Life at La Bastiole

Boîte aux lettres

2009-07-15T08:00:00.002+02:00

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

2009-07-13T16:35:00.006+02:00

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

2009-07-10T11:36:00.003+02:00

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

2009-07-08T21:11:00.003+02:00

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

2009-07-01T17:01:00.006+02:00

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

2009-06-30T15:15:00.005+02:00

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

2009-06-29T08:00:00.000+02:00

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.

Ruban de caution

2009-06-24T16:56:00.003+02:00

The movers come Friday morning. They'll spend Friday and Monday packing us--the blessings of working for a multinational company--and then, Tuesday, the truck will take it all away. Even though we're not packing ourselves, I've spent the last week and more sorting and arranging and discarding. I tell whomever asks (or doesn't) that the more organized the household is when it is packed up, the easier it will be to unpack on the other side, but that's only part of the reason for my activity. The rest of the reason is that it distracts me. If I can control the towels, I can control the world.

We've got a combination of stuff in the house: ours, friends', Jules'. When M. Morin, the responsable commercial of the moving company, came to discuss our move, he suggested that we would need to separate those things for the ocean shipment from those for the air shipment from those which will go in our suitcases--and then, of course, all that from things which will not go with the movers at all. I've been puzzling out how to do that without putting the household it total disarray since his visit more than a month ago.

The solution came to me in the wee hours on Monday. Later in the day, I paid a visit to our local Briconautes and bought a role of red and white striped caution tape. I've tied pieces of it around everything that the movers aren't to bother with: the lamps, Jules' chairs, the pulls of the kitchen drawers that still have groceries in them. Since we'll stay in the house for nearly two weeks after the truck departs loaded with our ocean-going shipment, we're leaving our clothes in the closets, and those closet doors all have red and white ribbon tape on their knobs.

I had thought that all the ribbons lent the place an incongruously festive air, but when G came home this afternoon she pointed out that it looked like nothing so much as a fractured relay race. Like the participants were supposed to race from the chair to the table to the lamp to the bed to the closet to the kitchen, not touching anything but the tape. It's like living inside a race course, she said.

And, now that she mentions it, I see her point. The race starts Friday morning. I'll be on duty with the movers all day, explaining about my ruban de caution and assuring them that no matter how ferociously they bark, Alice and Wendy won't bite. You may not here from me til Monday or even next Wednesday: but I'm not gone yet. Check back.

Ditch

2009-06-22T17:42:00.003+02:00

In our commune (and, for all I know, in every French commune), the mairie has the right to widen the public thoroughfare--that's road to you--when a new house is built. And they get to charge the owner of the new house for a portion of the widening costs. They can't widen it a lot--no super-highways going in where there used to be a goat path--but they can widen it up to one meter from the preexisting edge of the road. Our house was built two years ago, which qualifies it as new.

And thus it came to pass that last weekend Jules came down from Paris, hired two day laborers, and dug a ditch along the edge of the chemin alongside our house.

In the dark hours when Jules lies in bed, counting over all the people who are scheming to part his sous from him, he apparently remembered this law and realized that it was possible that his good friend the mayor of our village might decide, one day, to pave an extra meter of ground on our side of the road.

When this thought came to him, Jules did not turn over and drift off to sleep, to dream of legislation repealing the TVA. I imagine that he sat up in bed and put on the light, woke Madame, and together they hatched out a plan to prevent the commune taking any of their land.

Our lane is about eight feet wide, and bordered on both sides by either a sheer drop of several feet into an olive grove; an equally sheer stone wall, rising straight up for much higher than I can reach; or impressively tall, dense hedges. We have a hedge. Between the edge of the paved road and the hedge there is a few feet--a meter, if you will--of packed earth and rock.

Or there was. Jules and his hired men spent the hottest weekend we've yet had this summer digging up that packed earth, making a ditch where the edge of the road had been. As ditches go, it's not terribly deep--not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve, as Mercutio said, when he contemplated the damage that would result from driving his Citroën into it.

Now, if M. le maire takes it into his head--Jules explained it all to C; he was very proud--to widen the road, the measurement will be from the edge of the pavement and not from the edge of the packed earth. And Jules won't have to move his hedge.

Canny or illegal? We're not sure. But we suspect.

Outing

2009-06-19T16:46:00.004+02:00

School is winding down now, and although it officially continues for another week, that week and this are a mix of half days, day long fêtes, and, here and there, no school at all. Yesterday I picked E and G up at noon. We went to Antibes, the port town a half hour away, to run some errands and have a wander through the vieille ville, looking for shade in the narrow pedestrian streets.

We sat in a bar on the Place Nationale and ordered tomato and mozzarella sandwiches and a pitcher of water. Afterwards we did our errands: some fabric for me, a book we'd ordered from the English bookshop, the shoe store for sandals for the girls. The shoe store experience was a bust and, by the end of it, we were all annoyed with each other: nothing major, just what happens sometimes when expectations run afoul of reality.

Our next stop was at the Gelateria del Porto. C and I found this hole in the wall ice-cream shop the night that we arrived in France two years ago. Jean-Marc makes all of the gelato himself, and it's everything from chocolate to mango to caramel beurre salé. The night that we found it we sat on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville with our cones, and watched the Saturday night parade of couples strolling. We could hardly believe that we had gotten here, everything packed and sent and the house ready for the renters and a meeting with the realtor to find a French house on Monday morning, and here we were, eating ice cream at 10.30 in the evening in a French seaside town.

Yesterday E took one of the benches outside the gelateria, and G and I went in to order. The shop is open to the narrow sidewalk and street, and consists simply of the windowed counter that holds all the glaces, a menu above, and the kitchen, with all sorts of interesting-looking equipment, behind. When G and I walked in, the place was empty not only of customers but of employees. We took our time choosing and, in a minute or two, Jean Marc arrived. He had been having a drink with a friend in the bar opposite. We ordered mango for E, nutella for G, and watermelon--in French it's pastèque, so much more exotic--for me. He used a small spade to shape our glaces into flowers whose stems happened to be ice cream cones.

We sat in the shade and ate our cones, and then walked down the hill to the public fountain (put up in the reign of Louis XVI to honor one of his admirals, the engraving at the top tells you) and washed our hands and faces. Surely the public fountain is one of the pinnacles of civilization. Clean, drinkable water, available in every (or nearly every) parc and place in France. And the fountains themselves, more often than not, beautiful things carved out of stone and worn with age. While we took our turn at it, two young women, dressed to the nines, stopped on the other side to fill their water bottles. Old men sat in the shade nearby and watched us all.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the last two years, and what they've meant for us, how they've changed us and not. It's part of the process of leaving, and I promise I'll try to spare you too much of it. But yesterday, going from the plastic expensive uncomfortable shoes in the chain shoe store to the humanity of homemade gelato, sold to us by the man who made it, the man who's passing the time between customers across the street with his friends and a mid-afternoon coffee, posed such a contrast. The chain store with its poorly made goods and disinvested sales clerks; the local artisan with his shop and his craft, a craft he's proud enough of to carve each serving into the shape of a rose.

Well. It brought us back to ourselves, is what it did, and we went from being a mother and two teenaged daughters, caught up in the roles of impatience and annoyance and disagreement, to being a family on an outing. We went from the too-big picture (how are we ever going to get through all the times we're going to have to go shopping together) to the splendid detail of an ice cream rose. How wonderful, we said to each other, may I taste yours? And then we washed our hands in the fountain.

These two years have given us a lifetime's number of moments of grace, of humanity, like that one. We came with two girls, and we are leaving with two teenagers who toggle still between girldom and young womanhood. Every moment is its own miracle.

Chocolate

2009-06-17T17:40:00.006+02:00

Blanche and Gilbert came for drinks the other evening. They work at our bakery, or maybe it's more correct to say that we buy bread at theirs. Blanche's nephew is the owner--an elected member of France's national order of patissiers, merci beaucoup, and the gâteaux au chocolat to prove it--and it is a family business: there's Gilles, who is up the hill baking; Madame his mother, a little deaf and with orange dyed hair, but always smiling; her sister Blanche, ten years younger; Blanche's companion Gilbert; and assorted nieces and cousins whom we know by sobriquets such as the nice lady with glasses, the stern lady, and the one with the nose ring.

Anyway, we'd invited Gilbert and Blanche up for drinks so that C could give Gilbert the yarmulke he bought for him in Jerusalem. Gilbert is Jewish--his support for Obama hinges on his certainty that Obama is, in fact, half Jewish--and, when I mentioned to him that C was off to Israel for a meeting, he requested a yarmulke.

What color? I needed to find out if he really wanted one.

I don't care. Any color.

Do you want a pink yarmulke? A green one? I realized that he was serious.

Of course not. A blue one, blue like the flag of Israel. And crocheted, not cloth. Do you understand?

I did, and I told C, and he came home with one.

We gave it to Gilbert and he tucked it into his breast pocket, very pleased, and told us about Obama's Jewish heritage.

Blanche rolled her eyes at me. But you know, I've always loved Americans, she said, patting my knee and taking another bite-sized pissaladière from the plate E offered her.

I remember when the Americans came at the end of the war. I was only a little girl, and all through the war, my father, he had a little cardboard suitcase with all the money and valuables in it. Every time there was an alarm, any danger, I don't know what, I was just a little child, he would take the suitcase under his arm, and my brother in one hand and me in the other, and we would go and hide under the lavoir.

A lavoir is a large stone trough with a spigot. It usually has a shelter built over it, so that the laundresses can work in the shade. Every village has one, and every farm of a certain size. Blanche's family owned much of the valley below La Bastiole; it was to their own lavoir that they ran.

When we heard the news that the Americans were coming, I remember my mother burst into tears. We are saved, she said, and she cried and cried. Then they came, in their jeeps and their uniforms.

She fell silent. I wanted her to go on, but I didn't want to interrupt her thoughts. After a moment, I asked: What do you remember most about the Americans?

Then she smiled, a huge, radiant, girlish grin. They gave me chocolate, she said. I had never tasted it before.

One month

2009-06-15T15:20:00.006+02:00

A month from today--a month from right now--we'll be on a plane bound for the New World. The girls and I are taking off a day before C and the dogs: we're traveling directly (if you can call three flights direct) to my hometown, where we'll recover from jet lag and the first bumps of cultural re-entry. Meanwhile, C, Alice, and Wendy will go directly (only two flights) to Washington.

If you've ever traveled by plane with your dogs, then perhaps you know that American carriers refuse to transport animals too large for the passenger cabin if the temperature forecast at either the departure or arrival airport exceeds 85 degrees. That's because the animals in their crates go out onto the tarmac when the luggage goes out. And if the luggage has to wait a bit, so do the animals. (Beagle brochette, anyone?) Hence the policy: over 85 degrees, Fido goes the next day. Air France has no weather policy because the animals go on at the end, while the passengers are boarding. Et voilà, the weather doesn't matter so much; Fifi travels with maman no matter what.

My hometown--have I told you where it is? I can't remember--does not sport an international airport. Thus: if they traveled with me, the dogs would have to fly domestically. And the 85 degree rule would be invoked. And there I would be, at a pay phone in O'Hare, leafing through my address book and hoping that I still have my college adviser's home phone number so that she can come and get my dogs for a sleepover.

And why are C and I not going to the same place? The answer is so much less interesting than you may be imagining. He's got to go back to work. The girls don't start school until the end of the summer, and I won't even look for a job til September or October or maybe let's just keep checking those unemployment figures...so we are going to profit from our relative footlooseness by having a nice long old-fashioned family visit.

Also our furniture won't arrive in Washington until the middle of August.

And then, Washington is, for us, Real Life. Were the girls and I to go directly back and move, with C, into Grandma's house while we wait for the boat with all our furniture to come, then we are all pretty certain that the summer would look like this:

1. Worry about the start of school.

2. Worry about finding a job.

Repeat as necessary until bedtime.

So C and the dogs will land in Washington and the girls and I will land farther south.

C, you'll have deduced, clever as you are, will be flying Air France. Nice to Paris, Paris to Washington. Champagne and movies on demand the entire way (even for the dogs).

The girls and I will be flying Aer Lingus. Nice to Dublin, Dublin to Chicago, Chicago to home. When I mentioned to an Irish friend that we would be on the Irish airline, she stopped what she was doing and turned to me.

You know Aer Lingus is a low-cost airline, she said.

Well, they were the cheapest tickets we could find, and even though the company is paying for it, all the other tickets were thousands of dollars and had terrible connections...

She looked at me pityingly. No, she said, I don't mean they have cheap tickets. I mean you have to pay for your food.

I got it the second time around. While C sips champagne and catches up on this summer's blockbusters, E, G, and I will be spending our last euros on microwaved meat pies with cabbage, and headphones that will let us listen to the film version of The Price is Right as the video is shown on the front wall of the cabin.

Maybe my friend was wrong. (I hope so.) Maybe overseas flights are different. (Fingers crossed.)

Or maybe we'll just be that much happier to touch down.

Chez Ed

2009-06-12T15:44:00.005+02:00

C's colleagues are coming tomorrow for a farewell picnic supper. This morning I went to buy the groceries. Violette is doing the cooking for us: she'll make roast chickens and lasagna, and the équipe will bring salads, quiches, desserts, and so forth. We're expecting in the neighborhood of three dozen men, women, and children of various nationalities. Our oven attends family reunions every other year with its Easy-Bake cousins, and the ovens all sit around and tell stories to each other about all the full-size casserole dishes that they rejected. To put it another way, our oven, he is small.

To put it still another way, the idea of cooking for several dozen people of assorted dietary regimes made my eyes cross. It was only when I remembered that Violette sometimes cooks for Jules and Madame that this picnic supper became more than a twinkle in C's eye. I inquired; she consented. She stopped by and made me a grocery list. We agreed that I would buy the groceries and she would cook them. Then C sent out his invitations.

And so this morning found me at Ed. It's the discount chain of Carrefour, which is one of France's largest grocery store chains. A word about French supermarkets: while they are absolutely the place you want to be if you're doing any French cooking (E. LeClerc, our local hypermarché, has four aisles devoted to fresh dairy products, everything from butter to fresh mozzarella to aged chêvre to chocolat pots de crême), they are pretty bare bones affairs to an American eye. There is no track lighting. The floors are linoleum. There is often a smell that combines overripe Camembert, fish, and the wine that spilled last Tuesday. And maybe today's paella.

And that's in the non-discount stores. So you can imagine, perhaps, what Ed is like. The aisles are close together--a chariot and a half wide, so you can practice your manners while you make your way--and they don't seem to have a lot of help shelving. To wit, flats of sugar or coffee or canned cassoulet sit in the middle of the aisle. In the produce section, fruits and vegetables are heaped on the counters, at the end of the counters, and in boxes under the counters.

Then there's the boucherie. Madame told me the first time we ate dinner together--when she was giving me her tips about the area--that Ed was the place to buy meat, and I've heard it often since. I dutifully went after Madame recommended it. We had pasta and vegetables for supper that night. The butcher counter at Ed leaves nothing to the imagination. Sheep brains. Tête de veau. Racks of pork ribs. Whole rabbits, their forearms raised in surrender. Quail wrapped in bacon, with their heads still on. Slabs of beef. And a half dozen butchers in white coats and hats and aprons, taking orders, wielding knives, weighing and wrapping and bantering non-stop.

It was all a bit much.

But Violette told me that I should go to Ed for the meat, and since I knew she was going to see the wrappings on the meat and thus know where I had bought it, and since I am a coward at heart, and didn't want her to scold me for not having done as I was told, this morning found me at Ed. Before I go on, let me tell you how to pronounce Ed à la française. It's not Ed, like your uncle. It's euh-day. Euh-day. In my hometown, the neighborhood where the tobacco barons had built their homes in the 1920s was called Buena Vista. We said byoona-vista. Some people took Spanish in high school, and some transplanted Yankees, got all high and mighty and used the proper Spanish pronunciation, but usually they had to say it a few times before anybody knew what they were talking about. Byoona-vista. Euh-day.

Apparently everyone in the region is having their colleagues over tomorrow for a picnic supper, because they had all gone to Ed to shop this morning. The chariots at Ed are the size of a small Citroën (the better to buy more low cost food), and I took nearly the last one. I made my way through the produce section without international incident (though there were some close calls) and lined up at the meat counter. No numbers to take; the group simply decided whose turn it was next. When one of the half dozen butchers asked someone for her order, she looked around at her neighbors and, if no one seemed at the point of objecting, she went ahead. I waited a few minutes--long enough to see that the poulets fermiers were still sporting their feet and heads--and then it was my turn. I looked to the woman in front of me; she nodded. I looked to the woman in back; she nodded.

5 poulets, s'il vous plaît, et 3 kilos de viande hâché. We're expecting a lot of people, and leftovers would suit as well.

Madame la bouchère sent me to wait at the end of the counter while the poulet man took away the more vivid parts of the chickens and she herself ground the meat. I watched them both, and the line, and then, since taking off all those heads and feet takes a little while, I fell to perusing the contents of the counter in front of me. I had fetched up in front of the pork and, beside it, the charcuterie, the cold cuts, preserved meats, pâtés and so forth. There was a stack of pork roasts, ribs, loins, chops--everything pork. (And a sign from the French pork council explaining that swine flu had nothing whatsoever to do with pigs.) In the charcuterie case, there were a couple of varieties of head cheese, one with parsley, the other with asparagus and olives. Some squid in vinaigrette. Pâtés in ceramic boats trimmed in blue--the boats, in fact, are for sale, 8 euros; I mused on that for quite a while--and rillettes de porc.

It was somewhere between the pâté and the pork chops that it happened. I began to feel hungry. It was coming on to noon, and I'd been doing some heavy shopping--I'd been to another store, and wrestled with another chariot, before Euh-day--but there, in front of the butcher counter, I got hungry.

I don't know of a better marker for adjustment. I don't cook meat as a rule--chicken, yes, fish, sometimes, pork tenderloin, now and then--because I've always been too squeamish. Blood. Tendons. Death. You know. Start down that road, and well before dinner you're already on to global warming and planetary catastrophe. Although our house has been the family gathering place for Thanksgiving for years, I have almost never been able to cope with the turkey myself: a little too much nature, thanks very much; I'll work on the sweet potatoes. And yet there I was, this morning, wondering idly if the head cheese was good with asparagus.

Not that I bought any. But I did think about it.

Dinner with Maigret

2009-06-10T10:44:00.005+02:00

L and I treated ourselves--really, the whole trip was one long treat--to a proper dinner out on our last evening in Paris. She'd cut an article out of a budget travel magazine on a restaurant that turned out to be walking distance from our Charming Apartment in the Heart of the Marais. The article said it was an Authentic Neighborhood Bistrot with Regional Specialities from Throughout France, and featured a photo of the smiling chef standing in the dining room holding a few plates of plats, main courses.

Now, I imagine that there are some among you who would not dream of going to Paris without a list of restaurants to try. A list, maybe even cross-referenced with wines and the chef's employment history. We are not that kind of travellers. It's not that food is not central to our experience. Rather it's that the restaurants that turn up in foodie magazines often seem too cool for us, or too expensive, or too fancy, or too far from where we're staying and who wants to change metro lines late at night after a good dinner? Or all of the above. Anyway, the fact that this one was in a magazine aimed at the less wealthy traveler, and its proximity to our neighborhood, were both points in its favor. So off we went.

We walked through the door at 7.45. The chef--we recognized him from the photo--was sitting at a table in front of the bar with a glass of wine, looking at his fingernails. There was no one else in evidence.

C'est un peu tôt, mesdames, he said, barely looking up. It's a little early. We're not quite ready. Come back in, oh, maybe 15 minutes.

We backed out onto the street. We looked at each other. Early? 7:45? Dinner is sometimes but a distant memory by then. Go away? I know you are paying customers and all, but I need to finish my pre-opening verre?

We were impressed. This was taking the clash between American ideas of customer service and the profit motive versus French ideas of the dignity of labor and working to live to a whole new level.

We wandered around for 25 minutes. (No way were we going to be the first ones to be seated, and no way were we going to be turned away again.) Why didn't we go to a different restaurant? We thought that any chef with the presence of mind to send away customers--well, we thought it would be interesting.

And it was. There were two other tables of customers when we went back: a French couple murmuring to each other in the corner, and three Americans in sweatpants and logo tshirts sustaining a dull, but good-tempered, roar opposite them. We ordered from the chalkboard that the hôtesse brought. Asparagus in vinaigrette, ricotta flan with herbs for the first courses. Lamb cutlets and brandade de morue for the second. Then we looked around.

The restaurant was small--perhaps a dozen tables--and the walls were unfinished stone. White lace café curtains hung in the large front windows. A wooden partition four or so feet high divided the room, with a small bar on one side and a few dining tables, and the rest of the tables on the other.

At the back of the room, in the corner opposite us, there was a table for two in front of the partition that divided the dining room from the kitchen. A brass plaque hung over it. Dedicated plaque enthusiasts, we got up to read it.

Georges Simenon, 1903-2003, it said. And, below, in a smaller script, Ici vous êtes assis à la table d'Inspecteur Maigret. Here you sit at Inspector Maigret's table.

All the bistrots in all of Paris, and we walked into this one. We've been reading Maigret since we were kids, both of us, first in English (they had a whole shelf in the Reynolda Manor Branch Public Library) and, lately, in French (ooh la la). We toasted Simenon, and Maigret, tried to figure out whether it had been Simenon's table in reality or Maigret's in fiction, and, about the time the first courses came, decided it didn't matter.

The chef delivered the asparagus and the flan. He asked who was having which. We explained we were sharing.

In that case, he said, eat the asparagus first. Its taste is more mild, and the ricotta and herbs would overshadow it.

We took his advice. The asparagus was wonderful--what you imagine the asparagus wrapped in a purple rubber band that you buy at the grocery store is going to taste like, and what it never does. Chives figured in the seasoning--chives, which grow in our garden and go to seed because we never know what to do with them--both the stems and the flowers.

The chef asked us how we liked it. We praised his work to the skies, and asked about the chive flowers.

He responded with a two minute discourse on the making of the dish. While we couldn't recreate either--the dish or the discourse--we were moved by his passion. Anyone who can wax eloquent on the marriage of mustard, vinegar, and asparagus is someone at whose table we want a place.

The lamb and the brandade came out next. M. le chef offered a little extra olive oil with the brandade--we were getting to be friends now. Brandade is, by the way, salt cod mashed with olive oil and milk. It is so much better than it sounds. Really. Comfort food. I promise.

We ate away, watching as the restaurant began to fill up with regulars. We were pretty sure that the table opposite ours was occupied by a French film star of a certain age (and a certain amount of Botox about the lips) with her daughter. Next to them sat an older couple who had brought their own bottle of wine because I never know if you're going to have anything drinkable, monsieur joked with the hôtesse. When we were nearly finished, a photographer came in, bearing his camera bags and lenses, all in black except for his shock of thick grey hair. He made the rounds of the regulars' tables, shaking hands and air kissing, and then walked through to the kitchen. He met the chef, hands full of plats, and stopped him to discuss each one.

Then he installed himself at Simenon's, or Maigret's, table.

It was time to order dessert. The chef came to take our request: a moelleux au chocolat, a crême brulée, a tarte tatin, or a fromage blanc with raspberry sauce?

We took the fromage blanc. The chef nodded in satisfaction: we had passed this, the final test. We'd shared entrées that complemented each other. We'd ordered the brandade--something off the beaten path of most foreigners. And now we had passed up both the chocolate and the twin sisters of French desserts for the homely fromage blanc.

He brought it to us; in a flat soup bowl, with the coulis poured over it, it looked like a camellia blossom. You can google fromage blanc and get plenty of sites that explain what it is, but this is all you really need to know: fromage blanc is what God intended dairy products to be. When God made cattle, it was because he had a hankering for fromage blanc.

This serving was appropriately divine. The chef came to check on us again while we were eating it. We praised it and him and, really, at this point, the whole world. He nodded, accepting responsibility graciously. Comment dit-on fromage blanc en anglais?

On dit fromage blanc, we said. There's no other word.

You know, he said, they don't even have fromage blanc in England. He said it in a way that made it clear that that fact alone explained so much about the other side of the channel.

We don't have it in America, either, we said.

Ah, said the chef wistfully. He who brings fromage blanc to America, that man will be a billionaire.

We didn't take coffee afterwards, or a tisane. We paid the bill--it was, if not exactly budget, well worth every centime--and stood up to go. The chef appeared at our side.

Take these postcards, he said, and give them to your friends in America. He handed us each a half dozen postcards bearing the restaurant's coordonnées. And come back again, anytime. He opened the door for us. We turned to say goodbye and thank him, and he shook our hands.

Merci, monsieur, we said.

Mais non, mesdames, he replied, c'est à moi. Merci à vous.

Inventaire

2009-06-08T15:04:00.005+02:00

More than once in my career as a professional nerd (historian, archivist, curator) I have been delighted to come across an inventory. A French one, from 1793: how many books did the marquise own? how many pocket handkerchiefs? An American one, from 1954: how many framed photographs? how many record albums? They are a wonderful source, inventories, for getting at the texture of life, for furnishing the mental picture.

Until you have to undertake one.

When we left America two years ago, U.S. customs wished us a pleasant journey and reminded us not to bring our nail scissors on board. Les douanes françaises have a different idea. Our furniture and--what is the term? household effects--came to France with us. And will return with us. And there's the rub. French customs requires an inventory of our personal effects.

This inventory--which runs to 12 printed pages of Excel spreadsheet--exists right this minute on my computer as a bilingual list of household objects. All we have to do is write down how many of each item we own, its individual worth, and its collective worth. Confused? How's this: under the heading Children's Items, the list goes: Bassinet, Bicycle, Boards Games (sic), Bottles, Car seat, Child's Vehicle, Cradle. After each entry there is a column for the quantity of Bottles that we own; another for their unit value (in euros); and a third for their total value (in euros).

Perhaps you are not convinced of the difficulty of this task. (Perhaps you've never moved house; perhaps you and your laptop live alone on a desert island, using solar panels for battery power and eating coconuts.) Let's take a look at the Home Office Equipment & Supplies category. There, we find Calculator; Computer Software; Copier; Envelopes. A little further along: Laptop; Modem; Notebooks; Notepads; Pencils; Pens.

Quick: how many pens do you own? Notepads? Bonus question: what's the difference between a notebook and a notepad?

Now, C and I are seasoned enough in the ways of the French Mind to suspect that there must be a way around counting our pens and estimating their value. So we called up our responsable de déménagement, Nathalie, and asked her to square the reality with the form. Did we need to count and value our envelopes, or could we just make a guess?

The French customs are requiring that you list all of your household items, came the response, but do not worry about it. It is not a big thing, just a formality.

So do we need to count the envelopes?

You must fill in the inventory with the number of items you possess, but their value, you do not need to be so exact.

So if we were to write down, 150 envelopes, worth 5 euros total, would that be adequate for the customs agents?

I do not know how many envelopes you have, of course, so I could not say. But it is not a big thing, you do not need to worry about it, they are not checking the forms all the time very carefully.

There is here the official, capital-letter Truth (French customs requires an inventory of personal effects leaving the country in an ocean shipment), and then, it seems to us, an unofficial, lower-case truth (the inventory can be approximate as long as it is credible). What is difficult is finding the sweet spot of credibility, the number of envelopes and notepads and, while we're on the subject, staple removers, toilet seat covers, model cars (adult), and pantry items, that we are likely to own, that a douannier could rubber stamp. Of course, we could count all of those things (staple removers, two or three unless we need one that minute; no toilet seat covers or model cars (adult), whatever those might be, and as for pantry items, I though we weren't allowed to ship foodstuffs?), but that does not seem like a good use of our time or sanity.

Although the professional nerd in me is curious about how many books and pocket handkerchiefs we own. I almost feel as if we owe it to posterity--to the professional nerd of generations hence who is writing an article on the material culture of American expatriates in France in the first decade of the 21st century--to do a proper count. (Three laundry baskets; one hamper; one sofa; one dining room table; one kitchen table; six night stands; one rocking chair; 19 candle holders; seven rugs; two teapots; five beds; 15 wine glasses; 10 quilts; 744 books...)

Almost. But not quite.

Falafel

2009-06-05T14:01:00.005+02:00

It would be only a slight overstatement to say that we chose our Charming Vacation Apartment because of its proximity to L'As du Falafel. If, after all, you can choose between an Authentic Parisian Small Building two metro stops away from falafel, or an equally Authentic place a mere two minutes' walk away, I think the choice is clear. I have been making the Falafel Pilgrimage for almost two decades. C has gone with me many times; we've taken the girls (they, at age 9, chose a hot dog instead; as a good mother, I've forgiven them their youthful waywardness). L and I have gone regularly over the past few years. The visit that stands out--the visit, I think, that marked me as a Falafel Lifer, was one that we undertook with the girls' Aunt A. That time, we elected to take our falafel around the corner to a park. It's not a big park, or a particularly notable park--sand and gravel, a play structure, a very small boules pitch--but it provides the closest park benches to the falafel window.

We installed ourselves on a bench, falafel-filled pitas in hand. It was A's first pilgrimage to the rue des Rosiers, and I had been talking of not a whole lot else the entire day. We'd had a late breakfast and, what with one small child and another, not gotten out the door til past noon. Although it was only an hour or so since our morning tartines, I suggested that we go directly to Falafel Land. Lunch, after all, is lunch.

A and L demurred. No one was hungry--when pressed, I had to admit that I wasn't either, actually--and they both wanted to visit the Centre Pompidou. You know, the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in France. Magnanimously, I agreed, secure in the knowledge that if, once inside the museum, either showed a reluctance to proceed, after a reasonable art-viewing period, to the rue des Rosiers, I could always strike out on my own and make it back before they'd finished discussing Number 26 A.

Eventually--post cards bought, Pollocks perused--we headed over to L'As du Falafel. It had been several months since I'd had my falafel fix--several months of herbes de provence, lamb, fresh pasta, cheeses, and salads--and I was ready. Perhaps you've never had really good falafel, and don't know what I'm talking about? I'll defer to a proper food writer, the Times' Mark Bittman, to explain:

The sandwich contains the requisite super-crisp, garlicky chickpea fritters, with creamy hummus, lightly pickled red cabbage (something between slaw and kraut), salted cucumbers, fried eggplant and just-hot-enough harissa. This is all piled into a pita in such quantities that eating it is an adventure in napkin management.

Each sandwich has four or five fritters in it, layered with the other ingredients so that each mouthful brings a mix of tastes and textures. We sat down on our bench, extended our sandwiches away from our laps, leaned forward, and bit.

One of my falafel fritters escaped the pita. It rolled out of my lap, along the bench, and dropped onto the ground.

Don't eat that! L used the tone that she usually reserves for when a small child has just picked up a piece of raw chicken from the floor of a public restroom, has opened his mouth and is looking at the chicken with avid curiosity and hunger. It may be that I had reached to pick up the fritter from where it had rolled to a stop, just between a cigarette butt and an empty Ricola box.

I looked up. The aunts looked back at me and started to laugh. I couldn't quite see what was funny: here I was, down one fritter out of five, experiencing my own personal crise du falafel, my falafel investment down 20% before I'd even taken a bite. L wiped away a tear while A tried to hold her sandwich upright while she doubled over laughing.

It's just that you looked so griefstricken, said A.

Well. Since then, I eat inside at L'As du Falafel, sitting at a table, and with a knife and fork. What it lacks in excitement, in the edginess of dining al fresco, it makes up for in the virtual certainty that all of the fritters, and even the last bits of eggplant, will reach their destination.

Déjeuner

2009-06-03T13:41:00.004+02:00

We arrived in Paris on a Sunday afternoon; it turned out to be the Sunday afternoon of le week-end d'Ascension which we would have understood had we stopped to think about it. We knew it, of course. But we didn't understand it. L'Ascension--the day in the Church year which marks exactly what you might think it marks, Jesus' ascension into heaven--fell on a Thursday this year and France, being a bedrock secular country, took the day off. And, since it was a Thursday, also took the day following. Which meant, had we but taken the time to consider, that arriving in Paris on Sunday afternoon was the close equivalent of arriving in any major American city on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. In short, a bad idea for the traveler.

And a worse idea, it turned out, for the traveler needing to collect the key to a rented holiday apartment. We had rented an apartment for our few days in Paris through one of those agencies that rents holiday apartments to Americans. You know the ones: they serve as middlemen between French apartment owners who have found a way to bring in some extra euros and eager Americans who have found a way to Live Like a Parisian in Paris. The agencies themselves always seem faintly shady, as though, when you send off your credit card number, instead of getting, in return, an apartment in a Classic Parisian Building in a Quiet Street, Walking Distance to Place des Vosges and Convenient to Métro, you get dunned for a thousand or so dollars.

We'd sent off our credit card number and emailed the agency our arrival time for the Sunday afternoon. M. Gaymard, the propriétaire of the Charming Studio Apartment with Mezzanine in the Heart of the Marais, was to meet us at the apartment with the key. He had our flight information. We copied his phone number into our cahier.

The flight was an hour late. The baggage arrived forty-five minutes later. The Air France autocars into Paris were running a reduced schedule. We phoned M. Gaymard (1) while standing beside the baggage carousel; (2) while waiting for the bus; (3) from the bus; (4) while standing in front of the gates to the courtyard through which we had to pass to enter the Classic Parisian Building where our Charming Studio Apartment waited; (5) while standing outside the door of said apartment (after someone had kindly buzzed us through the gates). Each time we left a message in which we stated where we were (airport, bus stop, bus, gates, corridor) and how dearly we would love to catch up with him on this fine Sunday afternoon.

After phone call number five, we thumbed through our cahier in search of other Paris addresses and phone numbers and, finding a likely one, rang up a friend of a friend and explained our plight. Could she--if M. Gaymard did not turn up (was, perhaps, even now enjoying a holiday in the Seychelles on our credit card), as looked increasingly likely--put us up for the night? Mais bien sûr, came the blessed words down the line. Absolutely! How awful! Stay here in any case! Come right over! Or she would come to us!

We decided to hang on for a little longer to the dream of the Charming Apartment in the Heart of the Marais. It being nigh on five o'clock, and one of us having started her journey well over 18 hours earlier and on another continent, we went round the corner to a café and ordered a meal.

The rosé had just arrived when our phone rang. It was M. Gaymard.

I am calling about the apartment, he said, in correct, accented English. Was there anything in particular that you needed?

Yes, we said. The key.

Ah, bon. We could see him nodding. En fait, in fact, I am just finishing lunch with my family, and now I must take my mother back to her house. Perhaps I could meet you at the apartment in--oh, perhaps in two hours?

I had a professor in graduate school who used routinely to stand me up for appointments. She had two offices on campus, and no matter which office I turned up at, she was never there at the time we had agreed on. Sometimes she showed up in a half hour or so; more often, never. She never apologized and never explained. It's an enviable skill. M. Gaymard possessed it in spades.

An hour and a half later, we rolled our suitcases back around the corner. In front of the gates, standing still in the middle of a sea of sunny Sunday evening strollers, was a man who resembled a middle-aged Christopher Plummer, if Plummer had been cast in the role of a bourgeois French gentleman. Neatly pressed linen pants, a striped Façonnable shirt, a navy linen jacket slung--slung? no, draped--over his shoulders, his hair carefully swept back from his brow, M. Gaymard greeted us by our first names. We greeted him as Monsieur.

He had been at lunch, he explained. Had our flight plans changed? Had we been supposed to arrive today?

Clearly the idea of arriving in Paris on a Sunday afternoon, the Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend, boggled the mind. And it was beyond boggling--unthinkable, really--that there could ever have been an expectation that one would interrupt one's Sunday lunch en famille to provide a key to tourists. And after lunch, of course, one had to take one's mother home, and settle her for the week. There is no reason to apologize when one has behaved comme il faut.

The apartment, once we breached its defenses, was lovely. Its meters-high window looked down on a hidden garden; the building was steps from one of our favorite streets in our favorite city. We shook hands with M. Gaymard as he handed over the keys and vaguely answered our question about whether or not the electricity and hot water were turned on, and then we closed the door behind him. We looked at each other and shrugged. A holiday weekend, a French gentleman, and his Sunday lunch: we should have booked our flights for Monday.

Speaking in tongues

2009-06-01T12:16:00.001+02:00

Today is the Monday after Pentecost, the day after the Church marks the beginning of the Apostles' ministry, the beginning of the spread of Christianity. The story goes that almost two months after the Crucifixion and subsequent Events Jesus' band of followers was still hanging around trying to figure out what to do with themselves. After dinner one evening the Holy Spirit came to them, and they all began to speak in tongues, to speak in languages they had never spoken before, and yet (here's the miracle) they understood each other. So they decided to hit the first-century Mediterranean lecture circuit and, 2000 years later, here we are with the day off. Because it's a national holiday in France, this Catholic country where separation of church and state is a bedrock of the Republic.

Lots of possible renters have been coming to look at La Bastiole for the last few weeks: French people, Dutch, some Finns, and, a couple of weeks ago, a American couple who were moving from the States for a couple of years. Jules and Madame were here for that visit and came down the hill to supervise. Danielle the agente immobilière came, and Christine, the Americans' agent, brought the couple. We all met up on the terrace. English was the common language and, since the couple was from America, the French all decided that I should give the house tour. I led the couple through--the kitchen was small, the refrigerator smaller, there wasn't a real dining room, and what about screens on the windows?--and they took pictures. When we got back to the terrace, Husband asked Wife if she had taken photos of every room.

Not of the bathrooms, she said, as though bathrooms were a self-evident thing, something that didn't need to be remembered.

Trying to help them understand what they were up against (toilettes à la Turque, anyone?), I put my hand on her arm. These are really nice bathrooms, I said. They're bathrooms for Americans.

The couple looked at me like I was crazy. Bathrooms are bathrooms, their expressions said.

Ours was the first house they had seen in France. The bathrooms at La Bastiole are airy, tiled in grey and blue, have lots of storage, deep bathtubs, and shower stalls. We even have one bathroom in which the toilet shares the room with the sink and bathtub, a rarity on this side of the Channel. La Bastiole's septic system may leave something to be desired, but the bathrooms look like something out of Architectural Digest.

In any case, Danielle the agente later told me that it was not the bathrooms that kept the couple from taking the house.

Ta maison, she said, elle est trop Catholique.

My house is too Catholic?

We had to go through several iterations of the tale before I understood. It emerged--quickly from Danielle's machine-gun French, slowly into my consciousness--that the couple were Jewish. The couple had told their agent that all the Catholic objects in the house had been troubling for them, and that they didn't want to take the house for that reason.

We're not Catholic--C, for the record, was bar mitzvahed, and I am a lapsed Episcopalian--and so it took me some time to come up with what might have offended the visitors. Then I thought of the Camargue cross that was a gift from friends. The symbol combines an anchor (for hope), a cross (for faith), and a heart (for charity). It hangs in the guest room and reminds us of the day we spent with those friends (another mixed-faith family) in the Camargue.

Once I had absorbed the bare facts, Danielle editorialized. This is why we have wars, she said, because people aren't tolerant of other cultures. France is a Catholic country, she went on. No one goes to church, but still, it's who we are, it's our tradition. If they won't live in a house because it had a cross on the wall, how will they ever adjust to life here?

The message that Pentecost often carried when I was a regular church-goer was that of going out into the world to preach the gospel. It's a message that always made me squirm. I'm not good at selling things--Girl Scout cookies, magazine subscriptions, wrapping paper: our family always sold less than anyone else in the girls' elementary school--and Pentecost felt a little too much like a sales pitch. And then, there's the whole Talking about Faith with Strangers issue: really not my calling.

What I've come to love about the Pentecost story is something else. It's how, suddenly, everyone could speak a foreign language (a miracle in itself) and understand each other. As though our common humanity was all that we needed, as though we could cast aside the barriers of language and culture. As though all these possible renters--Dutch, Finns, French, Americans--could walk through La Bastiole speaking our own languages and yet communicating. (And the bathrooms: they'd understand that these really were designed à l'Américain.) Language--spoken and cultural--is a hard thing to learn, and the idea of a linguistic miracle speaks to me. Living in a foreign country and culture, that is the miracle (after world peace and an end to global warming, and Camembert that doesn't make the whole house stink) that I long for most. We all need to speak in tongues, to communicate our common humanity beyond and above our different languages.

I hope the couple found a house that was cross-free. And I wish for them their own miracle.

Tender mercies

2009-05-25T10:15:00.002+02:00

In the summer of 1991, I went to Paris to do research. I had just finished my second year of graduate school, and the common thing to do at that point was to go off to your country of specialization--in my case, France--and begin preliminary dissertation research. I rented a room in a foyer, a boarding house for jeunes filles, that was run by a not terribly friendly order of Lebanese nuns. My room overlooked an interior courtyard and had a bed, a desk, a hotplate, small fridge, sink, and bathroom. Tiny, spartan, adequate.

It was my first time living in a city. My first time living alone overseas. I knew no one. My advisor had given me an introduction to an American scholar who lived in Paris. When I met him for coffee one day across the street from the Bibliothèque nationale in the rue de Richelieu--it was a decade or more before the Bibliothèque de France--he told me my research topic would never work. There was not enough material, he said, unconsciously mimicking Woody Allen, and too much had already been written about it.

I was miserable. I missed C dreadfully. I hardly spoke French. The métro smelled bad. I was too shy to buy a roasted chicken from the traiteur. I didn't know what I was doing there. It was in the days of postcards and those flimsy blue air-mail letters, and calling cards in phone booths. I was, in short, alone and lonely and increasingly unsure of myself and my purpose, wondering why I had ever thought I wanted to study France.

Then a postcard came from a former student of Madame Mère, another transplanted Southern girl who was travelling through Europe. She would be passing through Paris; could she stay a couple of nights with me? She'd be with me the last few days that I was in Paris; her dates fell just at the end of my--now foreshortened--stay. I had intended to stay the entire summer but, one day in the depths of gloom about my prospects as a French historian, I had walked by a travel agency and had what I now know was a coup de foudre, a sudden insight: I could leave. I was having a lousy time and I could do something about it. I walked in and changed my ticket. Then I walked down the street to a phone booth and called C: I was coming home a month early.

A week or two after that, the former student's visit coincided with that of friends from college who had--of all things--a car. I cleared my desk at the B.N. and we went off for a day at Fontainebleau. While my friends napped in the shade of the forêt, the traveller and I sat on the edge of Henri IV's canal and talked. And talked. Later, we stopped in a village for dinner. The only commerce was an auberge that backed up to the Seine. We sat in the garden next to the river and ate coq au vin and drank red wine, and I began to remember why France had beckoned me. The next day my new friend helped me move out of my room and got me as far as Montparnasse station on my journey back to America; she added my jar of Nutella to her backpack and went off down the rue de Rennes to her next adventure.

You won't hear from me for a few days this week because I'll be meeting up with that friend in Paris. Husbands, children, doctorates, houses, and several cross-continent moves later, L is one of the great constants, and tender mercies, in my life. And so, it turns out, is Paris.

Under the bed

2009-05-20T10:10:00.005+02:00

Last week, Madame Mère helped me begin sorting things for packing. I hate packing. I'm terrible at it. I find it overwhelming, unsettling, uncentering. I'm worst at packing a suitcase--how can I possibly know which sweater I'll want to wear Saturday? and if we're going to hike, I'll need to bring two completely different sets of clothing, are you sure we're going to hike?--but not a lot better at packing a house. When we organized the house to move to France, more than once I found myself standing in the living room holding a book--one book out of hundreds--and weighing whether or not to bring it. Should I bring the collection of Colette's stories that I've carried around for 30 years and never opened? (I brought it. I still haven't read Colette; maybe I'll repatriate her.)

I thought to take advantage of Madame Mère's calming presence by starting to sort the cave. It's where everything that we brought from America and didn't need in this house ended up: casserole dishes too big for our French oven, framed odds and ends that didn't fit on our mostly-window walls, the box of C's camping stuff that I packed in 1999 in California. And so I began sorting things into piles: giving away, throwing away, moving back. Madame Mère fetched and carried and stacked and nudged me along when I got stuck on the thermoses from the girls' first grade lunchboxes.

Wendy, our grey dog, watched. She followed me and sat at my feet, toes turned out, nose in the air, keeping track of my decisions. When we pack for a trip, she stares mournfully at the suitcases and has even been known to heave a sigh. It's not that she minds going to visit Madame Puppies, which is what happens when the suitcases are closed up and loaded into the car. It's just that she'd rather stay home and avoid the change. This looked like packing to her. She stayed close.

A day or two later we noticed Wendy had taken up residence under E's bed. Wendy's regular routine centers around following me upstairs, downstairs, outside, and back. Now, we noticed, she was missing for large swaths of the day and, when we called her, it was a few minutes before she came. The puzzle came clear when I was in E's room one afternoon and heard a scratching sound coming from the bed. I lifted the skirt and voilà, the grey dog. She looked at me. I looked at her. She went back to sleep.

I cope with the stress of leaving La Bastiole by making lists. I have a list of food items to bring back to America (tea; fleur de sel; olive oil; herbes de Provence) and of errands to run when we get there (Ikea for curtains for the girls' rooms; the library to renew our cards; the grocery store for pantry staples, and hasn't there been an article in the Times in the last six months about staples? Add finding that article to the list). I know why I keep the lists: it's to stave off the panic over moving, leaving, loading suitcases into the car, that can wake me early and have me forecasting disaster and misery well before breakfast. To stave off panic, and to distract myself from the weight of the damp, drippy sack of Sad that is slung over my shoulder. It's not tragic that we have to leave this beautiful life on the hillside: tragic would be if we hadn't ever had this life, or loved it. But it is sad. It's sad to leave a place where you've been happy, where life has felt beautiful and magical and right. And it's fine to feel sad, but I find that a good thorough list, maybe even alphabetized, certainly categorized, can make the weight more bearable.

Wendy seems to have come up with her own solution, and it doesn't require a note pad. If the world gets too big for you--too much sorting and organizing and packing and why doesn't she just sit down for heaven's sake?--then (her solution seems to be) make the world smaller. Under E's bed it's quiet. No one's moving anything or going anywhere. It smells like home.

She may be onto something.

Piétianque

2009-05-18T14:29:00.005+02:00

We spent the weekend with friends on the Ile de Porquerolles. It's one of the Iles d'Hyères, which I seem to remember is a crossword-puzzle phrase, off the coast of Toulon. The Porquerolles is a national park, with minimal development and (in theory) no cars. (The cars, and really, there aren't many, are mostly in the village, of which of course there is one, this being France.) The rest of the island is divided between forests and vineyards and hiking trails. And of course beaches around the edges.

Our hotel was next to the church, on the village square. The village went something like this: church, hotel, hotel, restaurant, postcard stand, ice cream stand, corner store, restaurant, town hall (we've come halfway round the square now; the mairie is opposite the church), hotel, restaurant, ice cream, postcards, restaurant, bar, bike rental, bike rental, bike rental, bar, restaurant, swimsuit shop, postcards, filmy lineny blouses shop, restaurant, bike rental, bike rental, hotel, and here we are back at the church. The town was one block deep and one square wide; it looked like a stage set. If Humphrey Bogart had turned up on the terrace at the bar, we would not have been surprised.

The center of the village is taken up by a wide unpaved square. A playground stands in front of the mairie; at the church end, there's a paved step down into the place. A row of eucalyptus trees holds down the other two sides. Saturday evening I took my book and sat on a bench to watch the action. Whiffs of garlic and fish came out of the restaurant behind me as the chef got dinner started. A wedding had taken place at the mairie an hour or so earlier--we'd seen the wedding party having their champagne outside the town hall while we had our ice cream--and there were still stragglers from the group parading up and down in their finery. Daytrippers were hurrying to catch the last ferry to the mainland. Parents were sitting on the benches around the aire de jeux, and their kids were racing in circles around them.

But the main show was the boules matches. While I was sitting there--and I was there for an hour or so--there were never fewer than three matches going on in different parts of the square. The ground was uneven (sloped would not be too strong a word) and grassy in some places, stony in others. The players weren't troubled, though: if they preferred the manicured courts of cities, or even the mostly level ones of villages, they didn't act like it.

The group playing closest to my bench was made up of five old men. They were the central casting version of Provençal boules players: grizzled in varying degrees, leathery from the sun, dressed in outfits ranging from the downright natty (loafers, linen pants, polo shirt, a sweater tied over the shoulders) to the grab bag (grocery store espadrilles, worn, baggy dark Adidas sweatpants, and an equally worn, baggy tennis shirt in a clashing set of stripes). Each man had his own set of boules, of course, and they were all worn to differing degrees. One man--baggy sweatpants man--even had a magnet on a string that he used for picking up his boule. It kept him from having to bend down, presumably, and if it psyched out his opponents, surely that was no more than an added bonus.

Their game moved, after a bit, so that it was directly in front of my bench. When it did, the older man who had been watching them and providing color commentary relocated from his bench (up the way a bit) to mine. May I sit next to you, Madame? he asked. You have nothing to fear from me, he said, I am much too old.

C had joined me by this point, and we made room. The man's dog came along with him and sat down at his feet. We all watched the game intently; the players affected not to notice.

Are there two separate teams? I asked, after we watched most of a round.

No, there is only one team, he said, but there are two who play with three balls and three who play with only two. The ones who have three balls, their job is to use the third ball to knock the other balls out of the way.

Now, I could take a hundred or so words here and explain to you something about the way that boules is played, tossing the ball so that it comes close to the cochonnet, knocking other players' balls out of the way, and so forth, but even if I told you everything I know about boules (which is not much), that would still not help you understand what the man had just told me. The fact that I even understood the French--the words, I mean, not their meaning--was triumph enough for me.

He seemed to recognize that C and I were not up for the finer points of boules, and he changed the subject. Vous êtes anglais?

Non, Americain, we said.

Ah, American! But you speak French very well for an American.

Oh, no, I said, as I always do, not really. Sometimes I have good days of speaking, sometimes, not so good. Because there would be no point in saying, Yes, even though I am American, I am not a complete idiot and I have, by dint of years of study and reading and memorizing, gotten to the point that I can carry on a simple conversation with you. Because when an old Frenchman says that, in a genuinely surprised tone, he means it as a compliment.

He ascertained that we came from Washington and that America is a very big place, and that we were living in France now. Then I felt it was safe to ask him about himself: he had been born on the island and grown up there--he remembered when the Americans came, he was 15--but there was no work on the island; he'd had to leave, and had worked in the douanes, customs, for 40 years before coming home to retire. The island wasn't what it had been. Too developed. Too many people.

Then the subject returned to boules, or, as he called it (and many do), pétanque. If you meet a Frenchman and he takes a shine to you, you'll know because he'll begin to instruct you in something. My friend who sells cheese at the market--we call him the Cheese Man at our house--always has a new hike to tell me about. Jules is forever explaining to us the finer points of something rudimentary but which, to his mind, we are unlikely to know. And we knew we had impressed our boules benchmate when he began to tell us the history of pétanque.

His version went something like this: in a village on the coast, between Toulon and Marseilles, many years ago there was a game played that was very like boules. The best player in the village was called up to war, and when he came back, he had lost a leg. He could no longer play boules the way that the rest of the village did; he could not walk, only stand still. And so he would sit on the bench at the side, watching.

His comrades, though, knew this was not right. And they came up with a new version of the game: the players had to stand still to throw their boules. No more taking a step forward to toss the ball. The feet--the pieds--had to stay together. Piéds-tianque, he said, as though the words were self-explanatory. And from that, the true Provençal name for the game, came the bastardized French word, pétanque. Et maintenant, he went on, people play pétanque all over the world. The best players aren't even necessarily French. Some of the best players in the world come from Madagascar.

We listened and made the appropriate sounds of comprehension. Of course--fine French-speaker that I am--there was quite a bit that I didn't quite catch; this was miles away from school French, a long way from Parisian French, a fairly good distance even from the French that I hear in our village. But I think I got the gist of the story, and we all sat there together, when he was finished, watching his friends play until, a round or two later, the church bells struck the hour. They all picked up their boules and shook hands all around; our bench mate stood up and explained that he was very tired, he'd been doing some construction at his house all day, and he needed to go home now. He bowed to us, wished us bonnes vacances, and went away. His dog followed.

Then C slipped into the hotel. We'd noticed earlier that there were boules sets in the sitting room for guests to borrow. He brought a set outside, and we played a round or two of pétanque ourselves before dinner.

Made in China

2009-05-15T09:33:00.006+02:00

So Madame Mère and I were doing her Christmas shopping yesterday (bought and wrapped, thank you very much; the floor may be covered in dust lapins, but we are Good at Christmas). We had made our choices--I am not, for obvious reasons, at liberty to tell you what those choices were--and I handed them over to the shopkeeper, an intense and tiny woman in her late 20s. I've been a periodic customer in her shop for a while now, enough so that she recognizes me.

I handed her our choices; she took them and then paused.

Je dois vous dire, she said, que ceux-ci sont Made in China. I have to tell you that these are Made in China. That's how she said it: Made in China in carefully enunciated English.

Really? I said, not completely certain of what the appropriate response was, or where this conversation was going.

They are. They used to be made here, in France, locally, by artisans, by hand, but then the company was sold, and now they're all Made in China in factories. See, on the bottom, it just says, Hand-Painted. They can't put Hand-Made, the way they used to, because they're not Hand-Made anymore.

I see, I said, beginning to have a glimmer.

But they're being sold at the same prices now as they were before, and people don't realize, they don't know that what they're buying doesn't have the same quality. The man who owns this shop--he won't post a sign, he won't speak the truth about what he's selling. And then foreigners come in here, and they think they're buying something unique, something artisanal, something made in France, and they pay a lot of money but they have something that is Made in China. See--she took me to look at the pottery display--all of this is Made in China (a display of kitchen doodads festooned with plastic baguettes and tiny bottles of red wine) but all of this (the signs of the zodiac in rough clay) was made in France. You can see, it has a completely different spirit.

And it did. I mean, if you went in for a largish ceramic Virgo painted in faded blues and greys, you needed to look no further.

But people, foreigners, come in here, and they don't know what they're buying. They buy the cheaper stuff that is Made in China, because they say that the other things are too expensive. But it's better to have fewer things but things that are of quality, that have their own spirit, than to be surrounded by soulless cheap mass-produced tourist crap.

That last bit was a pretty loose translation, but I promise you that that's what she meant.

I was following along with Madame's logic completely--local, yes, factories on the other side of the world doing it cheaper and with less character and undercutting the cottage industries that have been the life blood of the region for centuries, no--but I still had the small problem of the Christmas gifts that she was holding in her hand and gesturing with as she declaimed. I cleared my throat.

But are there any of those that are not Made in China? I ventured.

In fact, there were, and they were on sale, because the shop owner didn't even understand that they were so much more valuable, being hand made by local artisans who were carrying on the tradition of their parents, than the other, newer ones that had been (all together now) Made in China. And, yes, she would sell us those.

Relieved, I put the Made in China ones back and took the local ones instead. We paid for those, and she sent us out to take a little walk through the village while she boxed up our purchases. When we were outside, I told Madame Mère, who had caught only the vaguest gist of the conversation, that the shopkeeper had given us 5% off on everything.

But why? she asked.

The only way I could explain was to talk about the patrimoine--the French notion of their national inherited culture, its intrinsic value and meaning--and the equally (though not exclusively) French fondness for Sticking It to the Man. (You can take your boss hostage, or you can shut down the national rail system, or you can charge customers who are sympa 5% less). And whether it's parking your tractor on the Champs-Élysées to protest McDonald's, or insisting that the only Champagne comes from Champagne, or calling mass-produced tourist crap mass-produced tourist crap, it's the same cultural instinct. Up with the small, the hand-made, the human; down with the giant, the mass-produced, the impersonal.

When we went back a few minutes later to pick up our purchases, she had boxed each and wrapped everything in brightly patterned Provençal paper. She handed the bags to me with a conspiratorial air and we went on our way.

Tapestry

2009-05-13T09:21:00.007+02:00

Sunday we observed American Mother's Day with a visit to the Villa Rothschild. I like it because it feels familiar, like another museum I know well, and because it is ridiculously beautiful, sitting on the saddle of Cap Ferrat, with views of the sea both east and west. This time, we took a guided tour, which allowed us to see the second floor of the mansion, and even more porcelain and delicate French furniture than are in the downstairs rooms. In the Louis XV room--two rococo marquetry desks, one with porcelain inlays; a suite of chairs from Louis XVI; an Aubusson rug; bits of Sèvres--he pointed out one of the 200 year old Gobelins tapestries hanging lining the walls. I'm not that much of a tapestry girl, I'm afraid, and I know that that is a mark against me in the Book of Culture. But something he said made me take notice. For a weaver at the Gobelins factory to finish one square meter of tapestry--all this is two centuries ago, mind you; it's what made by hand means--took one year.

This tapestry covered one entire wall in a large room.

We are in the middle of High Visiting Season here at La Bastiole. Two sets of (old, dear) friends have come and gone in the past six weeks; significant branches of my extended family were here last week; Madame Mère is with us now; in two weeks' time, the girls' aunt L will be here. She'll be our last visitor: when she leaves, on the last day of May, we'll have six weeks of packing and savoring and preparing and sorting before we close the gates.

We've been lucky in our visitors to La Bastiole. Our immediate families have been, almost everyone more than once, as well as many of our chosen family. And old friends, from different parts of our lives, people we've known at different times and in different places. They've all made the journey--a long journey of multiple flights and time zones for most of them--to see us, to sit at our table, walk our dogs, look at the olive trees, listen to our stories and tell theirs.

It has sometimes seemed like a lot of laundry and grocery lists. But now that I am on the tail end of all the visiting I see it differently. These connections have been a part of the warp and woof of our life for a long time. We've woven, by the Gobelins count, two square meters of tapestry since we've been at La Bastiole. Our visitors have helped us to weave it: although there are new colors in these squares, the old colors show up, too.

Now, without laboring that particular metaphor much more, let me say that, by our guide's reckoning, it must have taken the anonymous weavers of that tapestry as long as a decade of their lives to finish it. Ten years out of 60 or, if they were lucky, 70: births, deaths, marriages, wars, flu epidemics, economic crises, bad harvests, feast days and fast days. Ten years at the loom. We've been here for two, and it feels like a lifetime. It's not, thank goodness. If, as my grandmother used to say, the lord is willing and the creek don't rise, we've got a lot of square meters left to weave. What I am grateful for today is all the help we've had with these two squares, these two years: all the people who've come to see us, who've said to us, we love it here, it's beautiful, we're so glad we came to see you.

When we get back, when we start our next square, there will be new colors again. But also some of the same: colors that have been part of our story, our tapestry, for decades, part of our beginnings and part of these two years and, if we're lucky, part of many yet to come. For that, for all who have been part of these two square meters--for all the expense and jet lag and airplane food and ziploc bags of toiletries, all to come here and bear witness to our lives--thanks. And thanks.

Going Beyond the Daffodils

2009-05-11T10:32:00.003+02:00

Sunday morning in Liverpool we arrived at the Albert Dock just in time to climb aboard the bright yellow minibus for the National Trust tour of the childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The four of us took seats in the back; in front of us were a group of women in their 60s, a 60ish couple, and a mother (60ish) and daughter (30ish, 7 months pregnant). When the driver put on his seat belt he asked if we were all Beatles fans. E and G looked at us plaintively while everyone else mumbled a dutiful yes. Then he started the music.

We drove through Liverpool in the bus--covered in photos of the young John and Paul--to the strains of She Loves You and Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields and Imagine. The bus let us out at Lennon's home. Colin, the caretaker who lives on site, met us in the front garden and gave us what turned out to be a cultural history of postwar Liverpool and the Lennon family: the bombings in 1940 during which Lennon was born; the father who ran off with the merchant marine; the aunt who took in boarders to afford the middle-class house. We went into the kitchen and it was stocked with old tins of PG Tips and Heinz baked beans. The good china was locked up in the cabinet in the front room; there were chrysanthemums in cut glass on the window sill. Colin the caretaker told us how cold the house would get in the winter, how young John's aunt disapproved of George Harrison's Elvis pompadour and Liverpudlian accent. At Paul's house--smaller, shabbier, more working class--the caretaker told funny stories about other visitors and family stories about Paul and his father and brother.

Two days later we were in Grasmere. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Wordsworth and the French Revolution (nerds are us), and so visits to the Wordsworth houses--Dove Cottage, where he was a bohemian rebel, and Rydal Mount, where he out-Establishmented the Establishment--were the main items on the agenda.

At Dove Cottage, our docent had taken on the depressive atmosphere of the house. It was dark, low, cold, and damp. She was likewise. She recited her lines in each room with little or no elaboration and--E pointed out later--no hand gestures. The cottage smelled of the coal fires that still heat it (or don't). Atmospheric, yes. Informative, not so much. Rydal Mount was much the same: atmospheric--a pleasant, sunny house with views of the lake--but not terribly informative. Labels were glued to the wall under portraits: This copy of a painting in the National Portrait Gallery shows the Poet as a young man. This painting is of the Poet's great-great-great-granddaughter.

And so--we have come to the part where I lay my cards on the table--I have been thinking about storytelling. About how we tell stories, what we put in our stories, and what we leave out. What we think everyone knows, and what we think everyone ought to know. One evening in Grasmere we got behind a regional bus that ran between Windermere and Keswick. It was covered in advertisements for Dove Cottage. Go beyond the daffodils, ran the tag line, playing on Wordsworth's poem. Visit Dove Cottage.

Now, I have been beyond the daffodils. I can tell you stories about Wordsworth and his buddies that I would defy many other self-respecting poetry geeks to have at their fingertips. And I heard not one of those tales retold at Dove Cottage, or at Rydal Mount. The story they told was not of a young man who, by luck and chance and some measure of hard work but mostly being in the right place at the right time, ended up becoming A Famous Poet. Instead it was the story of How The Poet Sat Here, In This Spot Where You Are Now Standing, And Would You Like A Postcard With That.

In Liverpool--in our silly yellow bus with the giant black and white photos of Paul and John--we actually heard a story about how these young boys, or--as they said without a trace of self-consciousness, something I'll never master--lads, had the good luck to become the people we know as John Lennon and Paul McCartney. How they weren't terribly good students, and drove their parents crazy, and probably made an awful racket rehearsing.

Touring the childhood homes of the Beatles felt a little silly. After all, we're talking about our lifetimes, or our parents' (or, for E and G, their grandparents'), and I'm not even a big fan. Going to Wordsworth's houses, on the other hand, felt like a Proper Literary Pilgrimage, something I've been meaning to do for ever. And yet: it turned out silly was a gift. Silly meant that somebody at the National Trust had to think about what these house tours were going to be about. They couldn't be about Great Men: John hasn't been gone long enough, and Paul is still around, and neither of them found a cure for cancer (or wrote Tintern Abbey; we'll see how The Long and Winding Road holds up.). They had to be about life as it was lived there and then, how it felt and tasted and smelled. Up in Grasmere, the feeling seemed to be that the story would tell itself, that everyone already knew all about Wordsworth & Co, and that simply being in the Presence of the Poet's Life Mask (of which there was one; I was delighted, and confirmed in my suspicion that perhaps the Poet took himself just a tad too seriously) was enough. Would I visit both Wordsworth houses again? Absolutely; no question. Should the houses be on anyone's Lake District list? Yep. (Don't miss the lock of Wordsworth's hair upstairs in the back bedroom, overlooking the garden, at Dove Cottage.) Could the story told be more interesting? Yes. (But I'm not the one who has to figure out how to cycle thousands of people through those buildings. It's easy when you're sitting at your desk, difficult when you've got a busload of tourists who need to use the bathroom and will be in York by nightfall.)

And, for the record, I bought the postcard.

Mimi

2009-05-04T10:53:00.002+02:00

Friday afternoon found us on Easyjet heading south from Liverpool. For those of you who are not enjoying a Bank Holiday today, you should know that our English cousins are. And our flight was full of Liverpudlians (a word that it's just not possible to say too many times) who were determined to enjoy their Bank Holiday Weekend in the sunny south of France.

In the rain and chill and damp-induced fog that I was in when we boarded the plane, I did not grasp until most of the way through the flight that our flying compatriots were all English weekend-trippers. It began to dawn on me that something festive was up when, just before the drinks service, a voice behind me called Mimi! up the aisle. It was a young male voice, a voice redolent of (what I imagined to be) warm beer and snooker (what is snooker?) and football (not American style) and baked beans on toast. A younger version of Andy Capp.

When the flight attendant got to young Andy, he asked her what sort of sandwiches were available. Ham and cheese? he suggested. Oh no, love, said the young woman. Ham and cheese was only available on flights that originated in France. For this flight, he'd have to look in the flights originating in England column. And they had extra sandwiches, too, this time, a hot bacon baguette...

She pronounced the a in baguette to rhyme with hay.

I'll have that, please, love, said young Andy. A hot bacon baguette (again the hay). And a hot coffee with milk, and a Stella lager, and do you have any croissants?

No croissants, I'm sorry, but we do have some blueberry and chocolate muffins.

He chose a chocolate muffin to go with his hot bacon baguette, coffee, and beer, and as the flight attendant (twentyish herself; pink and white complexion; dyed blond hair pulled back into a knot, with the front section back-combed to suggest a bouffant) went up the aisle in search of the hot sandwich, he called after her: Could you just bring me another packet of ketchup please love?

I think it was the idea of adding ketchup to the hot bacon baguette that made me start taking notes. The man across the aisle from me, who was carrying twins, had just finished a plastic box of pasta salad that looked for all the world like egg noodles mixed with mayonnaise. In front of him was a man in his mid-40s wearing a black leather jacket and new blue and silver running shoes with a Chevrolet symbol on the heel. His salt and pepper hair was thinning in front, and he hadn't shaved that morning; he was reading a book called The Secrets of Sit-n-go, with sections called Playing a monster hand post flop, Playing a weaker draw, and Playing top pair, no kicker. His girlfriend sat across from him, in front of me, a slight blond in a blue hand knit sweater with small red wire-framed glasses.

Meanwhile, a strawberry-blond toddler staggered up and down the aisle with a plastic drink stirrer in his fist. His cheeks were chapped and his tshirt--I am the little brother, it said, in childish print--was stretched tight across his belly. His mother, or grandmother--older than I am, unless she had had a particularly hard life--was in loose jeans, a baggy linen jacket over a (proportionately) baggier cream-colored sweater, and I have no idea, none, what her cup size was. She followed him back and forth, up and down, and, proving once again that God looks after fools, the child made it all the way over the Massif Central without putting his eye out with the plastic stick.

Behind me, young Andy bellowed up to Mimi a few more times, and, in between, carried on an unbroken conversation with his friend across the aisle who had foregone the hot bacon baguette and chocolate muffin for a beer and a 7-Up and vodka. While I could follow most of what young Andy Capp said, I could only make out odd syllables of his friend's conversation. There, or food, or out, a bit of shut eye, whatever. After he was paged a few more times, Mimi--it turned out he was a beefy young man, not a tubercular soprano--turned around and threw an embarrassed grin in the direction of young Andy. I watched as he explained to the people around him--he was six or seven rows up--about his friends sitting back in steerage.

As the plane made the turn to cruise along the Riviera, everyone craned their necks to look out the window. Flashes went off as people took pictures of the view. My neighbors all looked like they'd been on the inside of a laboratory for the past six months, possibly even in cold storage, in petri dishes, part of an experiment to determine what would happen if humans were deprived of sunlight and fed a steady diet of hot bacon baguettes and pasta mayonnaise. I was in my travelling black and still feeling cold and damp, but they were dressed for the sun in capris, tshirts, and new tennis shoes, sunglasses at the ready.

There was a holiday spirit to the cabin. These English strangers demonstrated a level of intimacy in public that it's difficult to imagine French friends, much less airplane passengers, displaying in public after decades of life together. Any French man who yelled his friend's name up the aisle of an airplane--well, it's just unimaginable. Unless there was a dire emergency. Even then. It simply isn't done. And if it were done there would be a collective resettling, a recrossing of legs, shaking out of newspapers, an imperceptible drawing in and away, that would make it abundantly clear that it should not be done again.

The plane landed, and everyone leaped to their feet. They compared return flights--when are you leaving on Monday? maybe we'll be on the same flight--and then, slowly, they filed off. We watched them at baggage claim. Young Andy Capp--it turned out he was called Carl--was wearing black nylon cargo capris that set off his white legs and a pale blue knit sweat jacket. His Pumas were shiny white. He was standing with his unintelligible friend and Mimi, eyeing the French women standing across from them while they waited for their bags. The women were swaddled in various layers of white lycra--34Cs all around, no secrets there--and tight denim. They looked as though they had steered clear of the pasta mayonnaise. Or maybe it's just the red wine.

I hope those women let them down gently.

Plus poétique

2009-04-29T11:30:00.002+02:00

Every child in the girls' year in French school, having completed their week long internship in a business or stable or boulangerie or, in our case, several museums, has to write a report. At the Collège des vignes, that report must be 12 to 20 pages long. And, to clarify, in French.

The girls have labored and wept over this project--show of hands: can any of you who are non-native speakers drop and give me 20 pages in French?--but, the week before school let out for the vacances de printemps, each of them gave Madame Bovary, their French literature teacher, a draft. She had told them, you see, that if they gave her a draft on Tuesday she would correct their grammar and return it to them on Friday so that the students could perfect their rapports over the holidays.

Madame Bovary would be played, in the film version, by Margaret Hamilton. Don't remember who she was? How about this line: I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too! Still not there? How about: Surrender Dorothy! If you still don't know (and you probably don't, if you didn't grow up with The Wizard of Oz, look here. There is actually a certain resemblance, sans the green skin. Picture her if, instead of wearing her witch outfit, she was wearing stilettos, fitted white jeans, and a lacy black blouse over a sequined camisole, with several gold bracelets and necklaces.)

She is, to clarify once more, not real warm. All the guidance she gave the class on this report was a single page that listed the information that had to be included in the report. There was no indication of how that information should be presented: short answers? paragraphs? epistolary novel? Nor was there any discussion of how, exactly, one goes about writing a long paper. As in, first you gather information, then you organize the information, then you write an outline, then you write a more detailed outline....no, none of that. Just the one sheet of paper.

She did, in any event, correct the grammar and style on the girls' drafts and return them by the end of the week. There were lots of corrections, which I know took an age for her to make. The girls spent all day Monday putting them in to their drafts.

I asked E if there were any corrections that she hadn't understood. No, not really, she said. But something Madame had said was puzzling.

What was that? Hoping that it didn't have anything to do with one of those inscrutable French verb forms, passé simple in conditional voice or something like.

She said that my style needs to be more poetic.

More poetic? Her rapport de stage was supposed to be long, in French, and poetic? I took a breath. How so?

Well, she said, I had written that, before we went to the Horniman Museum, I hadn't expected to like it very much, but that, after we went, I liked it a lot. She changed that.

How did she change it?

Well, she said, and took her own deep breath, instead of saying, j'aimais bien l'Horniman, which is what I'd written, she changed it to read, j'étais séduit par l'Horniman.

Séduire, for those of you who have forgotten, means to seduce. Thus: seduced by the Horniman.

More poetic, indeed.

The Grand Tour

2009-04-27T11:30:00.001+02:00

Having made some Large Statements about my intentions to slow life down and appreciate the daily routine, I feel honor-bound to let you know that, for the next several weeks, I'll be doing no such thing. Tomorrow we depart for Points North: off to see family in Liverpool, which I'm sure is more scenic than I'm imagining, and then to the Lake District for hiking, tea, and Wordsworth's grave (please oh please let there be a death mask, or something made out of poetic hair). When we come back, we'll collect another branch of the family from the airport and deposit them at our friend's cooking school for a week. Meanwhile, other guests arrive to spend a few nights with us during the same week. Then, cooking school over, Madame Mère will stay on for ten days at La Bastiole, and, two days after she leaves, we'll go to Geneva for one of May's many long weekends. (Why Geneva? It's complicated.) I'll go directly from Geneva to Paris to meet up with another of the girls' aunts, and we'll spend three days in Paris before we come back to La Bastiole to sit on the terrace and drink tea til it's late enough in the afternoon for kirs royales.

And that brings us, loyal readers, to the beginning of June.

Which is all by way of saying this: I have the best of intentions about keeping you supplied with thrice-weekly updates from the world of La Bastiole, but we all know what paves the road to hell. So bear with me, please, and if you don't get your dose on a Wednesday, do check back in on a Friday. Or a Monday. Or, better yet, you can subscribe and then you don't have to remember. If you are a subscribing sort of person, which I know you may not be. I understand.

Now you know, though, and I'm sorry to dash your illusions, that I won't be watching the shadows lengthen during long afternoons, or eating local strawberries daily, or even spending many evenings en famille with my book. Life at La Bastiole is sometimes more about aspiration for me and my own life than it may be for anyone else. What I'll be doing instead--let me hasten to say, before the phone starts to ring and emails start to fly--will be just as wonderful: what a delight to see those we love. (And then, there's the possibility of the death mask.) But the month will look a little more like the Grand Tour, and a little less like Hanging Around at Home, than advertised.

And now I'm going to go and plant some basil.

Nothing on earth but laundry

2009-04-24T09:30:00.000+02:00

The sun is back. We've not seen much of it recently: a long succession of magnificently cloudy skies. Rain in all its variations (averses, orages, pluie forte, rafales: as Steve Martin said, the French have a different word for everything) has fallen almost daily for the last month or so. And when we've seen the sun, it's been cold.

But this week warmth arrived. Full sun. Blue skies. Warm.

While there are plenty of poetic reasons to be pleased about the warmth, we have, in our house, a more prosaic reason.

The laundry dries faster.

We'd never hung laundry outside to dry before coming here. (If you don't count one ill-fated experiment in California when the girls were babies, and the laundry, once hung out, stayed hung out. For a week.) When we arrived at La Bastiole, there was a washing machine but no dryer; I bought a drying rack as a stopgap measure until Jules provided us with a dryer, believing then, the French ink on my U.S. passport barely dry, that the absence of a dryer was an anomaly.

Three months later, the dryer showed up. A month after that, Olivier connected it. By that time, the drying rack was a habit. It helped, too, that the dryer did not dry clothes so much as it rendered them less wet. (An hour or two hanging up usually did the trick.) Electricity is expensive in France, and practicality is cheap, so everywhere you go, you see laundry hanging to dry.

We've had our share of house guests who gallantly offered to help hang the laundry, offers which we, of course, accepted like the gracious hosts we are. Then we (and I confess that here it is the royal we) flinched while we watched them take a dish towel out of the basket and pin it on the rack along its long side instead of its short side, landscape instead of portrait. Really. And without shaking it out and smoothing the wrinkles. Then the undies would come out and be hung on the extreme end of the drying rack, in the place, the only place, where something long (one of C's tshirts; the girls' jodhpurs; a smallish bath towel or largish hand towel) could fit. Camisoles draped over two rungs instead of pinned; socks hung pell-mell all over the rack instead of in pairs, all together, in the lowest spot (where nothing else fits), so that, when they're dry, it will be quicker to take them down and ball them up. Well. You will understand that after a time we would send our guests inside to make the hollandaise sauce instead.

Like most housekeeping tasks, hanging the laundry is both an art and a science. For us, the socks and undies and small things go in the center of the drying rack; the larger the object, the further out it goes. (Our laundry rack, oh you who just toss the wet laundry in the Kenmore and wander off, is a collapsible A-frame with two long arms that extend from the top.) Items too large for the rack (pants; sheets; bath towels) get hung, in the winter time, along the plastic-coated wires that form the trellis above our terrace. (See illustration above.) Summer, or when the year has advanced enough for our back terrace to get full warm sun for much of the day, the larger things and some of the larger small things (place mats; napkins; wind pants) are hung on the (glorious!) retractable clothes line that Madame Mère imported from North Carolina last May, and that it took two American men (who shall remain nameless) and one supremely competent Frenchman (Olivier) to install.

I am cautiously optimistic that we will soon be able to put the retractable clothesline back in service. C's already tried it once or twice without much luck; the weather was not warm enough, the sun not persistent enough. (When C hangs the laundry, I have found, it is best for all concerned if I am the one who goes in the house and makes the hollandaise. The clothes will, after all, dry eventually.) But today when I came home from the stables with G, E had already changed out the clothes on the drying rack. The load we'd hung only two hours earlier was dry. Now--I've just checked--the faux-shearling lined sweatshirt (which takes so long to dry that I often check several different weather forecasts before I even put it in the washing machine) is, after an hour and a half--just an hour and a half!--nearly dry.

It is a minor miracle, this drying the clothes in the sun. Laundry, to paraphrase, calls us to the things of this world, to the seasons and the length of days and when was it we last changed the sheets. When they no longer smell like sunlight, it's time to change them again.

Picnic

2009-04-22T11:30:00.002+02:00

The girls came hiking with the ladies and me this week; they started their vacances de printemps Monday. Lunch was a special birthday picnic. Everyone brought food to share: smoked salmon rolled up in flat bread with horseradish sauce and crême fraiche, guacamole with vegetables, tomato salad, onion tarts, Spanish tortilla, homemade bread, prosciutto and butter on brown bread. And then dessert: carrot cake, English fruit cake, coconut macaroons, chocolate chip cookies (the girls made those). And champagne, of course.

After the picnic it was time for games. One of our number, a retired hospital president called Georgiana, had brought along clothespins, which she passed out, one for each. She put a small box at either end of our picnic ground--and perhaps I should say here, to help you imagine it, that we were 800 meters up, on top of a mountain, in the shadow of a ruined château and with the entire coastline spread out below us--and, to get back to my story, divided the group into two. Half lined up behind one box, half behind the other. Georgiana then instructed them--she'd run out of clothespins before she got to me; I was on the sidelines--to hold the clothespin between their knees and travel from one end of the field to the other and back again before dropping the clothespin into the box. Ready, steady, go, she said, in her proper English voice, and pandemonium broke loose.

Two dozen women of a certain age, and two 13 year old girls, who have had a good lunch and are given a silly goal, can make an amazing amount of racket. There was a great deal of hopping and jumping and shrieking and dropping of clothespins, and even a little multi-lingual cursing, and within a minute or two the field had dwindled to three. Those three were not jumping or hopping or doing the funny little shuffle-skip that had led to the downfall of the other 23. They were, slowly and steadily and with great concentration, walking or, more honestly, waddling, toward the box.

Jon Carroll had me thinking this week about time. The clock, he wrote, is an opportunity. The clock will tell you what you need to do.

There are different schools of thought on how we should spend our last few months in France, how we should run down the clock. There's the Eurail pass school, which doesn't necessarily advocate the purchase of a pass but does imagine a trip to Major Capitals, a sort of condensed Grand Tour. Picture photographs of la famille Marron in front of an ever-changing green screen of Cultural Meccas. Then there's the Weekends in Provence school, which has us packing up every Friday and setting out for another charming village, preferably the ones near famous abbeys or vineyards, guidebook and map in hand. The green screen in this scenario features boules courts, antiques markets, and out of the way restaurants.

And then there's another school, which, if you're planning on placing any bets, I'd give good odds. It looks a little like this: we walk the dogs. Nice evenings, we drink a glass of wine on the terrace while we watch the shadows lengthen. We all sit together in the salon and read. We buy strawberries from Marjolaine and eat them right out of the barquette. We talk to each other about inconsequential daily things. We eat as many meals as we can outside. Maybe we go to the beach once or twice; we definitely go up into the mountains, and if we can, we look for wild mushrooms. If the opportunity presents itself, we sit in the place and watch the village go about its business.

What the three clothespin winners--because they were the only ones who got their clothespins to the box--had grasped, and that no one else did, was that there was no rush to finish. They had all the time they needed to get across the field. When we'll be in Europe again as a family, or in Provence, I don't know. But I think what I know is that it's not about being in Europe. It's about being a family. So what I'm going to try to do is take small, focused, present steps until, come mid-July, I waddle across the line, clothespin firmly pinched, and see what happens next.

Real France

2009-04-20T13:50:00.003+02:00

Colette took us up to her friends' goat farm last weekend. It's a few miles outside a village, down a series of roads that get smaller with each turn. The farm--house, dairy, barns, sheds--sits on a plateau that backs up against the mountains.

We are on a perpetual quest for authenticity, C and I, for evidence of human endeavor and dignity and creativity. I think it's part of what we were looking for when we came to France: small shopkeepers, local produce, people whose profession was book selling or bread making or flower selling, and who were not just passing the time behind the cash register. It's a hopelessly romantic notion, no doubt, and a naive one--France has more big box stores than any other country in Europe, I've heard--but, nevertheless, it's our notion.

And so it was with great anticipation that we drove up the series of smaller and rougher roads to the goat farm. Local farmers, local goats, and, Colette had assured us, we would be able to buy some local cheese. It was all too authentic for words.

Madame la fermière answered the door to her farmhouse and one of the first words out of her mouth was merde: she had meant to ask Colette to bring a book up to her from the village. Ah, yes, we thought, French people cuss much less self-consciously than we Americans do. (I have a theory about that being tied to Catholic culture and the sacrament of confession--cuss a blue streak all week, confess on Saturday, start over with a clean slate on Sunday--but I'll spare you the details for now.) But points to madame la fermière for authenticity.

Our first step was the dairy, where the farmer explained how they made goat cheese--milk, enzymes, rinsing, molding, not necessarily in that order--and showed us the room where they age the cheese. Wooden shelves laden with tiny rounds of cheese covered in various shades of mold. Then to the goat barn: dozens of brown and black goats shouldering each other aside for a better place at the trough. Goats, who look so clean and smell so bad. We walked up and down among them, pointing out the kids.

Then the sheep: even more, less clean and smellier. Madame la fermière and her husband sell the lambs for meat, meat that is sold in Italy. Why Italy, we asked. The French don't care about local foods; they'd rather go to a grands surfaces and buy cheaper lamb from New Zealand than support local farmers, was the response. We nodded sagely. We knew about the grands surfaces stores; we come from the place that invented them.

As we came out of the sheep barn, madame put out a warning hand to stop us. Shhh, be still, she said. Down the lane were coming hundreds of sheep--400 or so, she told us--herded by dogs and followed, several minutes of sheep later, by their shepherd.

We were thrilled. Dairy, goats, sheep barn, and now an authentic troupeau returning from a day in the mountains, and with their own shepherd en plus.

Once the dogs had herded the sheep into their paddock, the shepherd stopped to talk with us. He was in full shepherd gear: old baggy camouflage painter's pants, worn boots, multiple layers of sweaters and vests. A bamboo staff. A canvas messenger bag slung over his shoulder. He could have been anywhere from 40 to 70: his face was tanned into crevices. And he wore a navy beret at a rakish angle. The only way he could have looked more French is if he had had a baguette and a tricolor hanging out of his satchel. It was, for us, the icing on the cake.

He cast an appraising look over C and me. Alors, vous êtes des vrais américains? he asked. So are you real Americans?

We are, we assured him. Real Americans.

The shepherd cleared his throat. Well, it's a good thing I wore my beret this morning, he said slyly. I didn't know I was going to be meeting real Americans.

Ah, authenticity. Apparently it cuts both ways.

Beau

2009-04-17T10:32:00.000+02:00

Jules and Madame are here this week, and what do you think they want to talk about? (Aside from the perfidy of the locals, and how the glycine is not growing fast enough.)

The Obamas. And their dog.

When I came home the other day, Jules was in the garden. He'd arrived from Paris after lunch and changed immediately into his country duds--old Façonnable shirt, faded jeans, Tod's loafers, and a dark green merino wool sweater flung nonchalantly around his shoulders--and was haranguing the man driving the bob. Which means, in Jules parlance, any tractor-like vehicle that can move things around and may have been made by, or look like something made by, the Bobcat Company in North Dakota. (It took us a while to figure this out, as he pronounces bob in the French way: not bob like the yellow sponge with the square pants, but baub like the first syllable of bauble.) The man at the controls was using the bob to move large rocks back and forth. There were also pieces of plywood involved. And mud.

When I came out, Madame and Madeline, their granddaughter, had walked down the hill to join Jules. While Madame pointed out wildflowers and the swimming pool to Madeline, Jules muttered to her about the impossibility of getting anything done right by anyone other than oneself. Then I drew level with them.

Ah, ma petite! Jules did the bises. Then Madame did the bises. Then three year old Madeline did the bises and said Bonjour, Madame. Nobody greets like the French.

Once we had all kissed, Jules said: Et alors, Obama, he came to Europe!

Yes, I heard, I said.

And he was vraiment formidable! Jeune, beau, intelligent--

Madame interrupted. Vraiment formidable!

While Jules took a breath I leaped into the fray with a small joke. I see that you've put a belt around your sweater, Madame, just like Madame Obama.

But of course! I only wish I could look more like her. But I've given up alcohol and chocolate, and if I could only start an exercise régime--

And the dog! Jules grabbed the conversational wheel. T'as vu le chien? Have you seen the dog?

Have I seen the dog? I am the household expert on the dog, thank you very much. There is no Internet clip of the dog I have not seen, no article I have not read, and I even have a few theories about why we all--even the French--care so much about le premier chien. (It has to do with hope and normalcy, and I know you're shocked, shocked, to hear that I've been giving it some thought.) Mais bien sûr, I assured him.

Il est marron--so cute, the dog! And you know, Jules said, slowing down the French as he does when he's about to make a joke he wants to be sure I understand, le chien, he is black and white, black and white, tu comprends? Do you get it? Just like Obama! He looked to see if I'd gotten it, or if he needed to repeat the witticism.

I nodded. Yes, the dog is black and white. I understand.

Madame stepped in with a bon mot of her own. He is called Bo, et il est beau, comme le président. And she smiled.

Planned obsolesence

2009-04-15T08:50:00.000+02:00

G and E are tall enough to reach the upper rail in the Underground trains. You know, the railing suspended from the ceiling. They've been on the Washington Metro, the New York Subway, the Paris Metro, and, as of a few weeks ago, the London Underground. Their first trips on the Washington Metro were in strollers. Then there came a day when they had stamina enough to leave the strollers at home. And now, about two weeks later, they're standing next to investment bankers and Asian tourists loaded down with bags from Harrod's, holding on to the high bar and casually swaying with the rhythm of the train.

What I learned in London was how near my job is to being done. I watched as my girls interviewed the directors and assistant directors and heads of departments of various museums you've heard of. They took out their Clairefontaine notebooks, pulled their chairs up to the tables, and led suited-up men whose next meetings involved arranging tours for the G 12 first ladies through a list of questions about the museum profession. I kept track of their coats.

After one of these interviews, their Aunt A and I were sitting with them in a café on the Embankment. A asked what they thought they might like to do when they grew up.

I'm not sure, said G, except that I know I want to do something that helps.

We've tried to teach them to recycle, to buy seasonal produce, that it's possible to read a novel and cook dinner at the same time. To take the dogs for a walk. Separate whites and colors. Fertilize the geraniums. Keep up with friends. Eat three meals a day and get enough sleep. Help the person with a stroller. Watch movies. Hold the door for the next person. Tell stories.

What they don't know yet are some of the mechanics. How to read a subway map. Wear your purse over your shoulder, across your body, in the city. Put your change away before you leave the cashier. Be aware of your surroundings. They're the skills that my mother taught me, began teaching me on our first trip to London. They're the skills that made me feel competent and capable when, not that many years later, I was in London and New York and Paris on my own.

It seems to me that planned obsolesence is the goal of parenting: to bring up your children not to need you to bring them up any longer. When G, sipping her hot chocolate, said casually that what she wanted to do was to help--and that she wasn't sure, exactly, how she was going to do that, only that that was the thing that mattered to her, helping other people, making things better--A turned to me and said: I think your work here is done.

Almost. We walked down into the Underground and I reminded the girls to hold on.

Ready

2009-04-13T15:35:00.004+02:00

C and I went to dinner at L'Éléphant Saturday night. We were among the only people there who were not locals--if locals means that the waitress greeted you with the bises, the kiss on both cheeks. We didn't get the bises, but the waitress and the chef do recognize C, and they always seat us at the same table. So I think that gives us the status of respected outsiders. Which, let me hasten to say, is not bad.

We had ordered our pizzas--one reine, one quatre saisons--and drinks--a seize for C and a petit pichet, the smallest denomination wine comes in (but it left me with a headache most of yesterday quandmême) for me--when an older woman came in. She did the bises with the waitress, the chef, and the father and son at the table beside ours. Then she hovered until the father and son got up to go, when she took their table. They were finished--the food and drink were gone--but the time between finished and leaving is a fairly elastic thing in France. Anyway, they got up to go and she installed herself.

She draped her black velvet brocade opera coat over the back of her chair. Under it she was wearing a black tulip skirt with alternating matte and satin panels; a black blouse with long sleeves in illusion fabric, the bodice mostly illusion as well but backed up by a lacy black camisole. Pearls. Black stockings. Black velvet pumps with gold trim. Short spiky black hair, dyed to match. And large black tinted glasses trimmed in rhinestones.

She was pushing 70.

Her daughter came in and sat down with her shortly. Daughter was also in full black, but trending more to the denim and biker boots end of the spectrum. From which I think you can deduce that Madame her mother was the only person in L'Éléphant who, if Maurice Chevalier had put his boater round the doorjamb looking for someone to go dancing with him someplace where the lights were low and the champagne was flowing, would have been ready to slip into her opera coat and sally forth.

Now, I have been clear recently about my preferred footwear, and about my predilection for wearing clothing in which you cannot tell my bra size at first glance. However. Madame Rhinestones reminded me of a Department of Homeland Security advertisement that ran quite a lot in the bad old days. We can be scared, it went, or we can be ready.

Madame Rhinestones wasn't going to see retirement age again. Keeping her hair that black probably requires a fair amount of coiffage. But she is in the game. She's not in house dresses or sensible shoes or even comfortable jeans and no-iron knitwear. If aging scares her, she's keeping it under her (no doubt also black, maybe with a sequin detail) hat. She has not given up. If Maurice Chevalier shows up, she's ready.

Wisteria

2009-04-10T08:45:00.000+02:00

There's a wisteria tree on my route to the Collège des vignes. That is, it's not actually a wisteria tree; it's a tree that's been taken over, overrun, by wisteria. This week when spring has burst upon us, the entire tree, all 20 or 30 feet of it, is covered in purple blossoms. It's quite a sight.

It caught my eye today on my way to collect the girls. Wisteria is a plant about which my family has nothing kind to say. As in, it will take over everything. As in, if you're lucky, it will give out. As in, if you plant it and know what it is, you deserve what you get. They're not much for vines, my family. Too many days spent pulling morning glory vines out of cotton fields. I've always liked it, though, doubtless because I never had to get rid of it. I like how it survives, and how it's purple, how it will go anywhere and make a splotch of color.

When G and E were small, my grandmother still lived on the family farm. My second-eldest uncle lived there with her, and with my grandfather, too, until Granddaddy died. This uncle was a polarizing figure in our family: on one pole, my grandmother, who thought he could do no wrong, and on the other pole, everyone else, who, most of the time, just tried to be civil. He was the son for whose medical school education the family sacrificed. And he was the son who, once he had his degree, rarely came home. Birthdays, Mother's Days, Christmases all went by without acknowledgment from him. When he did parachute in, there had generally been a crisis--unspecified--and he had come home to improve his humor by criticizing the rest of us. That he was living with my grandparents at this point was the result of another crisis whose source remained forever unknown: one day, when he was in his early sixties, he called to say he was moving home. The next week, he had taken over the front room.

This is the good memory I have of this uncle: one day, when the girls were small and we were at the farm, he led us out across the field, through the woods, to a ruined farmhouse. It was covered in wisteria. The vine showed where the house had been--starting at the edge of what would have been the front porch, shooting out across the collapsed tin roof. The house had been abandoned for decades, but the wisteria had gone on. As the pines and wild laurel had crowded in and taken the sunlight, the wisteria had shot out long tendrils along the ground, finding the light it needed to survive.

We all stood there in the clearing and marveled at that wisteria. We wondered about the family who had lived there--I think they were some connections of ours; most families in that part of the world are--and about what they would have to say about their wisteria vine. How it had outlasted the house, and maybe the family as well.

That uncle died last week. He was as polarizing in death as he had been in life and we--who treasure our family, who look after each other, who prize our connections to each other more than most anything else--we are left marveling at the absence of grief. We're hopeful that some sadness will come with time. In the meantime, we're trying to uncover some good memories of this man. Or at least some good memories in which he played a minor role.

The wisteria today was my first one. It's called glycine over here, and, to hear Jules talk about it, it's the ultimate vine. There are four planted beside our front terrace and they are coming along, slower than you might expect. Madame Mère, when she's here, shakes her head at them. If Jules is lucky, those vines will die, she says, and then she goes back to nurturing some other plant, or grandchild, along. I disagree, though not strongly. I like to think of someone walking along the lane, years hence, and seeing a house nearly covered in purple blossoms, and wondering about the family that was here when those marvelous wisteria vines were first planted.

Shoes

2009-04-08T08:55:00.004+02:00

Danielle the immobilière brought clients to look over the house yesterday. She'd called the day before to make an appointment with me; we settled on 5 o'clock, but she arrived an hour early. I was taking the sheets down from the clothes line when I heard her white Saab convertible pull into the parking, and, sheets bundled over my arm, I went up to greet her.

She took my hand and kissed my cheeks. Look at you, she said, you're practically French! It was hard to see what she meant by that: I was in loose jeans, a looser knit shirt, and clogs. Also small earrings, no necklace, and no makeup. Danielle, en revanche, was in a deep rose cashmere turtleneck (I'm going with 32C, push-up), tight jeans with ample rhinestone trim, and black 4-inch heels with a pointy toe and rhinestone detailing (to match the jeans). Drawn-on eyebrows: check. Blond hair the color the girls' was when they were 2: check. Cloud of perfume: two checks.

The clients were following her in their Volvo station wagon. Our driveway is nearly vertical and gravel en plus, so if you are unprepared for it and driving a manual car, it often takes more than one pass. It did for these ladies. After Danielle and I had encouraged them and waved our hands around sufficiently, they managed to bring the car to a level spot and decant themselves. Two of them: maybe sisters, maybe friends who saw the same hairdresser. Long straightened black tresses; thoroughly made-up eyes; lipstick. Tight peasant-style blouses(I know, it seems like a contradiction in terms, but trust me) open to a level that would have sent even Marie Antoinette back into her boudoir for a scarf (both push-up, probably one 34C and one B). Assorted necklaces bearing assorted pendants. Bracelets. Tight jeans. And then shoes: one set of black pointy stilettos trimmed in gold ribbon, one set of peep-toe Lucite stilettos revealing (of course) a set of well-painted toes. They each moved in their own perfume clouds.

I went before them down the hill and into the house, stashing the sheets in the guest room, alerting E that we had company, quieting the dogs, and tidying the kitchen counter. It meant that I missed seeing them descend the gravel path in their shoes. They examined the garden--or, more accurately, field--in front of the house, looked down towards the pool, and took in the dead olive tree being held up by a plank. (I missed Danielle's explanation of that.) Then they came inside and Danielle led them through the rooms while E, home with a cold, stood next to me and tried not to giggle.

As soon as they had disappeared into the bedrooms, she let out a snort. Did you see their shoes? she said, while waving her hand in front of her face, trying to waft the perfume somewhere else.

We composed ourselves in time for the ladies to emerge from the chambres. I chatted with them while Danielle took a few photographs for her website--yes, we were from America, yes, we had been very happy here, yes, we had wanted to stay, no, the furniture did not come with the house, it was going back with us to America--and then, with much kissing and shaking of hands, the three of them clacked out and made their way back up the hill.

I read somewhere once, or maybe someone told me, that shoes reveal nationality. Germans: sturdy, fashionably ugly (or just ugly). Italians: fashionable, elegant. English: sturdy, practical. Americans: practical, comfortable, often featuring a swoosh or the latest in air-cushioned technology. And French: not practical, not comfortable, aggressively fashionable, a certain kind of completely impractical elegance. I adopted clogs from a Danish friend a decade ago, so while I'm not sporting a swish, I'm a long way from stilettos. A day even in plain flat shoes--some practical loafers, maybe with a nice bow detail--leaves me cranky. I do own a few pairs of heels, but they're the sort you'd wear to meet with the board of directors, not to seduce them. I can no more imagine putting on a pair of 4 inch heels to go look at rental houses than I can imagine walking on the ceiling. No matter how good my French becomes, my shoes will always give me away.

If

2009-04-06T17:08:00.004+02:00

We ate lunch today at the crêperie in Biot. It's one of our favorite places, though we've only been there a few times. That village is out of our way, and the crêperie has what you could generously call limited hours. You could also say that it is closed more often than not. The result is that we never make a plan to go there--we plan either on one of the cafes with tables in the place near the fountain, or the boulangerie with its sandwiches and plastic chairs. So when the crêperie's door is open, it's always a pleasant surprise, a welcome change of plans.

There are only a few tables--maybe 10 tables for two, but most are usually pushed together for groups, so it feels like only four or five. The ceiling is held up by old beams, the walls decorated with silk flowers and small slates with notes about the menu: the kir maison is made from hard cider with a shot of myrtille liqueur; the vin chaud comes at 2 euros a verre, or 4 for a pichet. The kitchen is across the back wall--tins of herbs ranged on shelves, wooden spoons, bottles of olive oil and vinagers, and crème de menthe for drinks competing for space. What takes up the most space is the crêpe stove, the large, round cast-iron griddle on which Madame makes her crêpes. More than likely, that's what you'll notice first, because when you come through the door, Madame will sing out a welcome from where she's standing at the stove.

Madame seems to be about six feet tall, though likely she's shorter; it may be that it's just a small room. She's blond and lean and pretty, and yet manages to be more maternal than anything else, laying her hand on your arm to welcome you, rearranging the furniture and finding some extra cushions so that everyone in your party can sit comfortably, passing out menus before retreating to the stove. Today we were with our visiting friends--their last stop before their next stop--and so there was extra bustle as she got us settled and then went to find colored pencils for the kids. And, a minute later, an eraser and a pencil sharpener.

Traveling with kids is hard. The food is different, and in a village miles from most places, there's not a lot of choice. Our friends' patience was endless, even when their kids ran out of patience with the strangeness of it all. It's a helpful mirror for us: to see what feels strange and, by that reflection, to see what has come to seem normal to us. We don't notice, anymore, the smallness of the spaces, the sharpness of the flavors, the torrents of French. It's what we see, every day, what gets reflected back to us. Visitors give us the chance to turn the mirror a little and see what it's like to glance into our borrowed world. I think it can feel magical, but it can also wear a person out.

At the end of our lunch--C had a salad, I had a crêpe, and there were various omelettes and salads and crêpes besides--I availed myself of the toilette. It's the kind of restaurant that is heavy on the silk flowers, as I think I mentioned, and the charming signs. Still, though, I was unprepared for the decoration above the sink. Framed by a wreath of pink ivy was a translation of Rudyard Kipling's If, translated into French:

Si tu peux rester calme alors que, sur ta route,
Un chacun perd la tête, et met le blâme en toi...

If you can keep your head when all about you,
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

It's an awful poem, in any language. But as I washed my hands it made me smile. I thought of Madame printing it out, framing it, and hanging it on the wall. I wonder how many visitors have come through her crêperie--how many sibling meltdowns she's seen from behind her stove, how many jet-lagged families who needed nothing more than a good meal in a comforting place. She's so nurturing and warm and welcoming, and she infuses her food with the same spirit--but I wondered if she thought that, even with her singsong French and her extra cushions, there wasn't still more to be done to buck up her guests. Like maybe a poem that they could read, in private, that could offer some encouraging words. If you can fill the unforgiving minute / with sixty seconds' worth of distance run: maybe that sentiment, she figured, could just about give all those footsore and worn out tourists the strength to make it to the next stop. And--en plus, perhaps, she thought--it sounds better in French. I stopped by the stove to thank her on my way out. But of course! she said. And then, with a smile, bonne chance.

Mapping the reality

2009-04-03T09:02:00.003+02:00

Friends arrive for a visit tomorrow. They'll rent a car at the airport and drive up to us. Earlier this week, when I offered to send C to meet them, they replied with assurances that they could find their way and a copy of the map of our neighborhood provided by their GPS.

The map was wrong.

It wasn't wrong in the broadest sense--the red dot representing La Bastiole was in approximately the right place on our lane. But it was wrong more narrowly, in that it showed La Bastiole as sitting at the corner of our lane and another road, a road that wrapped around La Bastiole and, somewhat further down the hill, met up again with our lane.

There is no such road.

Now, to be fair, there is a disused road behind our house. It's the path that the dogs and I take to the village most days. But it leads up the hill, not down, and it meets up with a different lane entirely.

Our friends' GPS is not the first instance of satellite confusion we've run across. The village had maps printed up recently--glossy brochures showing exactly how little there is in the way of commerce--and on that map, too, this mystery road appears.

I pointed out the discrepancy between reality and satellite imaging to C, who believes in technology more than I. His first response was that the phantom road must be the path up to the village. It may be that I made a sound like a snort at that juncture. We've been on that path a hundred times, and we know where it goes. Then he mentioned the path below our house, the one that goes across the hill to the next village. C thought maybe that was what the GPS was showing as a road. Neither, though, does that path follow the map's outlines. And heaven help the person who tries to drive a car along it: mud, stones, and a spot where there's a blackberry bramble on one side and a 20 foot drop on the other, where you have to go single file and where the dogs cast doubtful looks over their shoulders at me every time.

How hard it is to believe the evidence of our eyes versus the certainties of a global positioning system. Our whole sense of the world, these days, is staked on technology being right. On the Internet being able to link us to truth in under 2 seconds. Even as I write this, I wonder if I'm not somehow misreading that map, misunderstanding its representation of the lane that I drive up and down every day--wondering if, if I just turned my head a little, I would see that, in fact, there is a road where the GPS says there is. After all, there must be, mustn't there?

Apparently there's a village in England that has had similar troubles with the GPS. Wedmore's lanes are too narrow for sidewalks, yet they turn up as the shortest route to the Bristol airport. 15,000 vehicles a day go down it nowadays, passenger cars as well as camions. Villagers have had their front gates sheared off, lost their mailboxes, found the side mirror of their cars snapped off on the ground. When asked, the spokesman for the GPS guys said: We map the reality. We cannot change that reality in our database. Who are we to make a change and say, ‘You cannot drive in that road’ if, in reality, you can drive in that road.

Except for when you really can't, not if you've got more than four wheels. Or if the road, like our phantom, doesn't exist.

C's going to meet our friends at the airport and lead them home.

Naming the horse.

2009-04-01T15:52:00.006+02:00

I just dropped E at the écurie for her weekly lesson. Since January, the girls have been riding at a small stable down the hill: close enough to walk to from home, if only the road they would have to cross didn't have two blind curves and no shoulder. They have leased a horse, which means that someone else owns the horse and they are paying--we are paying--for a weekly ride and private lesson. The girls alternate weeks and, on fine days, they both like to hang around at the stable helping out, grooming the horses, feeding them, moving bales of hay from one corner to another.

One of their favorite pastimes at the stable is taking the miniature ponies for a walk. The stable sits at the end of a dirt road in the valley, surrounded by fields and here and there houses. If you walk down the road a bit from the barns, you can look back and up into the mountains. It's what people mean when they talk about the country.

They'd been going to the stables for a few weeks when they mentioned at supper one night that they'd taken Nazi for a walk that afternoon.

Who? we perked up.

This sweet little pony called Nazi. There followed the kind of description of a miniature pony that only a horse lover can give. When I am confronted with a dozen horses, they all look brown to me. When E and G see the same horses, they see a dozen different shades. I imagine it is not unlike telling identical twins apart. Except since these horses aren't mine, I can't.

A few minutes later the description of Nazi the sweet little pony came to an end. I had spent the time not in listening to whether Nazi's sweet little mane was blond or chestnut but in reviewing what I knew about Sylvie and Gérard, the stables' owners. They hadn't seemed like war criminals, or proto-fascists.

The girls showed signs of moving on from sweet little Nazi to equally detailed descriptions of other horses. I put him in his stall right next to his friend Gold, said G. It was so sweet, they touched muzzles right away.

Gold? we said. Nazi's stall is right beside Gold's? Curiouser and curiouser. Proto-fascists with a sense of humor? What were the girls learning down the hill?

The girls rolled their eyes. It's not Nazi, it's Nazi, E said. Her second a was ever so slightly flatter.

They wouldn't call a horse Nazi, Mama, G chimed in.

We looked at each other, at a loss. Maybe you could spell it, C said.

Nazi. N-u-t-s-y, G said.

Nutsy! we said.

That's what we were saying, they said.

They'd learned the name of the proto-fascist pony from their friend Virginia, who had, in turn, learned it from (perfectly innocent) Sylvie and Gérard. Sylvie and Gérard had called the horse Nutsy, an English word even though they don't speak English, and then had pronounced as French people would. Nootzie. Virginia, in turn, had taken their French pronunciation and put it through her aristocratic English accent: Nautzie. And then along came our girls, who heard Nautzie and, because their forebears came across the waters, their au came out as a flat a. Et voilà: Nazi the pony, who hangs out with his good friend Gold.

We were relieved.

Violets from Marjolaine

2009-03-30T12:37:00.004+02:00

We came home to rain on Saturday night. We'd left rain, too, in London, but of course it was a different sort of rain: cold, windy, even icy. The rain that led us up the hill from the airport and along to our village was gentle and, if not quite warm, then several degrees away from cold.

The big news of the week was that Madame Marie, at Pizza Pierre, has lost her lease on the concrete pizza hut in the parking lot. She's moving up the hill, to the next village, where she's taking over the lease on a storefront that has housed a sandwich shop and tea room for the past six months or so. The tea room lady is moving on, and Madame Marie is moving in. There's already a pizzeria in the village--L'Eléphant--so, Madame told C, she's going to have to improve la qualité de son produit.

C had cooked all day Saturday and we came home to applesauce, meatloaf, and butternut squash, nourishing, homey food after our week of pork pies, fish and chips, and as much Asian food as we could work in. He'd gotten the fruits and vegetables from Marjolaine at the rond point, along with some striped tulips. And Marjolaine had sent along a violet nosegay for me, a little cadeau to say welcome home.

Home is what it feels like, coming back here. This morning the pharmacist recognized me and spent five minutes comparing face lotions with me. The sisters who run the café where I meet the English ladies for coffee tsked with me about the rain, and when my friend the cheese seller came in to return his café au lait cup, he waved to me from the counter.

Home is a funny thing. Today's New York Times reports that San Francisco's Chronicle newspaper may become a casualty of the recession and the iPhone, and, even though I haven't subscribed to that paper in more than a decade, I felt a pang. I've read Jon Carroll's column in that paper for nearly twenty years--first in print and now, for years, online--and it has kept me connected to a place that still feels, in many ways, more like home than anywhere we've lived since. On other trips to England, I've felt a sense of familiarity, of home: all the months of my life given over to reading English literature resulting in a visceral sense of belonging.

This time, though, England, London, felt foreign. Of course it's awfully easy to speak English with everyone you meet, and be able to grasp, pour le plupart, the jokes in the ads in the Tube. But in two years village life has changed us. All the people, all the energy, the sheer scale of the city: exciting and wonderful, yes. Overwhelming and bewildering: that, too. When we got out of the car at La Bastiole Saturday evening, it was dark and the air smelled of rain and woodsmoke and green. We were home.

Family Life

2009-03-27T11:39:00.000+01:00

Maybe you've heard about 6 milliards d'autres, 6 billion others, the newest project of Yann Arthus-Bertrand? This new work of the photographer and artist who, several years ago, made La terre vue du ciel, The Earth from Above, large-format photographs taken from a helicopter showing beautiful and alarming vistas, was on at the Grand Palais, in Paris, this winter. Beginning in 2003, Arthus-Bertrand interviewed and filmed 6,000 people in 65 different countries. He asked them questions about their lives: family, experiences, sorrows, what made them laugh. And then he put it all together, a portrait of humanity in the world at our moment.

Miss Clavell, the girls' teacher, went up to Paris and saw the show at the Grand Palais. She was inspired. She came straight back down to the Collège des vignes and told the international class that they were going to do their own version. They'd collect the email addresses of all the kids they knew in different countries--from Thailand to Bolivia to Finland to South Africa--ask for a photograph and send them a questionnaire. When it all came back, they'd put on their own display.

G and E caught Miss Clavell's excitement. We spent an evening clicking around on the website, listening to different voices talking about the same things in different ways. (It's a website that makes you think, The Internet: On the Whole A Good Idea.) And we thought of all the people we know in different countries and found their email addresses.

Last week, Miss Clavell led the class in thinking of what questions to ask. School? Parents? Religious education? Music? Someone suggested that there be a question about family life. What kind of family life did the respondent want to have in the future?

G (she told us about it that evening, at the supper table) thought about that for a minute. When she and E were in fifth grade, in America, their teacher did a unit on sex education. It was called Family Life (and we had to sign a permission slip for it). G sat in class the other day and wondered how many schools in the world call their sex education unit Family Life. Would the kids on the other end of the email think that they were being asked what kind of sex life they wanted to have in the future?

So did you say anything? C and I asked.

I decided not to. G shrugged. I mean, it's hard to explain to a French teacher that Americans can't say sex without blushing.

The girls have had sex ed this year at school, and it's not been called Family Life (and there was no permission slip). The first chapter was called Reproduction, and the second, which they're on now, is called Contraception. If asked, they'll tell you what the three most popular forms of birth control are in France today, in order of popularity and efficacy. They have to memorize it for the test.

So did the question make it onto the list? we wanted to know.

Oh, yeah, said G. I guess anybody who thinks it's talking about sex will just assume that the questionnaire came from a French school, and the French are like that.

Indeed. I hope I get to see the responses.

Spring

2009-03-25T12:00:00.000+01:00

The morning chorus woke me at 6 again this morning, the third time this week. As soon as the sun looks like it will rise again, the birds wake up and fly into our olive trees. Someone pulls out the pitch pipe, they tune up, and the singing begins. If I must be woken at 6, then there are worse ways.

The birds are here, of course, to let us know that it is spring. Wildflowers are popping out everywhere: the terraces under the old oliviers are covered in tiny white daisies whose petals have purple undersides that show off in the slightest breeze. The wild iris--I know, it seems unlikely, and yet there are large and small iris colonies everywhere, around utility poles, by the side of the lane, on our path to the village--the iris that are so omnipresent that no one could have planted so many are beginning to bloom, shooting up their stalks with all those buds of promise. Hellebore, wild orchids, flowers and bushes and shrubs I can't name are all blooming everywhere.

Marjolaine is back. We saw her at the rond point on Sunday, her pink scalloped umbrella shading tables of fruits and vegetables and flowers. She'd been away all winter, a latter day Persephone, having both of her knees operated on. (It says something about the French health care system that the fruit and vegetable lady at the roundabout had the same knee surgeon as the retired upper crust English schoolmistress who lives in the village.) Now she's better, back on her feet, and, while she hasn't got any of her own produce to sell, she's still driving down to the organic wholesale farmer's market at 5 in the morning, three days a week, to bring back goods for her stand. Sunday there were tiny bunches of spinach, broccoli, potatoes, apples, onions, and a few bouquets of ranunculus for good measure.

When we came up to the stand, Marjolaine was reading Une année en Provence. Peter Mayle is popular in French as well, and apparently Marjolaine is a fan. We traded favorite parts--she likes the description of the mistral as actually flattening the world--and, when we told her we'd just been and found the house, she wanted the directions. One of these days, now that her knees are fixed, she's going to drive over there and find it. Even though he's not from here, she said, he understands what Provence. I told her that I had always thought that Mayle exaggerated his characters. Then I came to live here, I said, and--she interrupted me. He writes about us exactly as we are, she said. Il n'exagère pas.

That night we had fresh spinach for supper. Soon there will be wild asparagus, and morels from the forest, and then the first strawberries, and cherries. How shall we ever taste it all.

Signs of the times

2009-03-23T12:00:00.002+01:00

When we used to drive in France, before we became experts thanks to the School of French Driving, we were frequently puzzled by road signs. The white circle with the black slash. The yellow diamond on a white ground. The red-rimmed triangle enclosing the black x. But no other sign was quite as puzzling to us as the exclamation point. A triangle trimmed in red, sometimes with a white background, sometimes with a yellow, and, in the center, a large, emphatic exclamation point. We would pass it on the road and think, ! . What now? What do we look for? What does it mean? It would leave us with a lingering sense of unease.

Then we went to driving school and they gave us--well, we bought--a copy of the Code de la route, the French driving rule book. (Insert here joke about there being a rule book for French drivers.) The first few pages were devoted to signalisation, to signs. And there, on the bottom of page six, the last sign to be explained, was our ! triangle. What did it signify? Dangers, said the code, for which there are no corresponding signs.

In other words, when you find the ! sign on your route, it could mean anything. Godzilla could be around the next corner (there's no monster crossing sign), or a bit of road could have washed out in this morning's rain, or someone could be pruning the hedge alongside. Slow down and watch for monsters. Make sure the road is still there before you continue. Look out for guys on ladders with chain saws.

It is a useful sign, the !, it seems to me. Especially these days, when it can feel like there are so many dangers for which we have no corresponding sign. How do you signal a failing economy? Global warming? Health care crisis? And that's just the front page news. It doesn't include all the domestic crises, the ailing relatives, the thousand small crises that unspool in a life. This morning as I drove along the upper lane in the village on my way to French class, I passed a ! sign in the road. It had a yellow background, which denotes, in code de la route parlance, that whatever it was referring to was a temporary danger. That this, too, shall pass.

In praise of aunts

2009-03-20T12:00:00.006+01:00

E and G -- along with every other student their age in France -- have to do a stage d'entreprise, an internship in which they learn about a business or a profession. Every 13 year old in French school will spend a week going to work every day--in a stable, on a golf course, in a boulangerie, with a veterinarian--seeing what it's like and thinking about whether it's the kind of work they might like to do someday. Then each one will write a report (12 to 20 pages, illustrated).

It's a big deal. We've known it was in the offing for over a year. The other kids talk about it, and the teachers started talking about it in the fall. We wondered what to do. Our connections here fall into three categories: C's colleagues, our village friends who are nearly all retired, and our shopkeeper friends. Sending the girls to do an internship at C's office seemed uninspired, and asking Gilbert if one of them, at least, could come along to work at the boulangerie would mean waking up awfully early.

That's where the girls' Aunt A comes in to the story. I was talking to her one day about what we might do--thinking about sending them back to Washington for a week--and she listened. Then she called me back. What if we took the girls to London, to work with A's museum colleagues there for a week? They'd have a tour of the museum profession, see the other side of exhibition galleries, find out a little bit about the kind of work that A does and that I used to do. A would come along, of course, and we'd have a week together in London.

We said yes, please, and thank you. And we're going next week.

Now, here's the thing you need to know. A is not really their aunt. By which I mean, she's not my sister, or C's. But she's watched them and enjoyed them and cut out valentines with them and gone to movies with them--she's loved them--since they were small. Now she's drawn up a week long internship with her museumy friends, and is taking a week of vacation and flying across the ocean, to hang out with them and help them out. Aunt-like behavior if I've ever seen aunt-like behavior.

A few weeks ago I read this and it reminded me of all the women who've looked out for me--my family aunts, my extended family aunts, my aunty friends--and it made me think, too, of the girls' aunts--family, extended, and otherwise. The kindness and generosity of A and her consoeurs makes me catch my breath with gratitude. We are some lucky girls, E and G and I.

____________________________________________________________________

We'll be away, but I'll still be posting thanks to the miracle of writing ahead. À très bientôt!

The sill of the world

2009-03-18T08:11:00.005+01:00

The girls have passed a virus back and forth all winter. E had it earlier this week and stayed home from school. The main symptom is a low fever that goes away with some medicine--as long as the ibuprofen is working, the fever is gone, and she feels fine. Or not completely fine, but functional.

Of course I worry when either of the girls is sick. But I have to confess that having one of them home during the day is a side benefit. When I was working, when they were younger, rearranging my schedule to stay home with a sick child was stressful and frustrating. Now that they're older and sick less often, and I'm not working, I like the quiet hours we spend with the under the weather girl under a blanket in the big chair, reading, and me puttering, cooking, reading, coming in and out. I like the quiet time together.

Yesterday E stopped on her way through the kitchen to say that some of the kids in her class are exactly like the mean rich kids in books. The kids who make fun of the new girl, the main character, she said. In those books where the main character goes to a boarding school where she doesn't know anybody, and she's not like anybody else, and these rich kids pick on her. That's what the kids in my class are like.

She said it not with a sense of injustice. I don't think she's the one they're picking on. Being identical twins inoculates the girls to some degree--there are two of them; they look just alike: it gives bullies pause--and so, I think, does their American-ness (they're the only ones with two American parents, which makes them exotic). And then, they're fairly savvy socially: they can both read the dynamics and figure out where not to be standing.

So when E told me this it was in the manner of a social anthropologist reporting on field research. I've read about groups like these in novels, and now I'm seeing how they play out in life. She knows how the popular girls move, how they hold themselves differently. She knows how social power plays out: when the queen of the rich kids was called to the board and ridiculed by their math teacher, the class was silent. If it had been one of the unpopular girls, E explained, the class would have laughed.

The girls' class of the International Section at the Collège des vignes has about 30 students. The group she's talking about makes up around a third of that number. And she's right: they really are rich. Many of them come from families in which neither parent works, parents that moved here from England because it's easier not to work here, as one of them explained to me. The children have a different attitude toward school. They don't study much and have the grades to show for it. They bring their ipods and iphones and other bits of technology to school to show them off. They ignore their teachers. And their parents have a different attitude: most of these kids take the regional bus back and forth from the stop at the train station down the hill from the school. The bus leaves at 5, so the kids stand around outside the train station for anywhere from 15 minutes to 45. There's a grocery store cum newsstand cum betting parlor across the street, and the kids buy candy and sodas and stand around in clusters.

I see them when I pick up E and G, as I do every day. The girls are in miniskirts or tight jeans and expensive boots, their hair blown straight, eyes heavily outlined in makeup. The boys have gelled their hair straight up, or else wear it hanging down in their eyes; their bluejeans are slung so low they defy gravity. The North Africans who live in the neighborhood steer around them, the women in their headscarves pushing strollers with a toddler holding on to their skirts, the men with their dogs, sitting on the low wall by the bus stop. And I pick up E and G, the three of us acting out our own suburban American ritual, just as out of place in this French market town as the dissipated aristocrats in training and the immigrants. Which means, maybe, that none of us is out of place. If no one belongs, then everyone does.

This started out, though, about E, and her talking about her class. She is taking it all in, watching, observing, weighing. She knows where she stands in the pecking order, and she's begun to speculate on how her sister's and her departure will effect the social strata in the class next year. And I'm sure, too, though she hasn't mentioned it, that she's wondering what the social order will look like next year, in her American school. I wish her a lucky passage.

La vieille gloire

2009-03-16T14:21:00.002+01:00

The local collège had its annual vide grenier this weekend, and Sunday morning C and I walked through it. It means an empty attic: a vide grenier is when you try to sell the stuff that wound up in your attic to someone else, for their attic. In other words, a garage sale. I have never been a garage-sale goer in the States--and I distinguish, here, between a flea market, which features people who deal in particular types of salt and pepper shakers and so forth, and a garage sale, which features card tables on a suburban lawn.

Here, vides greniers are never individual concerns but rather community productions, held on the village boules court or in the school yard or the communal parking. There's usually a mix of stands set up by local folks selling their no longer needed baby gear and children's books and then those set up by professional grenieristes, to coin a term. The grenieristes seem to travel from village to village with their wares, the poor and somewhat shady cousins of the brocantistes who set up in the marchés d'antiquités and brocantes that make the tour books.

Business was brisk at the collège when we got there Sunday morning. Cars were parked on the main road and a steady stream of people were walking up the hill to the school parking lot where the tables were set up. We were--I was, really--in the market for a ceramic water jug manufactured by a pastis company. Which is not as arcane or uncommon as it sounds: every bar in the south of France sells liters and liters of pastis. There are various brands: Ricard, Pernod, Pastis 51 are the most common. Pastis drinkers have favorite brands; you'll drink your pastis out of a glass with that brand's name on it. And you'll cut it with water, unless you have solid steel insides. You'll pour the water from a pitcher that is sitting on the bar, and that pitcher will, just like your glass, have the name of a pastis maker on it. And that's what I'm looking for. Not because I like pastis--can't stand the stuff--but because I like the idea of filling that jug with water and setting it on our table.

We didn't find it today. We did find a handful of fèves. One dealer there was a specialist in fèves, the favor that is hidden inside of the galette des rois that everyone shares during Epiphany. She had baskets and bowls of the tiny porcelain figures, 50 centimes each. The fèves used to be characters from the nativity story but, in this last days, they're more likely to be characters from kid movies. As of Sunday, we own six Harry Potter fèves: Harry, Hermione, Ron, Hagrid, Hedwig the owl, and--I was really tickled about this one--a very small, very purple Night Bus.

While I was trading three euros for six fèves, C walked away to reconsider his marriage vows. I caught up and we made the circuit of the vide grenier looking for my water pitcher. There was a second-hand shoe stand; a specialist in perfume bottles; someone selling the 1993 questions de l'année edition of Trivial Pursuit; and Madame Marie, from Pizza Pierre, looking for buyers for baby clothes. Also a table lamp whose base was a model of a passenger liner in the act of splitting apart on an iceberg. I said it was the Titanic; C said the scale was all wrong. He demands verisimilitude in his shipwreck lamps.

We were coming down the last aisle of odds and ends when a familiar pattern caught our eye. At the edge of a table crowded with old clocks and mysterious kitchen tools was a folded up bit of fabric. All we could see was white stars on a navy ground. I picked it up and turned it over: red and white stripes. I set it down again and turned away.

An American flag, here, in the village? What a strange thing, we thought.

It was all cotton, I said. Usually they're nylon.

We walked past another stand. This one had books. Maigret, Tintin, a couple of guides to good health through herbs, and Les Rèves de mon père in hardcover.

If we were going to fly the flag, I said, that would be a flag with a story.

We stopped.

How much do you think? said C. Five euros?

Ten, I said.

He went back. I hovered.

In a minute he was back. Five, he said.

I slipped it into my purse, next to the Harry Potter figurines.

Parking Annoying

2009-03-13T15:39:00.004+01:00

When I came back to the car after meeting friends for lunch in another village the other day, there was a notice under the windshield wipers. Stationnement Interdit et Genant, it read, in capital letters. But not today, it hastened to explain: on the coming weekend, during the annual village fête.

No Parking is the dictionary translation of both stationnement interdit and stationnement genant. You see both versions of the sign, and they mean the same thing.

Except they don't, really.

If something is interdit, it is forbidden by law. It is interdit to smoke in the épicerie. Interdit to throw trash out of the car. Interdit to stop on the autoroute (unless you are having car trouble, in which case you can stop, but only in certain areas).

Genant, however, means annoying. The girls' profs at the Collège des vignes are fond of telling the kids how genant they are. Mothers at the end of their rope in the cereal aisle tell their toddlers that they are genant. The guy in the car in front of you who's had his turn signal on for the last kilometer, and slows down to 20 kilometers per hour at each driveway: he's genant.

No parking signs are about equally divided, in my highly unscientific poll, between interdit and genant. So my conclusion is that to be annoying is just as méchant as to do something which is forbidden. They're both illegal and could get you anything from a fine to a trip to the impound lot (though I've never seen an illegally parked car ticketed, and I've seen a lot of illegally parked cars). They appeal to different parts of the psyche. Maybe you don't care so much about ignoring the law (stationnement interdit), but surely you don't want to annoy the boulanger (stationnement genant). An annoyed boulanger, with a car parked where he likes to take the sun between customers, might sell you yesterday's croissants, or an over baked baguette.

It is--and bear with me here--another example of the French habit of thinking about the community, and the good of the community, more than of the individual. Annoying parking is different from forbidden parking. Forbidden parking doesn't require an object. It's just forbidden. Annoying parking asks the question, who is annoyed? And that question implies other people. It implies community.

So if you go to the fête des violettes this weekend, don't leave your car in the village parking. Not only will it be forbidden and get you in trouble with the law. It will also be really annoying to the folks who live there.

Repas à l'école

2009-03-11T08:54:00.004+01:00

E tells us that, next year, she's going to pack her sister's and her lunch for school every day. She'll make roast chicken sandwiches with lettuce, tomato (when it's in season, she points out), cheese, and mayonnaise (she likes mayo). She's a little concerned about the bread. She knows we won't be able to get baguettes every day, and she's not a big fan of regular sandwich bread. I think she's still mulling over that part of the equation.

We haven't had the school lunch conversation while we've been here because lunch is part of the deal at the Collège des vignes. We pay an additional fee--it averages out to a few euros per girl per day--and they eat lunch in the school canteen.

Here's what that looks like:

There's a guy in a toque (and he's not being cute; he's a chef, and that hat is his uniform, it's how you know he's the one in charge), some sous-chefs, a kitchen (stoves, ovens, sinks, prep counters, pots and pans and heat), and a cafeteria line. The kids line up with their trays. They take an entrée, a plat, and a dessert. The first course, the entrée, could be some grated carrots with vinaigrette, or it could be a boiled egg with a little mayonnaise, or some sliced beets, pâté, or a green salad. The main course, the plat, ranges from spaghetti bolognaise to boeuf bourguignon to couscous, which is not just the grain but a thick meat and vegetable stew. Dessert? They can have a piece of fruit (kiwis are popular) or a yogurt or, once in a while, a beignet. Of course there's also sliced baguette for everyone, and cheese. The food is all prepared on site. Everyone drinks water.

As far as I can determine, it is a Styrofoam-free environment. The meals are served on plates made out of something like Corelle; the kids eat with real cutlery, and drink out of heavy plastic cups. The only thing disposable is the paper napkins.

The children sit at round tables, eight or so at each, and serve each other from the water pitcher in the center. A surveillant or two keeps order--these are junior high school kids with pitchers of water: the possibilities of chaos are pretty high.

Morning classes end at noon. Afternoon classes begin at 1.30. The entire school cycles through the canteen during that hour and a half--about 700 students--eating in half-hour relays. Before and after they eat, the kids are outside in the courtyard, playing games, doing homework, fiddling with their cell phones.

We spent kindergarten through sixth grade packing lunches almost every night for school the next day: peanut butter and jelly, or mini-bagels with cream cheese, or egg salad on challah. Baby carrots or cucumber slices. Raisins or fruit cup. Occasionally a couple of Newman-Os. A day or so a week the girls bought lunch: Chips Olé, which I'm fairly sure is trademarked by Exxon, or pizza. It was a treat for us not to have to pack lunch, but thinking about the girls eating something that had been prepared in an industrial kitchen god knows where, shipped frozen to the school, microwaved, and plopped onto a Styrofoam tray--that really about outweighed the extra ten minutes on the sofa that not packing lunch bought us. Every day they bought cartons of milk to drink: plain or chocolate or strawberry.

At the girls' elementary school, the kids had about 20 minutes to eat, followed by 15 minutes on the blacktop.

So we've relished not packing lunch for these two years and hearing from the girls that they prefer paella with shrimp to pork, that the lamb in the couscous was pretty good today, and that the kiwis weren't quite ripe enough today but should be good by Friday.

And need I mention that I've never seen a pudgy kid at the Collège des vignes? Which is of course not just about the school lunches--but it's not not about the school lunches, either.

I read this a few weeks ago, and that's what precipitated the conversation that led to E planning the chicken sandwiches. Their high school--they'll be in high school next year--has an open lunch policy, which means that the students, beginning in their second year and depending on various factors, can eat lunch off campus. What's the nearest restaurant they can walk to?

McDonald's.

If you need me, I'll be in the kitchen putting a chicken in the oven.

À peu près

2009-03-09T12:47:00.004+01:00

We drove up to the mountains late last Saturday afternoon. From La Bastiole (50 degrees) to Valberg (30 degrees) it took just under two hours, the first hour on the autoroute, the second up an increasingly narrow road through a canyon whose rocks hung with car-sized icicles. It was the middle Sunday of our region's vacances de ski, and we were prepared for ski traffic, families going up, like us, for a few days' skiing.

There was none. Unless you count the five cars that we passed waiting to turn left onto the road at the bottom of the gorges.

After we had unloaded the car at the apartment and bundled up, we walked down the hill to the local pizzeria. We should have made a reservation, C said. It's going to be packed. Saturday night, middle of the vacation, and it's the only restaurant in the village. What are we going to do when it's full?

I guess we're going to walk back up the hill and drive someplace else, I said.

It's going to be a long walk. We should have called.

We got to the Sapin Blanc at 7.15. There were two cars in the parking lot. When we walked up the steps to the door, the owner put his head out and said they didn't open til 7.30.

Could we make a-- C said as the door closed.

I should have called before, he said. Dejectedly.

I looked around at the empty car park, across the snowy field towards the cross-country ski hut and the village houses perched above it. There were no car headlights anywhere, no lights to detract from the one house that had strung itself with flashing Christmas lights.

I think it's going to be okay, I said.

At 7.30 we went in. Wherever you want to sit, said the owner. Choisissez-vous.

We chose a table by the window. We ordered. A little while later, another family came in. Then a couple. Then two families together, with a sulky teenager.

The next morning C and the girls were up early--for us--and left for the ski lift a little before nine. It's going to be busy, said C, and we have to get our lift tickets and look at the map and figure everything out.

I went off to buy provisions and rent raquettes--the only place I waited was in the boulangerie, where everything I bought was still warm--and met up with the skiers again at noon.

Was it crowded? I asked.

The girls answered. There are no lines anywhere, Mommy, they said. We never waited at all and there's hardly anyone on the slopes.

I looked at C and he shook his head. I don't know where all the people are, he said.

We are city people. We expect to wait in line, to need reservations. We used routinely to buy our Saturday night movie tickets online Saturday morning, or even Friday night. Even, truth be told, Thursday. And our parents before us expected to wait, and taught us, early and well, to make reservations. Figure out where we're going to leave the car. We're genetically and environmentally disposed, because of all that training, to be early. In my family, we allowed at least fifteen minutes to get anywhere, and likely more. If we were early, then we'd just park down the block and wait til it was the stroke of on time to appear. C's family leaves early, too: look around any grandchildren-centered event, and, at least 20 minutes before it's due to begin, you'll find a couple ambling about outside, reading the notice board and checking out the third grade's Lewis and Clark posters.

My own small act of rebellion is to be late. Not late, late--that will be for my descendants--just five or, maybe, ten minutes. (Truly radical. I know. My mother wonders where she went wrong.) I don't like being early, sitting in the car, standing around. What that means is that I wait til the last possible moment to get ready to go somewhere and then, because I'm rushed, forget something and have to go back in the house. This can be, on occasion, a point of marital stress. But at least I don't have to wait when I get there.

The French have an expression: à peu près. It denotes approximation. More or lessness. If you arrange to meet for coffee à peu près 10.00, then one of you might come at 9.45 and the other at 10.15, but it won't matter: you'll wait inside with your café crème and your paper and, if you finish the café crème, maybe you'll run up the street for a few groceries and then come back. And have another coffee with your friend.

And you can do that--you can be à peu près--because this is the country. What happens in Paris I don't know. But here, in our corner of the world, there just aren't that many people. You don't need a reservation, and, when the ski lift opens at 9.00, the line will not have formed. In fact, the only people around will be the lift operator and his dog. If there's a line at the bakery at 10.00, well then, that's because everyone knows that that's when the second batch of the day comes out of the oven. But if you miss that, it's okay, because at noon there'll be the third batch coming out. You can go up the street and have a coffee while you wait.

We're learning--slowly--to relax. That we don't need to call ahead and that there will be plenty of parking, some of it even legal. But it goes against our grain, and I'm afraid that by the time we begin to organize our lives around the à peu près principle, we'll be back on the East Coast and find ourselves forgetting that we needed dinner reservations only to arrive late to a sold-out movie.

Maybe we'll move to Montana.

Finding Provence

2009-03-06T14:45:00.004+01:00

While we were in the Lubéron last week we went on an expedition to find the house Peter Mayle lived in when he wrote A Year in Provence. He's moved house since then, which made me feel marginally less like a stalker and more like a curious pilgrim--curious in both senses. Looking for Mayle's house would, I reasoned, give us a reason for a walk. (A walk is more satisfying if there's a mission involved, even if it's just mailing a letter.) It would take us to a village. (Always good to see another village.) And looking for the house would perhaps give us a sense of place, of what it is like to take a walk in the Lubéron, what it feels like to look out over vineyards and limestone and fallow fields. And this particular walk would, as an added perk, provide a mystery: which mas was the Mayles'?--and, if we were lucky, a solution: this one.

G and I went through our copy of A Year in Provence and made careful notes. The house was on a country road between Ménerbes and Bonnieux. It stood at the end of a dirt track that led through grape vines and cherry trees, with the Lubéron parc régional behind it. It was, in the oldest part, two centuries old. There were established shade trees near the house, as well as a stand of cypresses, a few amandiers, and a hedge of rosemary. The house had three wells.

It was ten miles or thereabouts from the house to Bonnieux, which meant that the house stood closer to Ménerbes. We started the research drive in Bonnieux. We'd make the drive, we thought, and then, once we'd scouted, go back on foot. We drove to the top of the village and found, after only one spell of turning around on a narrow road with a hilltop's height drop on one side and a medieval fortification on the other, the road that led to Ménerbes. Off we went, winding along the crest of the hill, the valley on our right and the Lubéron range on our left. About ten miles out of the village we started slowing down for every farmhouse on the left and reviewing our list.

Every mas matched.

They all stood at the end of a dirt track. They all had vineyards and cherry orchards. Rosemary hedges. Cypress trees. Hard to tell about the wells, of course, but every one had its fair share of outbuildings. Which is not to say that they were all the same; they weren't. Some sat closer to the road, some farther back. Some had the shade trees in front, some around to the side. Sometimes the cherry orchard took up the entire frontage; sometimes it was just a few cerisiers. But a provençal mas is like a Gothic cathedral, or a Shakespearean sonnet: unless you know a lot about what you're looking at, they all look pretty much the same.

We retreated to the hotel and to our book. On a closer reading we found a passage where Mayle had written that it was a two kilometer walk to Ménerbes along the trail at the back of the house. Et voilà. Now we had only to find the trail to the village and work from there.

The next morning we put together a picnic and went in search of the trail. The Lubéron, being a national park, is crisscrossed with trails that lead to villages and ruins and outcroppings and, some of them, to nothing at all. We found the trail that ran along the base of the mountain in the direction of Ménerbes and set off down it. But, an hour later, we hadn't found Ménerbes. Then, when we finally found Ménerbes--using the Sierra Club-recommended method of there's a village over there that might be it, and if we follow this dirt road maybe we'll get to it; of course we hadn't remembered a map--we lost the trail. We stood on the village's ramparts with our binoculars and tried to read road signs several kilometers away.

Eventually we walked back along the road in the direction that we thought the car might be in. It was not shaping up to be one of our more successful expeditions. We'd lost our way and walked a kilometer or so uphill through a forest, only to have to turn around and walk back down, never good for morale. We had had to walk on the road at more than one point--and while walking on a country road in Provence is hardly a hardship, we prefer the unpaved. We'd picnicked on a bench in the village, looking out over the vineyards and the Lubéron and trying to figure out exactly where we were in relation to the car, never mind in relation to Peter Mayle's house. And so when, a kilometer or so outside of Ménerbes and an hour later in the day than we had planned to be, we found an old sunken unpaved road leading off through the vineyards towards the mountains, we got out the binoculars before we veered off.

What we could see through those was, we were fairly certain, the trail on which we had begun, the trail we had thought would lead us to Ménerbes, which had led us instead up into the forest until we turned around and started finding our way by sight instead of logic. We took the turn. An orchard on one side, vines on the other, and when the road stopped, we were at the trail where we had started in the morning. And on the trail was a signpost pointing the way to Ménerbes along the route we had just come. 1.8 kilometers, it said. We'd missed it before, seasoned hikers that we are. We retraced our steps to the car and dropped the pack. Let's just look, I said. Just a few meters, it won't make us that much later, let's just see.

Back a little further along the trail from the dead end where we'd left the car, and there was a house with a pool at the back of the property and, between house and pool, a large enclosed courtyard. It was this one, the house. We had found it.

It was an awkward feeling, finding the house. We felt somewhere between literary pilgrims and stalkers. We were consoled by the fact that the Mayles have long since moved to another mas outside another village and so, while we were certainly taking surreptitious photos of someone's house, we weren't taking pictures of someone in particular. We weren't snooping on the house's residents but on the house. It was just a house, the way that any house is just a house, but also the way that the Bronte parsonage, or Carl Sandburg's Connemara, are just houses. A place that you knew in your imagination and never knew if you'd see. It was a goal, a destination, and we had--a half day's walk up and down hill and road, through pastures, and across vineyards and a village--reached it, a hundred meters or so from where we had begun.

Why do we go on pilgrimages? The pilgrims who crossed the Lubéron valley hundreds of years ago were on their way to the shrine of Saint James at Compostello. If they could get there, they believed, they could get that much closer to salvation, or to health, or, maybe, to hope. We weren't looking to save our souls. But instead, maybe, to feed them. To show our souls that the imagined can be made real, the word made flesh or, in this case, stone and vine and tree and path. To show our souls that we can, if not dwell in the imagination, well, we can take a walk alongside it. We can sit on a bench in the sun with our sandwiches, and look down at the vines growing in their orderly rows, vineyards stretching as far as we could see across the valley, and, as Saint James' brother put it, receive from the fullness of it all grace upon grace. It was a good walk.

Not easy being green

2009-03-02T09:33:00.002+01:00

Whenever we go somewhere, we look for an Asian restaurant. There's one place we can get Chinese-esque food nearby--twenty minutes away on twisty roads--and it is the all-too-usual French variation on a Chinese restaurant. Platters of food are arranged behind a glass counter, dumplings, wontons, spring rolls at one end; main courses in the middle; desserts nearest the caisse. You point and say how many portions of the poulet au curry or porc au gingembre you would like, the counter guy scoops it into a plastic box that he then heat-seals using the little machine on the back counter, and off you go. For the four of us to have dinner from our local Asian Palace it runs about 60 euros. And by the time we get it home, it has congealed.

We ate a lot of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai food in America. Chinese restaurants were our travel standby when the girls were younger: we knew that we could always find some stir-fried vegetables that they would eat, and some chicken, and there was the added interest of the restaurant's interior design. We are particular fans of the photograph of the waterfall that, when lit from behind, appears to be flowing. The food wasn't always particularly good--you try finding a good restaurant off of I-95 in Virginia--but it was interesting and gave us something to talk about.

Good Asian food: certainly on my list of things to look forward to about moving back to America. I remember a dish of scallops that I ate at a Chinese restaurant in Portland, Oregon, in 2002: spicy, garlicky, a hint of sweetness. Then there's the walnut shrimp we used to get at the fancy Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto, the shrimp lightly battered and fried, a white sauce that you barely noticed, candied walnuts. And the dumplings from our everyday Chinese place, and the sizzling rice soup. Then there's the dish of cellophane noodles with crab meat at The Slanted Door, in San Francisco. Words fail me.

When we travel here in the land of seasonal local eating, we are always on the lookout for an Asian restaurant. We found one that was not bad in Maintenon, in the Loire, last August. It sat across the place from the château gates, sandwiched between a brasserie that served beautiful salades composées (we walked by several people eating them on our way into Au Royal Maintenon) and the village Bar / Tabac. There's a sushi place near where L lived in Paris that did California rolls that served as a pleasant reminder of what a California roll tasted like. Last Saturday, walking down Cavaillon's main street, we passed a Vietnamese restaurant. C and I gravitated towards it, but the girls had already spotted a boulangerie next door that offered lunches. On closer examination, it turned out to be the boulangerie that Peter Mayle called the best bakery in the Lubéron. So we ate there: roasted chicken, homemade mayonnaise, tiny purple lettuce leaves on fresh baguettes for G and E; mesclun salad with tuna, olives, tomatoes and a light mustardy vinaigrette for us. The baker himself came out and talked to us for a while. It was an excellent lunch that could only have been improved by a plate of steamed dumplings.

The Relais was outside of Apt, which is a large market town. Aha, we thought: perhaps there will be an Asian restaurant. We dropped the girls at the hotel after a day of hiking and went to scout. It was Sunday evening, a risky time to look for a restaurant in France. Everyone who was going to eat out has already eaten out at noontime, and nearly every restaurant that was going to open on Sunday has already opened at noontime, and the proprietors are now at home, enjoying their Sunday evening, maybe thawing out some frozen pieds et paquets in the microwave.

We parked on the main street in Apt. One of our guidebooks listed, but did not describe, an establishment called Le Restaurant de l'Ho. Sounds vaguely Asian, no? At least, not terribly French? So off we walked to find it. It turned out to be across the street from--what we learned for certain the next day, and suspected at the time--a crime scene. Gendarmes were interviewing neighbors and red and white tape blocked off a portion of the pavement. Men with white paper suits over their street clothes were going inside the house. Tragedy may have struck en face, but we were busy looking at the menu of the Restaurant de l'Ho which turned out to be a. closed and b. regular French. We turned down a pedestrian street (all shutterd storefronts, just us and a cat or two) and, a block or so away, saw a sign that was unmistakably Asian in aspect. We quickened our steps and examined the doorway: it was Asian, and it would open for dinner in an hour. We looked at the menu posted beside the door.

There were all the standard starters: soups, dumplings, spring rolls. Then a small poultry section. A small fish section. A small beef section. But the largest portion of the menu, the delicacy that was clearly closest to the chef's heart, was the section devoted to grenouilles. Each item was helpfully translated into English. You could choose between beignets de grenouille (frog fritter); grenouilles au curry (frog curry); grenouille au gingembre (frog with ginger); grenouille au citron et à l'ail (Lemon and garlic fried frog); and, last but not least appetizing, grenouille à la sauce aigre douce (frog with sweet and sour sauce).

Now. If my friend Marie-Claire invited me for dinner, and she put a platter of grenouilles on the table, even grenouilles fritters, I like to think that I would tuck in with an open mind and plenty of baguette and red wine. However. It seemed to us, standing on the deserted street a few blocks from where a murder had been committed earlier in the day, looking in the window at the saggy houseplants that were the dining room's chief decoration, that Kermit should wait.

We retreated to the hill town of Bonnieux, where we found an open brasserie: cuisine traditionelle à base de produits frais régionaux, said the menu. Traditional dishes from fresh local food. The bartender promised us that he would stay open long enough to give us dinner. We collected the girls, and then we sat in front of the fireplace and ate vegetable soup and steack frites. A meal that, I like to think, could only have been improved by a few cellophane noodles.

___________________________________________________________________

I'll be away on Wednesday. Still the school vacances, and we're going up to the mountains for a few days. See you on Friday.

Brocante

2009-02-27T09:23:00.003+01:00

Sunday morning we went to the brocante in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Brocante translates directly as a flea market--but it's a flea market the way that a shop that sells last year's couture with the tags cut out is a second-hand store. And the Sunday brocante in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is the Platonic ideal of the type. Stands line the sidewalk between the village's main road and its canal for blocks, and when the road reaches the obligatory place and monument aux morts, the line of stands divides and multiplies, encircling the monument and place and then heading deeper into the village. Every stand is different, every dealer with his own specialty.

I've long been a denizen of antique markets and flea markets and antique flea markets in America, and have the odds and ends to prove it. The odd porcelain platter that matches my grandparents' wedding china. Small framed prints of a hot-air balloon in flight. A large rooster made out of old scrap iron. I love sorting through old stuff, the smell and feel of it, and, in America, I love the moment of connection when I find something that reminds me of a house I knew or a relative, or a novel.

In France, of course, I don't often have that moment of connection. What a French brocante lets me do, instead, is peek inside another world, another past. Kitchen tools whose function I cannot guess. Old boules, each with its own pattern of markings, so that the old man who used it would recognize it by feel even when the dusk had fallen so that all the boules looked alike. Sets of silver: to judge from most brocantes I've been to, there was a time in France when all households needed a set of silver or silver-plate fish forks and knives. And, also judging from the population of those fish services on brocante dealers' tables, that time has passed. Souvenir plates from Lourdes. Altar pieces and chipped statues of the saints. (Wouldn't a Saint Catherine look nice in the front yard beside my rusty rooster? I say to C. Are you kidding? he says, in a tone that makes it clear that he knows I'm not, and that he isn't, either.)

At Sunday's brocante, we parked in the first space we came to, put on all of our outer layers, and began the walk along the stalls. It was cold. Four degrees Celsius, 39 Fahrenheit, but the wind was blowing. The famous mistral that begins somewhere in Siberia and is going along at a pretty good clip by the time it gets to Provence, a wind that finds any chink in your clothing and seeps inside. We walked into it for a block or two and then, thinking to outsmart it and put it at our backs, we crossed the canal and walked in the opposite direction. It was still in our faces and blowing just as hard.

If it hadn't been for the wind, we could easily have furnished our imaginary mas in the Lubéron. Plates, cutlery, linens (linen linens, with lace edging), mirrors, chandeliers, candlesticks, kitchen scales, glassware (crystal, everyday, and several complete sets of pastis glasses marked with brand names), rugs, sofas, chairs, tables, garden furniture: a whole life, ready to be loaded up on a truck and carted off down a windy road to a stone farmhouse, where we would tend our vines and sit under the beech tree in the courtyard eating cherries from our trees, salad from our garden, bread from the village baker, and fresh chèvre from the farm down the lane.

But there was wind, and it was cold, and time for lunch. We bought a tiny set of silver tongs--E and G chose the ones with the more moderne design instead of the fancy claw-shaped ones--and went to find a café.

Boundaries

2009-02-25T13:56:00.004+01:00

We stayed at the Relais de Roquefure--and let me interrupt myself to say how much I love staying in small family-run hotels. There are probably thousands of them in France, in old town houses, châteaux, farmhouses, stables, a lot of them in old inns that have always been inns. The rooms, at least in the ones we can afford, tend to be small and the bathrooms smaller, but they are clean and comfortable and come with a sense of place and of individuality. The person who greets you when you arrive is not waiting for her shift to end; it's her hotel. She lives in the other wing. And these hotels are not precious, either, at least I've not come across one that is: that self-conscious homeyness of cheap antiques, pink wallpaper and dishes of potpourri that afflicts many small non-chain American hotels. These hotels are, I guess we would say, old-fashioned family hotels. In the best sense of the word.

And the Relais de Roquefure was a fine example of the genre. The building is a 200 year old bastide, a three-story main section bolstered by assorted connected former farm buildings, set on a few acres of land at the end of a country road that is part of one of the medieval Saint Jacques de Compostello pilgrimage routes. The innkeepers were a young couple expecting their first child. February is deep in the off season in the Lubéron, and so we were among the only guests.

As is often the case with hotels like this one, dinner was offered in the hotel's dining room. The husband in the couple was also the hotel chef. Our first two nights at the Relais we elected to eat elsewhere, partly because the chef offered only a menu. Which means, translated, not a menu in the American senses but rather a set dinner. To put it bluntly: no choices. First course, second course, cheese or dessert. Everyone got the same thing, and what they got was what the chef found at the market that day.

All very romantic and slow food and charming until the first time you sit down to dinner and find pieds et paquets on your plate. Pieds et paquets, for the uninitiated, is a popular Provençal stew composed of stuffed bits of sheep or cow stomach (the paquets, packets) simmered with blanched sheep's pieds, feet.

You know how much I love France. And French food. But that's my boundary.

I've never actually had the experience of pushing blanched pied du mouton around on my plate, and I hope not to. And that is why we put off dinner at the Relais until our final evening there. We wanted to have dinner in the large paneled dining room with windows overlooking the garden, we really did; we like nothing better than the idea of going down to dinner in the hotel. But what were we going to do if the main course turned out to be beyond our boundaries or, worse, beyond E and G's boundaries? They are adventurous eaters, but there are limits to any 13 year old palate, and we did not want to test them.

So Monday afternoon when we returned from our hike and bumped into the chef in the front hall, we reserved for dinner, feeling very brave indeed. Part of the experience, we said. We didn't mention our concern that dinner might be a long way from roast chicken to the girls. We didn't want to worry them or give them time to draw up a list of acceptable foods. We didn't want to give up the element of surprise.

Dinner was at 8. We took up our station in the dining room; the only other diner was the only other hotel guest, a Belgian woman who sat across the room from us with her book. The chef came out. Tonight's dinner: a salad with melted rounds of chèvre served on toasts; magret de canard with vegetables; a fruit gratin. The chef gave us a plate of thin baguette slices covered in homemade tapenade and went back to the kitchen. Our work began.

Magret de canard is duck breast. You know, ducks, those cute little birds that we were watching on the river this afternoon.

It tastes like dark meat chicken, and you like that, I said.

It's a lot like beef, C said.

Think how cool it would be to tell you friends in America about the time you ate duck breast at a country inn in Provence, I said.

The girls were unconvinced. Remember, cute little feathery creatures. Quack, quack.

We all enjoyed the salad with cheese. Then C and I went back on duty.

Just try it, is all. Just take a couple of bites, C said.

Don't think about what it is, I said. Just try it.

And then the plates arrived. A fan of sliced duck breast enclosing ratatouille and a roasted potato covered in a creamy mint and truffle sauce.

It tastes like beef, C said. Think of it as beef.

Just try it, I said.

The girls each took a bite. They chewed.

G was the first to swallow. It tastes like beef, she said with a twinkle, but better.

They both finished their portions. It was a success.

G had only one caveat. I still don't like foie gras, she said.

Duly noted.

Once upon a time in Provence

2009-02-20T10:10:00.007+01:00

Vous connaissez les livres de Peter Mayle? I was walking with Olivier up the terraces to see Jules. He thought for a moment, frowning, then (probably having translated my American pronunciation into French), nodded. Jules est comme un personnage dans ses livres. Jules is like a character out of Peter Mayle's books.

Olivier chuckled. Exactement. C'est ça.

Peter Mayle's books on Provence have been among our chief references for the region and its culture; for conveying an outsider's sense of wonder and delight A Year in Provence, Toujours Provence, and their confrères stand alone. G and E read the books when we first came, and have reread them since many times.

Mayle's characters are stock figures in our family stories. A few weeks ago, we took a day trip for C's birthday. We visited a couple of châteaux--wine making châteaux, not historic châteaux--in the morning (nothing like tasting a half dozen côtes de Provence to wake you up) and then, around noon, pulled into the village of Lorgues for lunch. As we got out of the car, G said: I hope we see some of those old Provençal men who spend all day playing boules and drinking pastis. Those guys are, of course, Mayleian standbys: the men of a certain uncertain age, between 50 and 90, pacing off the distance between the boules on the court across from the café.

And just as our steacks frites arrived at our table in the Hôtel du Parc, the men G had been talking about shuffled in. There were two of them, one short and stout, the other tall and ropey, missing their share of teeth, garbed in layers of flannel and wool and berets and sturdy boots, and they knew everyone in the place. We all looked at each other. There they are, she said.

We're not above using A Year in Provence as our travel guide. Last year, during one of the school vacances, the girls and I spent a night in Aix en Provence, and ate our dinner at the café Les Deux Garçons. Peter Mayle describes it thus:

The ceiling is high, and toasted to a caramel color by the smoke from a million cigarettes. The bar is burnished copper, the tables and chairs gleam with the patina bestowed by countless bottoms and elbows, and the waiters have aprons and flat feet, as all proper waiters should.

He doesn't mention the gilded mirrors that line the walls, or the leather banquettes, or the chandeliers whose soft light make everyone look like Audrey Tautou. We ordered drinks--a glass of red wine for me, Orangina and a Coca for the girls--and when the waiter (tall; black vest over white shirt; white floor-length apron over black pants; the tip of the third finger on his left hand missing, no doubt from a misadventure when he was in the Resistance during the War) brought the drinks, he picked up the bottle of Coca in his right hand. He put it over his shoulder and, in one movement, opened it with the bottle opener he had concealed in his palm, brought it back down, and poured it into its glass.

We would not have been any more starstruck if he had made a dove fly out of the bottle. It is now the standard by which all other restaurant tricks are measured. A waiter could balance a silver tray bearing an entire flaming roast turkey on one hand and we would cock our heads, consider it, and decide, upon reflection, that while it was no doubt difficult and quite clever, it was not, on the whole, as remarkable as that time the waiter at the Deux Garçons opened the bottle of Coke.

It's time for another vacances--they've been going to school steadily for seven weeks now, after all--and tomorrow morning we're off to Peter Mayle country. We'll be going to markets and visiting abbeys and hiking and eating and looking for old men playing boules and waiters who can do tricks. I doubt that we'll find anyone who surpasses our friend in Aix, but, after all, the pleasure is in the research as much as the discovery. We will be Internet-free for a few days, so, dear readers, I'll look for some good stories to tell you. And I'll see you back here next Wednesday.