the cards are buried in the paper drifts. I've uncovered several recently, in the Moving Process, and, since I've also found a cache of stamps and--imagine--my various address books (I keep intending to consolidate them), I've been catching up on my post card correspondence.

Which is what brought me to our local post office the other day. I went to put my cards in the Autres Destinations slot, as all of them were addressed to different time zones. Then I looked again.

A local wag had painted over the last two syllables of destinations and replaced them with an s, turning Autres Destinations into Autres Destins. Other destinies.

Well, it brought me up short. What is the relationship between destination--where you're going--and destiny--where your fate leads you? And are destiny and destination ever one and the same? We thought they might be: we thought that this destination--weather, beauty, history, food--could be our destiny. We thought we might stay, become permanent foreigners. Maybe destiny, or maybe just forces greater than we were--or maybe a little of both--leaned hard on our decision, and here I sit with the dogs, in an empty house, listening to the drone of the cicadas and thinking about where I'll be a few days from now.

We'll go--as I think I've told you--to my mother's house, to a place where you could pitch a ham biscuit in any direction and hit someone who was kin to me either by blood or history. And a few weeks later we'll go to Washington. Our current destination is home. It turns out that La Bastiole was a destination, and a good one, a happy one, but not our destiny. At least not for now. As for destiny: if it could be that we are together, and that we see our girls grow into strong and happy women, and if we could live in a place with good baguettes, above average Thai food, and fresh sweet corn in July, with a good bookstore and movie theater and--don't forget this one--people who share our stories and can remind us of them when we forget, well, let's just say we could do a lot worse.

Our time here has been a wonder, and now we've come to the end. We're closing the gates to La Bastiole--the portail secret, of course, but also the legal gate--and driving off down the hill. You've been good traveling companions; thanks for making La Bastiole one of your destinations. I don't know whether I'll have more stories for you once we reach the New World. I do know that this is the end for now.

As the child of an English teacher, I have bits of poetry that jingle round my mind. I can't remember phone numbers, bank codes, or passwords, but a line from a poem will lodge in my head for days. These last few days it's been T.S. Eliot, one of poetry's wettest blankets, but with what an ear for language. The end is where we start from, he said.

So here we go.

Tequila

We were invited for dinner at 7.30. Our hosts were English, so we knew that the expectation was that we would in fact arrive in the vicinity of that time; had they been French, we would have been expected an hour later. Culture is a subtle creature. It was, anyway, coming on to half seven and we were driving down the local départementale, a road big enough to have a white line down the center, but small enough to be lined by high stone walls. It was about to storm. A motorcycle came around us as we went into a curve, and the car that was approaching in the opposite lane flashed its lights. A reasonable enough response, we thought, to the moto.

But it wasn’t because of the moto that the car had flashed its light, as we saw a moment later. It was because of the miniature Pekingese that was trotting towards us in our lane.

Stop the car, we have to pick up that dog, I said.

C put on the brakes. He didn’t pull over because there was only wall beside the road. I can’t just stop here in the middle of the road.

Put on the hazards, I said, and opened my door. Viens, chien, I said. I’ve learned that French dogs, like French people, appreciate it when you make the effort.

The dog stopped, turned, and trotted up to me. I scooped it up into my lap and closed the car door. Okay, he’s in.

Does he have a collar? He turned off the hazard lights.

The dog wore no collar. His fur was dirty white and matted, and one eye was white with blindness. He sat in my lap panting. I cooed at him.

We’re going to be late. We can’t take that dog with us to dinner.

It was not the first time in our life together that C has had to organize the fallout from my spontaneous acts of helpfulness. One time he spent an anxious half an hour parked in the side yard of a dairy farm on a country road in California. A few miles earlier, we’d passed a large Holstein standing on the side of the road. She’d gotten out of the pasture where we could see her sisters still placidly chewing their cud. A cow in the road is a danger not just to herself but to anyone who happens along, so when we came to the closest farm, I wanted C to pull over so I could go tell the farmers that the cow was out. Then—when I couldn’t raise anyone in the farmhouse—I went round the barns, and, out back, found a trailer with a Spanish-speaking mother and children in it. The men were all off working in the fields, so I spent a pleasant twenty minutes drawing a picture of a cow and a broken fence. C and the girls, who were not yet one, stayed in the car, the girls sleeping and C trying to decide whether to stay with his children or go and save his wife from bloodthristy dairymen. When I came back to the car, he asked me in a steely voice never to do that again. When I explained about the language, and how it took some time to find a pencil and paper, and how the older boy was learning English in school, he was unmoved.

So the other night when he said we could not bring the matted Peke to dinner and what did I propose doing now I tried to think fast. I looked up and saw the bakery. Let’s go and ask Gilbert what to do, I said. He’ll know what to do with a stray dog.

No he won’t. Why would Gilbert know anything about stray dogs? But C turned off the road anyway, and we parked. Gilbert and his wife—or, rather, his companion; they’re not married—work in the local bakery and befriended us early on. Since then he and Blanche have been among our best sources of information and help.

When we got close enough we saw that the boulangerie was closed. Two of the young women who work there were walking away. Dog in my arms, I approached them.

Excusez-moi, mesdames, but we’ve just found this dog in the street. Not much for an opening gambit, but it was all I had.

They gave me the look that people give crazy strangers carrying dirty dogs the world over. Then they recognized me. Their faces went from ignore the crazy lady to let’s save the Peke in an instant.

C, meanwhile, was hovering in the background, torn between calling our hosts to explain why we were going to be late and helping me explain the situation to the bakery ladies.

Then one of the boulangères—really, barely more than a girl; 18 or 19 at the most—recognized the dog.

I think that’s my neighbors’ dog, she said. I’ll call maman and get their phone number.

It seemed too good to be true. I had been working out how we were going to introduce a blind, old, shedding French dog to Alice and Wendy, who are neither blind nor old nor do they lose their fur. Would we be able to take it out of the country with us on such short notice? What about our red couch?

C went to one side to call our friends while the fille du boulangerie called her mother. After a little conversation, she turned to the dog and said: Tequila!

The dog pointed its ears and looked at her.

It was the neighbors’dog.

Then she called the neighbors. There was no one home. We talked about what to do. The young woman explained to us where she lived, and we realized that she was a neighbor of Gilbert and Blanche. Well then, I’ll call Gilbert and he can tell us if the neighbors are home, C offered. We have great faith in our baker friend.

Mais non, came the reply. Gilbert et Blanche ne sont pas chez eux ce soir. They’re not home tonight. There was not even a hint of surprise that this couple who spoke such accented French would have (as we learned later) her uncle’s number programmed into his phone.

In the end, we followed the two boulangères back up the road down which we had already come, and turned off into the side street where Gilbert and Blanche and all their family live. The young women stopped a boy on a scooter who turned out to be the neighbors’ son. A set of gates opened and a large berger allemand came out to sniff around the car, followed closely by a teenage boy. Do you speak English? was the first thing he said, and the second, That’s our dog.

We asked if it were safe to open the car door. The German Shepherd looked fierce, and, although I’ll pick up stray dogs in the street without giving it a thought, I’m not a complete fool.

Oh he’s fine, don’t worry, said the boy, as he hurried around to my side of the car.

I opened my door. The dogs touched noses, and the Peke jumped out. All three went back in the house.

We were only a little late for supper—late by English standards, still early by French—and we had a good story. It wasn’t so much a story about getting the stray home safely. It was a story, our friends pointed out, about village life. All those conversations over the purchase of a daily baguette bought us more than bread. They bought us—gave us—a place in the community, made us, if not local, then at least into known strangers, strangers who were a little less strange. Who you would not be surprised to learn had your aunt and uncle’s phone number on speed dial.

Brûlé

When the movers came two summers ago, they unpacked our worldly possessions before they left. Glasses, books, photographs, all came out of their layers of paper and were put (more or less) in order. Or at least in an order that could be ordered.

But what, asks the person who has moved more than once, became of all that packing paper, and all those boxes? Did the movers take all that away with them?

How perceptive of you to ask. Indeed they did not take the paper and boxes away with them.

The experienced mover looks horrified. But what did you do with them? There must have been mountains of cardboard and paper! Did you set them out by the curb, to be taken away with the recycling?

We did not. There is no recycling truck that comes by our house. Because we live in the smallest, least grand house on a street of Very Grand Homes, Homes whose Very Wealthy Owners do not wish to be reminded of the smaller things in life, our recycling bins are at the far end of the lane, a kilometer away. We load up the car and drive our empty bottles and orange juice cartons down there.

Then what did you do with all those boxes and all that paper? The experienced mover is puzzled and concerned.

We put them all in the unfinished portion of our (illegal, off the books, don't tell anyone I told you we had one) cave. And then we forgot about them.

Until about a month ago. That's when my moving lists started, and that's when I started going down to the basement and thinking about what needed to be packed with what, what given away, what returned to its rightful owners. The now damp and moldy boxes, filled with damper and moldier paper, gazed at me reproachfully. We belong to you, too, they said. What will you do with us?

I brought showed them to C. The boxes perversely refused to meet his eye. To him they looked just like boxes, not like a Problem for the Wee Hours.

Still, he thought about it for a day or two. Then he suggested that we move the boxes back to America and recycle them there. After all, the truck pulls right up to the curb in front of the house; what could be simpler?

I accepted this solution for a few days. We'd just have the movers pack the boxes and then cope with them on the other side. Then one day I was doing the laundry and heard a distinct tsk behind me. I turned. The boxes looked at me balefully. Such a waste, they said, such a waste to move us back, the movers will probably wrap us in more paper and put us in more boxes. All because you can't think what else to do. Mmm. So wasteful. French people must have boxes to get rid of. What do they do?

I went back upstairs and thought about how many trips down the hill to the bins it would take before we had gotten rid of all the boxes. I figured half a dozen. If we carried a box or two upstairs each time we went to the basement, and then, each time we walked up the hill to the car, took a box or two with us, and, each time we went out, dropped a box or two at the recycling, well, it would be doable, wouldn't it?

I carried a few sample boxes upstairs later that day, and then to the car, and then, after I'd collected the girls from wherever they'd been, we left the boxes (flattened, of course) by the recycling bins.

They stayed there for three days, through two rain storms and one wind storm. Twice I drove by and they were in the middle of the lane.

Then in one Wee Hour I had an idea. It would require fewer trips to the car and the recycling and would finish off the problem in a matter of hours.

Reader, I burned them. May God and Al Gore forgive me, I set the boxes and paper on fire.

Not in the house--don't worry--but out in the garden, behind the Burning Wall. In our part of France, it is still legal to burn your garden clippings, your yard trash. People do it constantly and every garden I've been in has at least one spot and sometimes several that bear the telltale ash heap. Jules had Olivier built us a small wall at the bottom of the garden, over the leechfield, to pile our olive clippings and leaves and pulled weeds to be burned. It is, ironically, one of the few things that Jules has done since we've lived here that I know without a shadow of a doubt to be entirely within both the law and custom of the country.

And so, early one morning when C and the girls had gone out--I did not wish to implicate them in my sin--I began dragging boxes up the stairs from the cave, through the kitchen, and down to the bottom of the garden. And I set them on fire. Small fires; I never let them get very big. (Front page of The New York Times: Côte d'Azur destroyed by out-of-control garden fire; American woman says she didn't mean to.) Trip after trip down the stairs, up the stairs, through the kitchen, down the garden hill. I was covered in soot and mold.

After a couple of hours the boxes were gone. There may be a hole in the ozone with my name on it, and for my sins, I'll recycle that much more fanatically, I promise. But by lunchtime I went inside, found my list, and drew a line through the item Moving Boxes.

When we unpack in Washington, we'll put the recycling at the curb.

Checking in

I had a roommate one summer while I was in graduate school who came from Madrid. She was the youngest child and only daughter in a wealthy Catholic olive oil company-owning family, and this was the first time that she'd ever been away from home. (She was 22.) One evening she went to San Francisco to have dinner with friends and she did not come home. It was not unheard of in my circles for people to sleep over with friends of all denominations, so I didn't worry. But the next morning, Mar called me. In her best English, she said: I am calling to tell you that I have not dead.

And I have not dead either. Life's just been coming at us fast since last we spoke: going away parties and dinners, and then the Tour de France came through our village on Sunday, and Monday morning we took the girls to the stable where they're spending the week riding horses through vineyards, eating cake for breakfast, and playing with the stable puppies and kittens. It's girl heaven. From the stables, C and I drove north to Moustiers-Sainte Marie (it's there, in the photo). We spent two nights enjoying the blessings of furniture, and two days hiking and picnicking and stocking up on all the faience that we didn't know we needed. I now have the luxury of being physically tired instead of emotionally fatigued.

We're home now: Saturday, when the girls come home, we'll decamp to a rented house in the village. Between now and then, we'll do laundry, put the air shipment together for Monday, and return borrowed bits and bobs. Plenty to do, but not too much. I'm planning to stay in touch with you all over the next week or so, so do check back.

House keys

Before the movers left with their second and final load, Jimmy (that's Gee-mee to you), the younger son and the foreman, asked me to faire le tour of the house and make sure they hadn't forgotten anything. I did, and they had: a drawer in one of the armoires in our room was still full. My work shoes--heels and flats in various shades of black--which I hope to need. So Jean, the papa, took some newsprint, a box, and scotch (tape, that is) upstairs and came down a few minutes later with a box that he had carefully labeled Shoes, Study.

Jimmy and crew labeled all the boxes in English, although they spoke none. English, Jimmy explained to me when I asked, is the International Language of Moving. No matter where their clients are going, his crew labels all the boxes in English. Which would have worked out fine had our équipe figured out which room in our house was which. As it was, everything that was in the guest room in this house--C's desk and files; our winter coats; wrapping paper; my sewing boxes--went out of the house under the name of MBR which means, for those of you who don't compulsively read real estate listings, Master Bedroom. Because there was also a double bed in the room. And everything that was in our bedroom--my desk, my files, our bed, our dressers, our clothes and shoes and bedding--went out in boxes marked Study.

Which may make unpacking take a little longer.

As I was saying, though, le papa went upstairs and came down with a box of shoes that the movers on the other end will no doubt put in the study, and, shortly after that, the movers left. The girls and I ate our lunch in a daze, and then took turns vacuuming--do you remember how dirty a house gets during a move?--and, what with one thing and another, it was late afternoon before I went upstairs to our room.

I was feeling more than usually tuckered out. We all are: it's not just the physical displacing of objects, it's the displacing of ourselves, our souls and bodies. We've been saying goodbye to our life here for what feels like weeks, and we've still got two weeks to go. We have the same conversation over and over again, in both languages: Oui, il faut qu'on partir...it's because of the economy, more than anything else...on a esperé de rester...no, we kept our house in America...We could recite it in our sleep. And it's more than saying goodbye. We talked about this move to France for years, working it out in our heads long before we ever worked it out on the ground. Now we've done it, and it's time to go back. We think of all the things we'll miss about our life here, and all the things we haven't missed about our life there, and it slows a person down.

So I was thinking these sorts of flat and tired thoughts as I put our room (futon, two lamps, small rag rug: G said it looks like a yoga studio) in order, when I noticed something on top of the half-wall that divides our bedroom from the salle de bains. It was a set of keys. I picked them up and turned them over, looking for a clue as to what they would open.

They were the spare keys to a friend's house in Washington.

I held the keys and savored, for a moment or two, the feeling of belonging they gave me. And better than belonging: the feeling of going home, of going back to people to whom we are connected by so much of our past and present and, if we're lucky, future. Then I went downstairs, where I was promptly distracted and forgot about them. I found the keys again, today, sitting on the table that is the only furniture in what was the guest room (MBR to the movers).

I've been finding keys throughout our déménagement--keys to our Washington house, to our parents' houses, the houses of neighbors and friends--and I've put them all in a little cloth bag with the things that will travel in my suitcases. Each set I find makes me think of being in that house, the concrete memories of meals shared and conversations and the ordinary splendor of everyday life. They take me beyond the traffic and the Wal-Marts and the Mark Sanfords to the supper table, the music recital, and the afternoon walk. The house keys remind me that we are not just going back; we're going home. And home is the place where, when you go there, you can let yourself in the back door.

Le portail secret

The movers left at noon. The temperature was approaching 90 degrees, and there was enough humidity in the air, and enough clouds on the mountain horizon, to augur for more heat and an afternoon storm.

This morning the movers came earlier than they had on the previous two days; they were here a few minutes after eight, and the father--our moving crew was a father and his two 30ish sons--was running down the path by the house to open the secret gate and let the moving truck into the garden.

La Bastiole has two gates. Houses in our commune are only permitted one. We have one that leads into our small parking area--that's the legal gate--and one that leads directly from the lane into the garden. That's the illegal one. (We call it the secret gate; secret sounds so much nicer than illegal, don't you think?) The one that the mairie has told Jules that he has to take out. The one that Jules' good friend le maire told him that he could only leave in if he camouflaged it with plantings on the street side and never, ever opened it. The one that Jules opens every six weeks on average to bring in the bob or the tractopel or the load of gravel that is supposed to solve our septic problem.

The one that Jules said the movers were not, under any circumstances, to use.

C'est illégal, ce portail, et je n'ai pas le droit de l'ouvrir, he explained to C. This gate, it's illegal, and I don't have the right to open it. The movers, they can just put the truck in the parking, it's not a big deal, you know, these ouvriers, they're always just trying to take the easy way out, but in Paris, people are moving into and out of apartments on the fifth floor all the time and the movers, they do it and they don't complain.

Our legal portail--the one that leads into the parking--perhaps this is the moment to say a few words about that one. La Bastiole's driveway--in the middle of which stands the legal portail--is vertical in both directions. To turn into it in a manual transmission car, it's necessary both to downshift and to get a running start, both of which are difficult to do given that the lane is, itself, more than a little steep. (Some of our visitors won't even make the turn. They prefer to continue along the lane, through two blind curves with a seven foot drop on one side, to turn around in the slightly wider spot and come at it the driveway from the opposite direction.)

Once you make the turn, you have to turn the wheel sharply to avoid a wall on the left and then sharply, again, to correct for the wall on the right. These are walls made of large, uneven stones. Having threaded that needle, you find yourself at our gate, and then you put on the brake because you are now about to lose all the altitude that you just gained. And watch out, because there's an olive tree in the middle of the parking. When you've got the emergency brake on, you can leave the car and walk down the gravel path to the house, descending a half dozen uneven, wide, low, gravel-covered steps that are set into the terraced hillside. You can then enter the house either by a steep set of uneven stone stairs or continue around to the front of the house by way of more (and still descending) gravel.

When we moved in to La Bastiole two years ago, the movers used the (then not-so-) secret gate. Jules was feeling flush with having rented an unfinished house to Americans, and the mairie had not yet broken the news to him about the second gate being illegal. So it was pas de problème for the movers to back their shuttle truck in and unload our worldly possessions.

This time Jules' attitude was different. The movers' was not. When I met with M. Morin, le responsable, for the first time, he took one look at our driveway and said: We cannot get a truck in here. I do not know how we are going to do this.

And I said, Oh, pas de problème, Monsieur, on peut utiliser le portail secret. And I explained all about it. From the secret gate, it is but a few level and grassy steps to the terrace and the wide kitchen doors.

He was reassured.

Then we told Jules.

And Jules said--what he said (see above).

And C and I thought about the movers bringing their truck in through the legal gate. I remembered the scene in How the Grinch Stole Christmas when the Grinch's sleigh is balanced at the pointy tippy top of a mountain, a chasm on one side and a luge run on the other.

Jules talked to M. Morin on the phone several times, rehearsing with him all the reasons that it was impossible to use the portail secret. M. Morin came to see me again on the first day that the movers were here. We stood in the kitchen in a sea of newsprint and boxes while the movers packed around us.

I spoke with your propriétaire, he said. His eyebrows said the rest.

Ah, oui? I said.

He said it will not be possible to use the portail as we discussed.

Ah, oui, I said. (It's all about inflection.)

I'm not sure what we will do. Again with the eyebrows.

Ah, non? V0tre propriétiare, Madame. Il habite où, normalement?

He lives in Paris, Monsieur.

And is he in Paris now, Madame?

Ah, oui, Monsieur, I said.

Alors-- he began.

Monsieur, I interrupted. Sometimes, I am not understanding the French very well, you know. People, they are saying things to me, and I am not really understanding what they have said when they say what they are doing.

Ah, oui? said M. Morin.

And so today the movers left at noon. The house is empty save for a few beds and chairs, and a table and some lamps. We've got enough kitchen goods--plates and cups--to manage with, and a pot for boiling water and a pan for making tomato sauce, and of course my tea kettle. It took the movers two trips in their shuttle truck between La Bastiole and the large truck, the container truck, that the driver parked in the lot down by the rond point. The papa and his sons moved all the boxes out onto the terrace, and thence into the open truck.

Jules arrives on Sunday for a few days. I hope we get some rain between now and then. The grass at the edge of the terrace, near the portail secret, is looking a little worn.

Justificatif

We can now legally move.

I went up to the Mairie Thursday afternoon. I took with me the folder in which we keep: a recent bank statement; our French taxes; copies of both of our passports; our cartes de séjour; and the traduction officielle of our marriage license. (We just keep this folder lying around; you never know when, in the course of French life, you're going to need these documents.) When it was my turn at the counter, I explained to Madame la receptioniste that we were, malheursement, moving out of the village, and that I needed a certificat de démenagement.

We knew we needed this because Nathalie, our responsable at the moving company, mentioned it in her list of items that we would need to give the movers so that they could waft our household goods through French customs. Two inventories, signed and dated; two affidavits stating that we are not exporting either firearms or Picassos; and a certificat from our town hall stating that we have stated that we are moving. Now, usually at this point in our conversation, I would explain to you all about the history of this particular piece of paperwork, how it started, what it signifies, its relation to some broader themes in French culture. But today, reader, I have nothing for you. It may be the fog of moving, or the fog of age, or just fog, but I am at a loss as to the meaning of this piece of paper.

But back to Madame la réceptioniste. She nodded efficiently when I explained what I needed, and listed the documents she would need in order to make me a certificat. A pièce d'identité for each of us; an official document showing our local address; another document showing the address to which we were moving.

I had the pièces d'identité--that's child's play to anyone initiated into French bureaucracy--and handed them over. To show our local address, I handed Madame the bank statement. She paused.

Don't you have a copy of your rental contract? Clearly the bank statement was not the document normale.

I didn't. I decided not to go into all the irregularities of our rental contract--how we actually rent from Jules' daughters, who live outside of France, and how, really, if you read the fine print closely, we don't (in the strictest of French legal terms) rent at all, we just borrow the house and, out of gentilesse, pay some of Jules' bills for him--and tried, instead, our French taxes. This was printed in red ink on pink paper, with a sketch of Marianne in the upper left hand corner. It looked very, very official.

She nodded. It would do.

And now, a justificatif stating your new address?

Justificatif is one of those words that I doubt I would be able to pronounce correctly and at speed if I spent the rest of my life in France. So I said to Madame, I don't have a justifica...(it's always along about the fifth syllable that my willing suspension of disbelief that this could actually be a meaningful word gives out) but I do have a carte de visite that shows our new address.

I showed her the business cards that I had printed up last week to hand round to our friends here. It lists our names and our American street address and phone number.

She frowned. She shook her head.

Where exactly are you moving, Madame? It clearly beggared belief that I could be moving to a place that did not provide stacks of justificatifs.

We're moving to America, I said.

Her face cleared. Ah, she said. Les Etats-Unis. Bon. Of course, that explains the situation, her attitude suggested. They probably haven't developed justificatifs there.

She took the carte de visite--up til now, she'd left it sitting between us on the counter--and began to read it. She got to the name of our town and asked what it was. I told her it was the name of our town.

Then there was a two-letter abbreviation after that. C'est quoi, ça?

C'est l'état, Madame.

C'est quoi, un état?

C'est la section des Etats-Unis où on habite, I said, hoping that that would work.

She asked me to write out the name of the state. I did.

Friday morning, Madame called to tell me that my attestation was ready to be picked up. I resisted the temptation to say that I needed a certificat, not an attestation. I decided to roll with it and see if, this time, they turned out to be the same thing. (I know it sounds loopy, but once you've had to write down the number of paper clips that you are taking out of the country, you don't take anything for granted.)

On my way to collect the girls from their last day of school, and buy sandwiches for the movers who were wrapping everything they could reach in several layers of newsprint and stuffing it into boxes, I stopped in the village. Madame was at the desk. She handed me an envelope.

I opened it.

République Française, the paper says across the top, above the date, and just barely above the coat of arms of our village. Then, in bold capitals: Certificat Administratif.

I the undersigned, the mayor of this village, certify that Monsieur Mari, (and then his birth date, and nationality) and Madame Marron, son épouse (and my birth date and nationality, and have I ever mentioned to you that even though I did not take C's name, I am listed on every single French document we have under his name? Because that's the way it is in France. C'est comme ça. To continue:) have told us that they are moving out of the Commune, and will therefore no longer live at their current address, from the 15th of July, 2009. And that they will, henceforth, reside at: and then our American address.

All impressively official and bureaucratic, and our mayor's name and title below, and his signature (with a flourish; wouldn't you assign a flourish if you were the mayor of a small French village?) and a stamp showing Marianne looking unusually like the State of Liberty--pointy crown, torch, toga and so forth.

And so we have one more document to add to our dossier, one more piece of the paper trail of our French life.

I wonder if I could get a Moving In Certificate from our mayor in America. It might provide some closure.