Bravo

Today is the last day of school. I'll collect the girls and one of their friends from school at noon, and summer will be upon us. I've not had much to say about the Collège des Vignes, not because it hasn't been a central part of our lives, but because it's more E and G's business than it is mine. Or, to try to put it better, school has been, pour la plupart, the girls' experience, and writing about it and them has felt like an intrusion on their privacy. It's difficult enough to be 12 without your mother writing about you.

But this particular collège story is not so much about them as it is about what it's like to be their parents. C and I both carry a long string of academic accomplishments behind us, beginning with C's star turn as the Tin Man in primary school and ending with a couple of doctorates from a university that thinks pretty highly of itself. At the girls' previous school there were plenty of parents who shared our malady and we watched as they breathed down the necks of their grade-conscious sixth graders. Not us, we thought (probably a little smugly). School was an exercise in socialization more than in academics; the girls' grades were not something we followed too closely. Better they should learn to be kind and generous than that they compete overmuch with their friends on multiple-choice tests. Of course the fact that both G and E routinely brought home nearly straight A's made our laissez-faire attitude quite a bit easier.

Our hopes for the girls at the Collège des Vignes were that they not be too unhappy and that their French would progress; a friend or two would also be nice, but we did not want to tempt fate by asking too much. We resolved not to fret about grades. Over and over last summer we said: it will be hard. You will not be the best students, and that will be okay with us. It will get easier over time. Eventually the girls began to roll their eyes when we rolled out that speech. No kidding it was going to be hard.

So off they went to school, and the first weekend they were invited over to another girl's house for swimming. (Nearly everyone has a pool; it's the equivalent of air conditioning.) The weekend after, a sleepover with another new copine. Academics were tough, and we made some emergency runs to the bookstore to buy pochettes and encres, and there were some tears--on everyone's part. We were all of us disoriented. There's nothing quite like going from knowing all the ins and outs of an academic system to not being able to buy school supplies without help from the shop assistant.

By the end of the second term, the girls' grades had begun to take on a pattern. The grading system is different here. It's a 20 point scale, but the 20 point scale doesn't correlate directly to the American 100 point scale. Almost no one ever gets a 20. In fact, a 17 is considered remarkable. Anything over a 10 is not bad. So when the girls began to bring home 12s and 14s, we thought, well, they're getting the hang of it. The occasional 17 would show up and we would think: good, okay, that seems about right. Now what about that 14? Which is not to say--at least, I hope it's not to say--that we didn't praise the 14s adequately. I hope we did; I think we did.

A week or so ago the girls came home with their final report card, or bulletin. (Yes, we got their final grades a week before school was out, but the teachers continued to assign homework until yesterday. And the girls continued to do their homework.) C and I studied it--more 14s, a 17, a 15 or two, the odd 11.3--and after supper went for a walk. As we talked about the year, we realized that we had no idea how the girls were doing. In their class, there are 31 children--a lot, I know, but normal here--and we had no sense, aucune, of how the girls were doing in relationship to their classmates. Were there kids who had straight 17s? Did we need to worry about the 11.3? It was hard to hear each other speak because the academic baggage we were trailing behind us made such a racket.

The next morning I made an appointment with Miss Clavell, directrice of the International Section, and Mme Dupin, the girls' prof principal. When I went to school for the meeting it was hot, outside and in--no air conditioning and no pool--and the three of us clustered around the fan in Miss Clavell's office, pulling our skirts up above our knees to try to catch the breeze.

The teachers took out E and G's annotated bulletins, which we'll receive in the mail in a week or two. A few times a year the teachers meet and review each child's progress. They decide on the class rankings, based on each student's number grades, and write a note to the parents on the student's progress. I looked at the bulletins. G had received félicitations; E was on the tableau d'honneur. Both had been given a bravo for their progress in French. I took it in, nodded, and said, Okay.

Miss Clavell laid her hand on my arm and shook her head. No. No. This is not okay. This is super--and you have to read that in the French way, with a strong accent on the second syllable: suPER. You must understand. Only four children in the class received félicitations, and it is extraordinary, extraordinary, that G should be one of them, after only one year in French school. And E only missed it by a tenth of a point, and tableau d'honneur, only a few children received that. A bravo in French, that is excellent, excellent. They have worked very, very hard and done vachement well. You should be proud, pleine de fierté, in your girls.

Chagrined, I nodded. Of course I was proud of my girls--googly-eyed with pride is how I generally feel, completely awed and humbled that it's my task to look after these two--but I was also awash in disorientation. Félicitations just means congratulations for me, as in: oh, it's your birthday? Félicitations. Finished the kitchen remodel? Félicitations. And tableau d'honneur: just about every kid we knew in our other life made the honor roll. Yet here it clearly had a specific and special meaning. I had the impression that I could walk into any brasserie in any town in France and mention that my Anglophone daughters had received félicitations and tableau d'honneur in a French collège and the locals would nod sagely and say, Elles ont progressé très bien, Madame. Félicitations.

And bravo. I did not try to explain to mesdames that bravo is, for me, a silly word, an ironic word. It's what your pretentious colleague says when he leaps to his feet at the end of the mediocre opera. But here it had a clear, precise meaning. Some kids got a bravo, and others--at least two dozen others--didn't. I didn't understand what that meant, and I don't think it is just a matter of translating the word. You've got to figure out how to translate the culture, and I can't do that yet.

C and I knew how things worked in America. We knew how to calibrate all the honor rolls and presidential scholar certificates. We were oriented; we knew where the school compass points pointed and why. So we could luxuriate in paying attention to what we tell ourselves really matters more to us: that they grow up to be good people.

Miss Clavell and Mme Dupin weren't finished. Les filles, your daughters, they are toujours très gentils avec les autres enfants, Mme Dupin said. They look out for their friends, they are always helping them. Toujours smiling, toujours understanding and paying attention. It is lucky for us that they are here. They have des très bon coeurs.

I had planned to ask more questions, about the academic rigor of the courses, about how the system worked, about the culture of the class itself. But those questions seemed, somehow, beside the point. My girls were happy, they were kind, they were doing well. These two women were besotted with them. They said my girls had good hearts: what parent can resist that? As for the academics--well, I will probably never intutively grasp the significance of bravo, but it sounded like it was a good thing. Something to be proud of. So I said thank you, and they, being bien élévée themselves, said, Mais non, madame, merci à vous. Then we all kissed each other goodbye, and wished each other a happy summer.

This morning, while the dogs and I were on our walk, I thought about my conversation with mesdames. I don't mind most of the disorientation that comes with living in a foreign country; in fact, I like it. I like not being quite certain what the system is, and having to work at figuring it out. The satisfaction when I get it right is worth the anxiety when I get it wrong. What's so difficult about sending the girls to the Collège des Vignes is that we don't know the system, and we really don't want to get it wrong. I don't mind for myself. I've got my string of academic baggage, and whenever I need to, I can open a suitcase and pull out a degree. But my girls are children, here because C and I put them here. If we can't crack the school system, they are the ones who will suffer for it. If I think too long about it, my chest contracts and it hurts to breathe.

It seems, though, that all is well. As the dogs and I walked back down our hill this morning, I remembered the story of Doubting Thomas. In it, Thomas didn't believe his friends when they told him that Jesus was back. When everyone told him that they'd seen Jesus, Thomas probably said sarcastically, Well, bravo for you. Félicitations, and then went back to feeling disoriented and wishing he'd never left home. Thomas didn't understand, and wasn't taking anybody else's word for it. Jesus had to show up and shake hands, which is, you know, the proper French thing to do, before Thomas would believe it. I haven't shaken hands with the French system yet. I am vachement confused about the brevet and the bac levels, and I've just realized that I have no idea what courses the girls are going to take next year. Unlike Thomas, I've still got to go on faith alone. What I have seen is that my girls are in a school where they are loved, and they are thriving. I think I understand enough to say this: Bravo, mes filles.

Gardening

This morning I worked in the weeds for an hour or two. Olivier worked near me for a while, putting down driplines for my vegetable garden. We've put the vegetable garden on the terrace just behind the house, at the top of a wall about eight feet high. The top of the terrace is lined in rosemary plants, some of which we transplanted to make room for our petit potager. When Jules put the rosemary in last year, he just dug holes--or whomever he was paying dug holes--and dropped the plants in. No fertilizer, no soil amendments, just rosemary and the local clay. Nothing to discourage the weeds invading, either, so invade they have.

When Olivier finished with the driplines, he stopped to talk a bit before heading on to the next task. He saw the weeds. My method is this: clip them off at the base and then spray with désherbant. I know; I feel guilty about it, but you haven't seen these weeds. Olivier shook his head.

That won't kill them. Nothing will kill that kind of grass.

I raised my eyebrows.

Jules planted it a couple of years ago, up at his pool. Jules' pool is six terraces further up the hill. It's called faux kikuyu; it was developed -- here he nodded his head to the south and the sea -- in Africa, to prevent soil erosion. But here it spreads and spreads. It's already in the neighbors' garden en bas. You can spray it, but it just kills a little part, and then it grows stronger in another direction. C'est terrible, terrible. On peut rien faire.

Oh, I said, pleased to have something to contribute. With us, in America, there is the same sort of plant, developed to combat soil erosion. Elle s'appelle kudzu. You can watch it grow, it grows so fast. And nothing will kill it.

We shook our heads at the perfidy of invasive non-native plants and Olivier shouldered his tool bag and went off down the restanque. I kept cutting and spraying--what else could I do? Short of setting the whole place on fire, or renting a back hoe and scraping off several feet of soil partout to get rid of any vestige of root, all I can do is cut and spray. At least, that's all I've come up with.

I've been spending a lot of time outside in the garden, bent double, weeding and planting. My friend Marcelle, who lives in Cannes, which passes, here, for the big city, teased me the other day: Tu es bronzé comme une fermière. You have a farmer's tan. And I do. I'm not sure what to do about it--long sleeves, I guess, or no sleeves. That requires planning ahead, though. My gardening usually starts out as a quick check and turns into staying til the church clock chimes the next hour. So my arms are likely to remain paler at the shoulder than at the elbow.

Today I thought about the faux kikuyu as I worked at it. It had reminded me before of kudzu, the plant that has taken over entire fields in the American South, in its grim determination to take over the world. I had even speculated that this weed, cockroaches, and Republicans would be all that was left of the planet before too long, and now it's not looking so good for the Republicans. But the kudzu kinship struck a chord with me, the same chord that much of daily life here strikes. Sometimes I feel like Dorothy in Oz. Auntie Em's farm hands have turned into the Scarecrow and his friends; everything is different and yet everything is deeply familiar.

It's not when I'm with the English ladies, or people from the girls' school, that I notice it. It's when I'm with Olivier, or Violette, or Marjolaine, who sells her flowers and vegetables at the rond-point. I come from a background that is three-quarters farming. Families that worked the land since time began, for all intents and purposes--at least for as many generations back as we can count them in America, and presumably a while before that. All of them were, I'm pretty sure, bronzé comme des fermiers. I grew up eating out of my grandparents' garden, and for most of my childhood, the entire family shared the beef from one cow every year. Food and the land had a presence in our lives. It was immediate, tangible. So when Marjolaine tells me that she cut the broccoli out of her garden this morning, it feels familiar. When Violette surveys my garden and says, next year, you should make it a little bigger, I've heard that before. When Olivier bends over my tomato plants and shows me how I should take off the suckers that grow in the joint between two branches, and we commiserate about the weeds, I remember my grandparents, my uncles and aunts having the same conversation.

I know how to plant a garden and appreciate fresh broccoli, stake tomatoes and pull weeds. I know how to talk about those things. There is something deeply comfortable, and deeply comforting, about this kind of talk. Standing in a vegetable garden and talking about the weeds takes me back to my earliest memories, to memories that stretch the length of my childhood. In some deep part of my sense of the world, my idea of what adults do is that they stand around talking about the tomatoes: how many, what variety, and did you remember to pull the suckers off. When I stand on my restanque and have that conversation in French, it takes me back to standing, hot and squinty, in a sunny Southern field and listening to my mother and grandfather have the same conversation, and wanting to be inside at lunch under the ceiling fan getting ready for the cobbler made from fresh peaches. It feels profoundly right. It feels like I just found a book that I loved but had lost and almost forgotten, and now I can read it again.

Those fields, that kitchen with the ceiling fan, the peach trees behind the barn that gave those peaches, are all long gone. I grieved for them and let them go, resigned myself to their passing and loss. But imagine travelling thousands of miles and finding--not the same thing. Different. A restanque. My own kitchen. Apricots are ripening in the tree below Jules' house, and Violette and I plan to pick them together. I want to help her make jam afterwards. It's what we do.

Tidy Dogs

Dogs in France lead a charmed life. They travel freely with their people--when driving, I routinely pass cars where the front passenger seat is occupied by a dog--and wander the streets of villages with impunity, napping in sunny spots, cruising the floors of the café for dropped morcels. The farmer from whom I buy vegetables on Friday morning at the Valbonne market brings his Jack Russell terrier. The farmer is costaud, burly, sturdy, somewhere in his 40s or 50s, with a thatch of greying dark hair and twinkly eyes. He presides over a long table holding his blettes, carrots, pommes de terre, radishes, lettuces and poireaux, and his dog sleeps on a cushion in an old vegetable box under the far end of the table. They drive over from their farm in the Var, an hour or so away. I imagine that the Jack Russell rides in the truck with his paws up on the dashboard.

Almost every village has, in addition to its boulangerie, epicerie, boucherie, presse, pharmacie, tourist shops and swimming pool maintenance company, a dog groomer. In French, it's called toilettage de chiens. Faire la toilette, to make one's toilette, used to mean to get dressed and combed and powdered, contact lenses in, hair dried, ready for the day. There was hiccup in the language, though, and toilette went from being an elegant, Frenchy way of talking in English about getting dressed to being a giggly seventh-grade boy word. But in France it retains its original meaning, and not just for people but for their canine friends.

The universal human predilection for cute names that produces American beauty parlors called Curl Up and Dye results, in France, in toilettage de chiens parlors with names that make you call up a friend and tell her what you just saw. One near C's office is called Tout Doux (pronounced Too Doo), All Sweet. Up the hill is one called Quatre Pattes (Cat Pat), Four Paws. The one where we've taken Wendy and Alice is called Mon Bel Ami, (My Handsome Friend), and Madame's business cards states that she is passionnée pour les Schnauzers. Her own very handsome and well-groomed schnauzer presides over the shop, which is papered with photos cut from magazines of prize-winning schnauzers.

Someone has started a business locally, it seems, doing travelling toilettage. She'll come to your house by appointment for dog grooming. There were several businesses like this in our American city: dog groomers, yes, but also pick up and drop off dry cleaning, groceries, and that old favorite restaurant delivery. Here, not so much. You drop off and pick up your own dry cleaning, do your own grocery shopping with your own grocery bags, and restaurants--well, aside from the pizza trucks that show up in parking lots at dusk, the notion of take-out dinner, much less delivered dinner, is pretty alien. So toilettage at home is an exception to the rule.

The enterprising toilettrice has tacked signs up on notice boards and in bakeries advertising her services. The signs are fairly small--a little more than half a sheet of typing paper--and feature, in the center, a photograph of a well-groomed Shih-Tzu, turning up its snub nose at the camera, proud of the pink bow on its head. Under the photo, phone numbers and so forth. Over the photo, in loopy pink letters (to match the bow), the name of the toilettage company. Here, another hiccup: toilette went over to English and turned into toilet, which, in French, is a w.c. But if you really want to sound clever, in any language, isn't the surest thing to use foreign words? Alors, madame la toilettrice has given her business the cleverest name she could think of, a name that evokes both Hollywood glamour and hip familiarity. It's Star Toilet. Guaranteed to catch the eye.

Lining up

C and I picked the girls up at school on Friday afternoon, and on our way home we stopped in at the grocery store. I sent the girls next door to the boulangerie for bread while C and I studied the wine aisle, trying to figure out what to choose to take as a hostess gift to a dinner party that evening.

The girls came back into the market just as we were lining up to pay for our odds and ends. They were beaming. The boulanger wants you to come and say hello, he said for us to tell you. You'd better go.

The last time I had sent them alone into the bakery and not stopped in to speak to the baker, he had remembered it and remarked on it for an entire week. It's a small village. Not much happens at the bakery.

I left C at the caisse and went next door. The baker was talking to two clients, an older couple.

Ah, Madame Washington, bonjour. He interrupted himself midsentence. The couple looked appraisingly at me and I was pleased that I had changed out of my gardening clothes before coming out. The baker explained to them that I was American and used to live next door to George Bush. He explains that to everyone in the bakery, whenever I go in. Mais oú est votre mari?

Il est dans la queue, I responded, smiling.

M. le boulanger cocked his head to one side. The older couple cocked their heads to one side. We all looked at each other for a long moment. I had that sinking feeling that one gets when one has said something just slightly wrong. Then the light broke on the baker's face.

Ah! Il est à la caisse, Madame.

It hit me: I had said that C was in the dog's tail. In French, the word for an animal's tail, and for a line, a queue, are within one strange vowel sound of each other: une queue is a tail, and une queue is also a line. But they're pronounced differently. Not very differently to anglophone ears, perhaps, but differently enough. And a French speaker doesn't wait in the line: he makes the line, il fait la queue. That, as much as my pronunciation, was what had thrown them.

We all laughed, and the baker did his imitation of a dog wagging his tail. Then all three told me all the different ways I could say line: une file, une chaîne, à la caisse. The man in the couple, several inches shorter than I and with impressively snaggled teeth, assured me that French, she is a very difficult language to learn, and if he were in America, it would be très, très difficile for him to speak American. I shook hands and went off on my next errand, but not before the baker summoned C to visit him as well.

I went across to the traiteur for the elusive bottle of wine--we had decided to go with something Italian and exotic, defeated once again by the sheer number of choices in the grocery store wine aisle--and when I came out, Prosecco in hand, I could see mon mari deep in conversation with the baker. I went in to retrieve him--time was beginning to press; a ten minute stop was becoming a half hour excursion--and arrived just in time to hear them placing bets on the American elections. We might, depending on the outcome in November, owe each other a trip to Las Vegas, of all places. Or we might just go across to the café for a drink.

Le ramassage d'escargots

We are settled in, now, almost a year into our life here. Most of the time, I remember that shops will likely close at noon before I get there to find the shutters closed; most of the time, I remember to take my grocery bags with me to the store. Most of the time, France seems like any other place, our corner a beautiful one, but not so terribly strange or different or, aside from the wildflowers right now, wondrous.

This weekend C and I went up into the mountains. We left the girls with their grandmother--they were all eager to get us out of the house--and drove up the Route Napoleon to Castellane, a market town a couple hours' drive away. We walked along the edge of France's answer to the Grand Canyon which is, not surprisingly, smaller and more convenient to fresh bread and good coffee than the one in Arizona. We found a village that had been left to tumble down two centuries ago, and that now belongs primarily to several troupeaux of goats. In this new life of ours, though, none of these things--canyon, ruins, even curly-horned goats--were too terribly strange. We hike, we visit ruins, one of the English ladies even keeps her own goats.

Then Sunday morning we woke to a downpour. We looked at the map and, since hiking was out of the question and, it being Sunday morning in la France profonde, everything was closed except the local boulangerie (open til noon or they ran out of bread, whichever came first), we found the smallest roads we could to carry us home. The car could hike if we couldn't. We set out on a road that rapidly dwindled to one lane, no guardrails, as it wound and swerved through the mountains. No one else was out (downpour; Sunday morning; la France profonde) and so it was more a beautiful drive than a harrowing one.

The mountains gave way to high meadows, and then the road dipped down into a national forest. We passed a sign that announced we had left the département de Haute Provence and entered the département du Var: a government-issue metal sign. A few yards later was another, and C had to back up so that we could read it closely.

In stencilled letters on a piece of plywood, someone had written: In the Department of the Var, the Picking of Mushrooms, Harvesting of Snails, and Collecting of Fossils is Forbidden by Law.

Just when a place starts to become just a place, the authorities forbid you to collect snails.

A man, a dog, and a Pouilly-Fuissé

We went out for a birthday dinner the other night. I remember choosing restaurants in our American city on the basis of no more than a review in the paper, or a tip from a friend. Here, it is more involved than that. We talk to friends--the hiking ladies, C's colleagues, the English ladies, parents of the girls' friends, as wide a net as we can manage. We look up restaurants online. We check our guidebooks. We do a couple of drive-bys. Then, if more than one or two sources recommend the same place, we drop to the next layer of research. Is there likely to be something on the menu for our American palates? (We're not yet to the pieds et paquets stage of assimilation.) How much will this evening take out of the general funds? And, are they open the night or the week or the month in question?

If the menu looks promising, and the price does not cause us to catch our breath, and if someone answer the phone when we call, then, at least a week after our restaurant selection process has begun, it is finished. Otherwise, we begin again, or, occasionally, just go out and buy a chicken to roast.

Last Friday we went to a restaurant recommended both by one of the hiking ladies and by our Swedish neighbors, with the added bonus of having been a favorite local haunt of Julia and Paul Child several decades ago, albeit under different owners. Our reservations were for 7.30 and, as usual, we opened the restaurant. Just the five of us and the six staff. All the staff were young, their degrees and certificates in restauranteering freshly minted, except for the maître'd cum sommelier. While the others wore dark pants and jackets, he alone was in his shirtsleeves, a red apron tied nattily over his starched white shirt. He was a ringer for Sean Connery.

We studied the menu carefully. The room was silent except for our American voices. Once it was clear that we had made our choices, M. Connery approached the table with a flourish. He spoke to us in careful English, and we responded in our careful French.

He switched. If you are going to make the effort to speak French, he said magnanimously, then of course I will be delighted to speak French with you.

We murmured gratitude and C ordered a bottle of wine.

Ah, monsieur, he shook his head. If I might suggest, for the difference in price, this is a much better wine. He gestured to the menu. C agreed--what else could he do?--and off M. Connery went.

He was back a few minutes later with the bottle. The drama of presentation began: opening it, pouring a few swallows into C's glass. C swirled the wine around in the glass a few times, and M. Connery seized his opportunity. He held the candle up to the glass; showed C how to tilt the glass just so over the candle; how to look at the wine's color. Then more swirls, a sniff, and a taste. Much praise for C's willingness to follow the process. And then: All that matters, really, is the swirl and the taste. All the rest is a performance, is simply le drame.

He walked around the table, pouring wine. The other day, he said, I went to a wine tasting at the Hotel Carlton in Cannes. The Hotel Carlton is one of the grand old places across from the beach, full up these last couple of weeks with fancy people in town for the festival. People were there from all the best restaurants in France, some of the greatest sommeliers in the country. And some of the best wines. Two of the finest sommeliers were tasting a Pouilly-Fuissé--this is a famous wine, the kind that Gatsby would have bought by the case, to go with his silk shirts--and everyone else was watching to see what they thought of it. The first one tasted; the second one tasted. Then the second said: This wine tastes like a wet hunting dog. And the first one responded: Yes, but what breed?

We all laughed--some because we understood, others because we mostly understood, others because the rest of us were laughing, and M. Connery radiated the satisfaction that comes from having told a good story well--and, glasses filled, he retired to the other side of the room. The girls sat patiently by while I translated as best I could. Then E said: It's like being in a Peter Mayle story. Peter Mayle, our neighbor a few hours to the west, who has published a whole library based on the trope of a foreigner's encounters with French characters.

And it was. There must be a word for it, for the feeling of finding yourself inside someone else's story. A word for what it feels like, as a traveller, to stumble into an experience that is so closely aligned with something someone else has already described. And yet, to find the experience wholly genuine. Here we were, in this country-elegant restaurant, deciphering the menu as best we could, feeling a little out of place. I am sure that our sommelier had been to countless wine tastings over the course of his career--maybe not at the Hotel Carlton last week, but certainly someime, and I expect that the hunting dog joke has been making the rounds for quite a while--but he told the story well. And in telling it he drew us in, made us feel part of a circle that shared the same reference points, made us feel less foreign and more at home.

Which is not to say that M. Connery was not playing a role--the gracious host--or that we were not playing a role ourselves--the well-meaning foreigners. But in the absence of a mother tongue and mother culture to connect us, warmth and kindness and a story about a man and a dog could fill the bill. We laughed together and then settled into the always-serious business of a proper French meal. As Peter Mayle would say, Merci, Provence.

Leeks and freckles

Sad news out and about in the world lately, the earth cracking open and the sea heaving up and thousands of people, whole villages, just gone. If we were living in the time before the printing press and the Reformation then we would all go on pilgrimage someplace, leaving our wooden shoes behind and slumping barefoot through the spring mud to some saint's shrine to ask her to intercede, save us, protect us, make it go away. Some of the sad news touches our own family: natural disasters on a smaller scale but disasters nonetheless, disasters that serve in an odd way to point up the larger ones. See how you suffer? That's what it's like, now, elsewhere, for so many people at once. You feel sad and confused and angry that this could have happened, that this did happen? Think about those other people, and how they feel as they sort through the rubble looking for their child's pencil case. These disasters that leave us powerless and angry and sad.

I have no saints to visit barefoot and muddy, but today I chopped leeks and they were so white. The white gave way gradually to the softest of yellows and the yellow to a green that no paint color calling itself spring green could ever match. It was so beautiful that my heart tightened in my chest. All this sadness and I look at G.'s freckles as she bends over her dinner plate, and they are so present, so tangible, and so frail that I have to look away before tears come. Potatoes boiling in salted water: the bubbles are exactly what bubbles want to be, and I find myself staring, reading them for clues. Outside, storms pass and repass over us, but in the distance I can see a boat sailing along under clear skies, and it is like being dropped into a painting.

For years a poem by Marge Piercy, If they come in the night, hung over my desk, but in the taking down of our stateside life I had forgotten it. Today the words came back. She writes: I like my life. If I have to give it back, if they take it from me, let me only not feel I wasted any, let me not feel I forgot to love anyone I meant to love, that I forgot to give what I held in my hands...All this meaningless loss of life makes me sad, but it makes me angry too, an anger whose fierceness takes me by surprise. How can anyone step away, and how awful to be taken away, from a world in which leeks can be so white, freckles so perfect, bubbles so true, ships sailing on a such a sea? I want it all: I want to chop mountains of leeks and watch those freckles age, cook potatoes for everyone I know and watch summers full of ships. I want to sit outside under the stars with people I love, and eat and drink and laugh until I have to catch my breath. What I count, my rubies, my children, are those moments wide open when I know clearly who I am, who you are, what we do, Piercy writes, with all my senses hungry and filled at once like a pitcher with light.

Hungry and filled at once, like a pitcher with light. That is what I would ask my saint for, if I had one: the grace to be like a pitcher that is empty and yet full of light. That could help ride out the sorrow.