Outing

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.

Plus poétique

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.

Picnic

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.

Planned obsolesence

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.

In praise of aunts

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.

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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

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.

Boundaries

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.

The Birthday Party

E called me from school midday last week. Harriet's birthday is next weekend and her mother says they live too far from school to have a party. Can we have the party at our house?

Generally, when I get these calls, there is a lot of background noise. Children screaming on the blacktop kind of noise. E's usually having another conversation at the same time that she's talking to me, and, more often than not, I hear G's voice break in at some point, elaborating on a point. The kids are allowed to use their cell phones at the mid-morning break and at lunchtime, when everyone is outside and everyone is excited in the way that only middle school children who are not in class can be. So I take a Special Forces approach to the calls: answer, take the important information, and hang up.

The important information that I got from E's question was, Can we have friends over this weekend? I checked my interior calendar: weekend free. Yes.

Thanks Mommy bye.

I hung up and replayed the conversation. Then I thought I must have misunderstood. Surely I had not just agreed to host a birthday party for a child I'd never met.

When I picked the girls up in the afternoon, I asked them. What is happening with Harriet? Is it her birthday? I thought if I didn't come out and say birthday party then maybe they wouldn't mention it.

It's her birthday and her mother says they live too far away to have everyone come over for a party so since we live close by we said we'd have it at our house. Like that, but switching between children.

I had known, peripherally, that Harriet's family lived an hour east of the Collège des vignes. While she figures in the girls' stories about school, Harriet's never turned up outside of school for a sleepover or a playdate--I guess they're not playdates any more, are they?--and this was always given as the reason why. Too far to go, too difficult to arrange transportation.

But a birthday party? When we got home from school I checked my parental job description. (I keep it in the top drawer of my desk; I find it's a useful reference, as in when I point out to E and G that, as of their arrival at age 13, it is no longer part of my job description to clean their bathroom sinks. You see, it's not in the description, I say, taking it out to show them. That's why there's a bottle of Monsieur Propre and a sponge in your bathroom cabinet.) There it was, just after Food, Shelter, reasonably un-embarrassing Clothing, Books, Music, and Conversation: Birthday Observance. A sub-heading explained that a full-on party with cake and candles was not mandatory but was, particularly during early adolescence, Strongly Advised.

Apparently Harriet's parents job description was not the same as mine. I briefly entertained the thought of telling G and E that it was absurd for us to throw a birthday party for a child C and I had never even met, and that they should go to school and tell everyone that there had been a misunderstanding, but then couple of other lines in the job description caught my eye. If you say you will do something, then you must do it if you can, it said. And just below: when your children are kind and generous, support them. So I put the job description back in the drawer and went downstairs to plan a birthday party.

Everyone who was invited came. I made spaghetti; the girls and their friend Virginia cleaned the house, made the beds, and baked a cake. There were birthday candles, singing, and presents. The girls slept over--yes, a birthday sleepover party--and, in the morning, C made three dozen pancakes, which they finished. (We made ourselves some toast.)

Throughout the planning and staging of the party, there had been no word from Harriet's parents. Nothing. We wondered at it: did they not know it was a birthday party? did they not know the party was happening at all? Maybe they weren't comfortable speaking English, or French, or just speaking?

Sunday morning the parents began to arrive to collect their daughters. Most of them we knew, some of them we didn't; we shook hands and kissed cheeks when cheeks were offered, and spoke a little English and a little French and smiled a lot. Harriet's mother was one of the last to come. She introduced herself; we shook hands; she came into the kitchen and looked around.

It was nice of your daughters to give Harriet a little birthday party, she said.

Oh, well, they did it all themselves, really, we replied, as we washed the breakfast dishes.

It's too bad that the children don't get to socialize much outside of school. For us, living where we do, it is just too difficult. Harriet takes the bus to school every day because it would take too long for me to drive her. Your girls must take the bus, don't they?

No, I said. They would have to get up much earlier, and walk down to the end of the lane, and it's only a ten minute drive for me to take them to school. Since I'm not working, it's easy.

Oh, said Harriet's mother. I work at home, but it would be too difficult for me to do the driving.

At the end of Babar and His Children, after Pom, Alexander, and Flora have spent the day getting into scrape after scrape, the elephant king sits down on his sofa. The children have finally gone to sleep. Truly it is not easy to bring up a family, Babar says. What I wanted to say to Harriet's mother was this: it is supposed to be difficult. Driving your child to school so that she doesn't have to leave the house before 7 every morning and sit on the regional bus for an hour is one of those difficulties that we sign up for when they're born. As are, by the way, birthday parties.

Calvin Trillin, when asked for his theory on child-rearing, tells people Your children are either the center of your life or they're not. That's up at the top of my parental job description. Sadly, though, there's also something in there about cutting other people some slack. So that's one of my exercises this week, along with being more patient, trying to see the good in the Republican congressional delegation (I'm nothing if not ambitious), and giving Harriet's mother the benefit of the doubt.

Not so much about France today.

Today, dear readers, I am going to reveal to you that our home in America is in Washington, D.C. When we moved to Washington from California, years ago, we were excited about living near all the national monuments and museums. With time, we began to consider our home conveniently located for protest marches. We were there for the Million Moms; we were there for the marches against the war in Iraq; we were there for the March for Women's Lives. E and G are old hands at marches. They know where all the best museum bathrooms are on the National Mall.

We haven't raised our girls in the church, or in a synagogue. We have tried to teach our daughters to respect the dignity and value of human life, and to believe in love and hope, and to be kind and compassionate and thoughtful. I told my driving instructor, 'Arry, recently that, instead of bringing the girls up in a church, we have brought them up in the Gospel of Bruce Springsteen. (He liked that.) One time E and I were walking along in front of the White House, in one of the war protests in the winter of 2003, and she was singing Springsteen's song, Into the Fire. (She was eight.) She stopped singing mid-chorus, looked up at me and said: Strength, faith, hope, love. Mama, why doesn't Mr. Bush believe in those things?

He just sees the world differently, I said. At least, I hope that's what I said.

Last night C used some perhaps not wholly above board software that he got from a friend to fool our computer into thinking that it was sitting in the United States and thus able to pick up the signal for HBO's broadcast of the Obama Inaugural Concert. We had been raquetting--snowshoeing--up in the mountains in the morning. We came home and built a fire in the fireplace. C connected the computer to the television set, fiddled around a bit, and, miracle of miracles, there was the Lincoln Memorial.

We sat in our French salon for the next two hours and watched and listened. So much hope and goodwill. Living abroad, it's not obvious to me how to show my girls what a moment this is for our country. Were we in the States now, we could have taken them to the Mall yesterday, could take them tomorrow, and show them the thousands of other grateful, joyful people. We could be volunteering today for Dr. King day, instead of just taking a bag of outgrown but still good clothes to the local semi-equivalent of Goodwill. (I know it's not much, but it's a nod toward community service.) Here, though, few of their English and French classmates are even aware of the inauguration, and their teachers don't have much to say about it. Our friends are French and English: they are happy about the change in administration, but it's not their country.

How do we show our girls that this is different from the other times, and that we've not seen the like of this before? This Land is Your Land is one of the songs they learned as babies. It's a car song in our family, as it probably is in many. In our family it comes with a conversation about Woody Guthrie, and the Great Depression, and folk music, and how you sing to protest and to mobilize and to try to change the world, and sometimes it works but often it doesn't. The girls know the scratchy, fading Woody Guthrie version, and the hoarse, minor key Springsteen version, and, this fall, I started slipping the Pete Seeger version, all earnestness and singing along, onto the iPod. Because it's more than a car song; it's a song about what we aspire to mean when we say we're American. It's a song about "the country we carry in our hearts."

The Lincoln Memorial is the first memorial we took the girls to when we moved to Washington, and the one we've visited most often. We used to go and talk about slavery, about the Civil War, about Dr. King, and about strength, faith, hope and love. And so last night, when Mr. Obama spoke, standing on those steps where we've stood and talked about our country, that would have been enough. I think the solemnity and power of it would have sparked a connection. But then the set changed, and there was music, and not just any music. This Land is Your Land, with two of the singers and thinkers and activists who've helped us get our girls this far. And the country we have carried in our hearts all this time seems closer.

Birthday boy

Today is the third birthday of mon filleul ainé, which translates literally as my elder godson but accurately as one of the two boys who is almost mine. Why hasn't our language come up with a word for this? G is the son of my dear friend. To refer to him, though, as my friend's son misses the intimacy of our relationship. He is, quite simply, one of my own, a part of my family and my heart. When he saw me last month for the first time since August, he was in his grandpa's arms. And he reached for me.

I had to put him down after a minute, though, because he's one of the tallest and strongest and biggest and squirmiest three year olds you'll ever come across. G runs a life full tilt. He's spent the balance of his short life in France, and that has meant that we've been lucky to have lots of time together. So here, in honor of his birthday, are my favorite G in France stories.

When G and his mother visited us at La Bastiole for the first time, we mothers went with him down to the piscine. (Every new house in our région is required by law to have a pool; the water is handy for the pompiers in the event of forest fires.) We set G to wander around on the deck, and his mum and I sat at the corner of the pool and dangled our feet in the water while we talked. G walked up and down and around and around, and we cautioned him to stay away from the water's edge. He walked around singing his tuneless toddler song and we talked some more. Then he walked by us and fell in the water. Right between us. We both plunged our hands in, grabbed a body part, and fished him out. Then we laughed: two of us, fully grown, responsible, respectable, and one waterlogged 20 month old.

A few months later, he visited us again with his mother, this time for a week. It was the nadir of his life thus far. He was on the edge of language and profoundly frustrated at not being able to communicate the subtleties of his needs: so he did a fair amount of yelling. That he was sick--one of those full-on snotty colds that only small children get--made matters worse. His mother and I spent the week trying to find something to make him happy, or, if not happy (we gave that up pretty fast), at least not screaming miserable. One morning towards the end of the week we took him to the park. The setting for this park is beautiful: it's between a country lane and a stream, with an old mill on one side and a thousand year old church on the other. Birds were singing, the stream was burbling, and G stood in the middle of the playground, in the shadow of the pirate ship playset, howling, Mommy, No! at the top of his small but powerful lungs. We tried to console him--hugs, the slide, the climbing bars, applesauce for snack, more hugs--and, when he was inconsolable, we retreated to our bench and ate the applesauce ourselves.

A few months, again, and the language has come along and allayed some of his frustration. I am visiting in Paris, and when I come in the door of his apartment, G attaches himself to my leg. We read stories together. He introduces me to his stuffed animals and to his matchbox cars, and I give him his bath and put him to bed. When I think he has fallen asleep and get up to leave his room, he stirs, and says, from that place next door to sleep, Stay with me. I do.

Another visit to the south, and our families have gone for a walk. G and one of my girls fall behind the rest of us. When we turn to look back at them, G has found a walking stick twice as tall as he is, and my daughter is walking beside him, slowing her steps to match his and trying, with partial success, to avoid getting hit by the stick.

And then it is our last visit with G's family in Paris, before they return Stateside. It is our girls' birthday. We have a family birthday dinner all together, and G gets to stay up late. We've finished the meal and the beautiful cake, and C is teaching G how to make scarey faces. C drops his jaw down, rolls up his eyes, sticks out his tongue, and raises his arms over his head. G is suspicious until C returns to normal. Then he laughs. C makes the face again, and G copies him. They waggle their heads at each other, making lurid monster sounds, until G laughs so hard that he falls over.

One more visit to our house, and then they will be gone. G is sitting on his father's shoulders and we are in the lane behind our house. I pick blackberries and give them to him and he fills his mouth, his tongue and lips purple, tshirt, cheeks, father's head--a riot of blackberry juice.

And so, happy birthday, my boy. Bon anniversaire. I can hardly wait to see what you will do next.

Douce nuit

I sing in an English choir--English language, and, pour la plupart, English passports. I've sung in choirs off and on for years, in college and graduate school, and then an interval of working and child rearing, and now again. It's something that I often can muster no more than ambivalent feelings about, and yet I keep showing up at rehearsals. I think it's the distraction--when you are singing in harmony, you can't make grocery lists or worry about Detroit's Big 3--and the people--second sopranos tend, in my experience, to be solid, dependable, generous sorts--and then the moments when all the parts come in at the right time and in the right key and you are for a moment inside the music, inside the sound.

The Christmas concerts were this weekend. The Christmas carols that the choir sang this year were English (Here We Come A-Wassailing) and more English (Past Three O'Clock), with a couple of French (Quelle Est Cette Odeur Agréable, which means just what it sounds like it might) thrown in to show that geographical respect. The concerts were in the local village church, built in the early 1200s: plain, unadorned stone, a few windows high up in the walls, almost Shaker in its simplicity. The combination of stone and ridiculously high ceilings would make any music sound full and soaring.

Saturday night C and the girls came to the concert. We all know the more obscure English carols, down to the third or fourth verses, because of a Christmas party we've gone to in my hometown for all of the girls' lives and more than half of mine. At that party everyone brings food--and in our memory, it's the same food every year, brought by the same people: fudge from the University chaplain, pound cake from the retired superintendent of schools, ham from the political science professor. After drinking--spiced cider and wine---and eating, it's time to sing carols. Not just the standard American ones, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear and O Come All Ye Faithful, but ones you don't hear constantly, Good King Wenceslas and Of the Father's Love Begotten. The hosts are teachers, and so everything proceeds according to lesson plan. The carols have been photocopied, collated, numbered and stapled. The guest who is a piano teacher takes her place and numbers are called out. The same carols, every year. The same jokes, the same silliness, the same people who take the harmony at the same measure.

Our plane won't land in time for that party this year, and so this Christmas concert was our chance to sing all those carols. Silent Night was on the list, sung in French and in English. I've never liked Silent Night. The melody isn't interesting, and the words make me think of the third-rate art on grocery store Christmas cards. As the congregation stood and the opening bars reminded them of the tune, I looked down the aisle of the church and saw a little girl slip out of a pew towards the back and stand, shifting from foot to foot, watching the choir and the congregation. Her mother had careful hold of the strap of the little girl's pinafore dress. The child--four or five years old--had blond curls to her shoulders, pinned up and away from her forehead in a sparkly barrette. She danced a little unevenly to the music as everyone began to sing.

My girls were up front, where I'd saved them seats. When they were that child's age, I had, more than once, set them out into the aisle so that they could see the choir, buying a little more time that way, keeping them entertained a little longer. Now they stood seriously by their father, reading the words as they sang.

Douce nuit, sainte nuit.
Dans les cieux l'astre luit.
Le mystère annoncé s'accomplit.
Cet enfant sur la paille endormit,
C'est l'amour infini,
C'est l'amour infini !

For a moment all the Christmases were present at once, when I was my girls' age and singing this carol, when they were babies and little girls in the aisle, all the years of pound cake and spiced cider and our friend Jonathan singing Good King Wenceslas in his exaggerated bass voice, and this very Christmas, in the old church in the old country, all of us and all of those Christmases together. T. S. Eliot calls it "the accumulated memories of annual emotion." The melody built, and I took a breath to finish out the chorus and swallowed my cough drop whole. Tears leaked out of my eyes and ran down my cheeks: tears that come from a lot of eucalyptus flavoring stuck in your throat all at once, but also of all those accumulated memories.

The carol ended and everyone sat down. C found my eyes and asked if I were okay. Yes, I gave a small nod. Yes.

€14,99

Christmas billboards are going up: the pépineries are advertising Christmas trees, the hardware stores are advertising drills, and La Halle, a Targetesque department store, is advertising lingerie. On the billboard across from the Collège des vignes, in considerably larger than life size living color, a woman with dark, flowing locks poses in a black satin bustier, matching panties, and stockings held up by matching garters. She gazes frankly--the standard model blank stare--into the camera. To her right is the price: €14,99. In the lower corner is the name of the store and their Christmas slogan: Et si c'était vous qui rendiez le monde plus beau? What if you were what made the world more beautiful?

We leave the house for school in the mornings at 7.40. It's been cold recently--coats, gloves, scarves--and of course this time of year, the sun is just coming up. Traffic backs up outside the school as the gendarme stops traffic for the kids to cross the street, so that gives us plenty of time to contemplate the woman in her bustier. For me, it means that I think about women's images in the media every morning before my tea has had a chance to kick in, and I worry, beyond whether the girls have remembered all their books and notebooks and done all their homework and prepared for all their interrogations, about whether I'm giving them the tools they need to cope with these kinds of images.

When C and I were in the car going to town for Christmas shopping this weekend, we passed another billboard from the same series. This one shows a woman in bra and panties, holding her hair up on the top of her head while she kneels inside a clear Christmas ornament ball. (This ensemble is cheaper, only €7,99.) I mentioned the billboard by the collège, and C said he'd seen it. He took the girls to school the other day, and it's hard to miss.

Did you talk about it? I asked, hoping that he would say that they had, and he had said all the things that my Women's Studies professor would have wanted him to.

I said I thought she looked cold.

What did the girls say? I really wanted there to be more to the story.

They weren't paying attention.

Are they paying attention? Or are they, too, thinking over their homework and backpacks and lunch and who's going to sit where? Do I point it out, pull the car over and give them five minutes on the objectification of women, or do I let it go? If I let it go, is that condoning it, letting my daughters think that it's fine for women to be Christmas ornaments? Or is 7.55 on a Thursday morning not the time to talk about sexism?

I think--though I'm not sure--that you only get it when you're ready to get it, that you can only hear the answer after you've asked the question for yourself. Until the girls run smack into the wall of sexism--and they will--all I say to them about the woman in the bustier will sound like so much Mom talking. They'll listen, they'll take it in, they might even file it away somewhere, but it won't mean much.

Maybe. Two more weeks til the Christmas holidays, so I don't have to decide yet.

Encore des jumelles

When we watched the Bastille Day fireworks with our friends S and G from the beach in Nice this summer, we joked about the possibility that they would end up as the fathers of twin girls. S and G met our girls 12 years ago; they were talking about children of their own then, and I remember the fascination and delight with which they watched E and G toddle around, and all the questions they had for us. While we picnicked on the beach in Nice, their surrogate mother was at home in California with her family. S and G would go with her for the first sonogram when they returned home. This Thanksgiving weekend, S and G welcomed their identical twin girls. They've had a long journey to get to this birth. Our journey, by comparison, was ridiculously easy.

We were finishing graduate school. C found a fellowship that would give him work to do in France, so that I could be in France to carry on with my research. When we arrived, I was a few months' pregnant. The plan--we have always been big into plans--was to have the baby and tote it around Europe in a back pack for a couple of years before we went back to the States and dug in to our grown-up lives. I needed an obstetrician, of course, and one was referred to us. I made an appointment and one afternoon we drove into Nice to meet Docteur Xavier.

His office was in a grand belle époque building, brass name plates on the doors outside, a winding marble staircase leading up from an elegantly proportioned foyer. The office was up a flight, and, inside, the waiting room was sleek and modern, deep rose leather banquettes lining the walls, soft lighting, lots of mirrors. C was the only father to be in the room; everyone else was female.

Until Dr Xavier came to get us. He was in his late forties, greying, in a tailored tweed jacket and those wide-wale corduroys that look frumpy on American men but make French men look like they just got up from a long morning settling the château's royal accounts. He ushered us into his high-ceilinged office. There was a soft carpet on the floor, lamps throwing flattering light, and a huge window looking down into the street. Da Vinci prints and tasteful photographs of the doctor's children lined the walls.

C and I sat down in Louis XV armchairs in front of the doctor's antique desk. He took my medical history and then got up and led me into the small, state of the art examining room that opened off of the office. I undressed, put on the robe (I remember that there was a robe, or, at least, I don't remember that there wasn't one), and laid down on the examining table. He began the routine as C stood beside me.

Then the doctor stopped. He shook his head. Your dates are not right, he said. You are much further along than you think you are.

I frowned. How typically French, I thought, to assume that I do not even know how long I have been pregnant. I said, No, I think I'm right about the dates. (What else do you say at that point?)

He shook his head again. We shall make an échographie to know.

Dr Xavier rolled a small sonogram machine over to the examining table and turned it on. I had never had a sonogram before.

He ran the wand over my belly. A blinking image appeared on the small screen. It showed a mirror image, what I took to be the right side and the left side of a 16 week old fetus. How clever, I thought, that the sonogram can show both sides. I wonder how it does that.

That was the last thought of that part of my life.

Then Dr Xavier said, with a touch of satisfaction in his voice, There are two babies.

C reached out and grabbed a stirrup. I had the advantage, as I was already lying down. C said to no one and everyone: Are you sure?

The doctor looked at me. Sure? he said. What is sure? Our conversation had been in English and in French, and we had just reached the limit of his English.

Certain, I explained. Vous êtes certain?

Certain? Mais bien sûr je suis certain, he said. This is not the first échographie I have made.

While I was getting dressed, Dr Xavier took C back out into his office. They sat down across from each other, C in his fauteuil and the doctor behind his desk. Then he leaned forward and said to C: Sometimes, there are three.

Suddenly our plans were changed. We spent the next week wondering if this was going to be one of those times--I mean, if there can suddenly be two babies, the universe can surely bend enough for there to be three--but the radiologist Dr Xavier sent us to see was certain there were only two. Jumelles, twin girls, deux filles, he announced, it not having crossed his mind that we might want to keep the gender a surprise. We didn't. At that point we wanted to know everything we could. We had always been good students, and thought that more information would somehow give us more control over the situation. We were wrong, of course. We were now in a process and regardless of what we knew or found out, the only way out was through.

Which is what I remembered when I looked at the pictures of S and G's girls Saturday night. Two little girl babies, wrapped in the same American hospital receiving blankets that our own little girls babies were swaddled in. American blankets, in the American hospital where they were born. We couldn't figure out a way to carry two babies around Europe in backpacks, and so, after a few more months, we went home.

And then we came back. It took over a decade, but we found our way back, and nothing has changed and everything has changed. Everything--the images on Dr Xavier's screen can now empty the dishwasher and speak two languages--and nothing--we are here, lighting candles for the supper table, making plans and trying to figure out how to gather enough information to exert some control.

The French say bonne chance et bon courage. The first is easy to translate: it means good luck. The second is harder to translate: it's good courage, literally, but it's also be brave; in my head, it echoes the Psalmic be of good courage. Good luck has had a lot to do with getting our girls this far--all the trees that didn't fall over, all the planes that stayed in the sky, the researcher who invented Augmentin--but so has good courage, what Garrison Keillor calls the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. It's what I wish for S and G and their little ones: bonne chance et bon courage.

Goodly creatures

G got into the car yesterday when I picked the girls up at school. Their class had spent the afternoon with a visiting priest who runs an orphanage in Sri Lanka. We found out the main difference between here and Sri Lanka, G said. It's that, in Sri Lanka, you don't live with anyone before you get married. And, if you have a baby out of wedlock, it's a really big deal.
Those are not the first differences between the South of France and Sri Lanka that had immediately come to mind. Let's see: civil war; poverty; disease; infant mortality...couples living together before marriage.

It reminded me of something E had said a few weeks ago. The four of us went to see Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona--the one, as L helpfully put it, with a three-way. (You took the girls? she laughed. The choice of American movies is not that extensive in our corner of the world.) We came out of the theater afterwards and E said: I think Scarlett Johansson should have stayed with Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. They were all three happier together than apart.

C and I grew up in extended families in which living together before marriage was, if not an outright sin, then at least something that you didn't talk about. We both remember when Dan Quayle called out Murphy Brown's unmarried pregnancy and the religious right yammered on and on (and on) about it. And as for a ménage à trois--I'm not sure I even knew what that was until college, if then.

Our girls are growing up in a different culture. It's not just because we live in France now--our Stateside life featured plenty of unmarried cohabiting couples and single parents (although no ménages that I knew about)--but living in France doesn't hurt, either. It means that C and I get to cherry pick American culture: yes Jon Stewart, no Bill O'Reilly, yes The New Yorker, no Teen Vogue, yes Woody Allen, no High School Musical 18 (well, they have seen High School Musical, but only once or twice, and no product tie-ins). And it means that the world they walk around in is one that rejected John Calvin and all his uptight teachings on the evils of sexuality, in which outside every pharmacie is a condom dispenser.

I know, of course, that E and G will still have plenty to sort out about their upbringing. (Can you believe she used to write about us? Oh my god, that was just wrong, I can hear the phone conversation between them when they're 30 right now.) But they already live in a world where there is less shame, and less to be ashamed of, than our world when we were their age. A world in which more things are possible and fewer things are judged. They carry with them an easy confidence, a belief in the efficacity of love and hope. I take no credit: most of the time, I'm just running through my list of laundry and dinner and making sure they've done their homework and have the dogs been for a walk? But I'm so proud and grateful. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.

Civics lesson

So yesterday afternoon it was time to help the girls with their homework. C and I had spent the morning in an olive tree--this one was big enough and roomy enough for both of us to climb, so that we could harvest the olives from the inside branches of the tree instead of standing on the ground and whacking at the branches with bamboo stakes--and I was sitting at the table on the terrace separating olives from leaves and twigs. E and G appeared with their civics lesson.

At our house I am the designated humanities and social sciences tutor, while C handles science and math. I pretty much surrendered my math credibility the night that I assured the girls that long division was something that, once they finished school, they would never need to know again, and C, at his end of the table, said, actually, he used long division every day. (I'm still not sure I believe him.) That conversation happened when the girls were in third or fourth grade, and since then, I've stuck to my strengths. I mean, which is more useful, really, long division or being able to explain the Reformation? I find that the latter comes up in conversation all the time.

But I digress. The girls had told me that they were learning about analyzing documents in their civics class at school. They clearly found it a little mystifying--while they are pretty good at sorting out literary texts, working with nonfiction documents can feel like a different ballgame. They brought their textbook out to the terrace and showed me the lesson. It was called: Les Droits de l'Homme: les droits du travailleurs (The Rights of Man: the rights of workers).

The lesson was about the right of workers to assemble and to form unions. It drew on four documents which, taken together, led the students through the establishment of the right to unionize in France through to the role of unions in French society today. I started going over it with them, beginning with the first document, on the right of workers to assemble.

This means that workers can form unions, I translated.

They looked blank. Then G said, You mean, they can have dinner together?

It was my turn to look blank. No, I said, they can have meetings together about their working conditions.

G looked at me, and I saw her remembering all the conversations with colleagues from work that I've ever had about office politics over our dinner table. We were at a standoff.

Then the obvious hit me. My children didn't know what a union was.

I guess that while we were busy not talking about Air Force One and presidential lore at the dinner table in America, we also missed out on talking about the rights of workers. (But just ask my girls about the Reformation.) Apparently, it doesn't come up in American school curricula before junior high.

C came out and we spent, together, half an hour explaining the idea of labor unions--organizing for the common good, all for one and one for all, the kind of rosy, Pete Seeger-y version that I'm sure you would expect of us--and then C wandered off and we went over the documents.

I wasn't taught about unions in school. A family friend took me to see Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton in Reds, and afterwards told me stories about people who had tried to unionize the tobacco industry in the '30s. It all felt very mysterious and noble and secret, the sort of thing that it was risky, still, to talk about in the tobacco town where I grew up.

G and E are going to be quizzed on unions today in school, asked about the limits which striking worker must respect (no kidnapping; no hijacking ferries; other than that, it's pretty open), and asked to trace the history of the right to assemble. In France.

Education, I suppose, is largely about making the world a more textured and complicated place, a place where there's always another layer beneath the surface. When we are in the States at Christmas, I'll ask that same family friend to tell the same stories to my girls that she told to me decades ago. I wonder if the stories will feel mysterious to them.

At the caisse

One of my proudest accomplishments as a resident of France is my competence in the check-out line at the grocery store. (It's the little things.) In America, of course, you unload your groceries onto the conveyor belt and then, if you're me, you stand there and eavesdrop on the conversation behind you, or watch the woman wrangling with her two year old in the aisle, or work out what time the sitter's coming and if you should get movie tickets in advance. Meanwhile, someone bags your groceries and puts the bags back in your grocery cart.

Not here. One of the most stressful things about visiting France before we moved here was the trip to the grocery store for picnic supplies, or chocolate and biscuits to take home. I would unload my cart onto the belt. The checker would run each item over the scanner and slide it down the ramp, where it would join its fellows in a jumble. I would take out my grocery bag--at least I knew I was supposed to bring my own--and frantically try to load everything up without putting the eggs and the bananas under the jar of Nutella. Meanwhile, the checker would finish, call out the amount in thick impenetrable syrupy French, and wait, no doubt tapping her foot impatiently under the counter. I would toggle between loading the groceries and digging out my wallet, all the while trying to remain calm as the line lengthened behind me. One time, I remember, I bought a leaky bottle of Badoit, and the cashier sent me back to the Water Aisle to replace it. My French held up for that exchange, but that I remember it at all suggests that it was the event of the day.

The first months that we were here the grocery check out continued to be stressful. I would unload, walk through the scanner that was making sure I hadn't pocketed a tin of foie gras or a magnum of Lafitte-Rothschild, open up my grocery sacks and begin hurriedly bagging. Invariably the lettuce and the brioche loaf would come down the belt first and the canned goods last, which meant that I had to choose between putting the lettuce and the brioche at the bottom of a bag, where they would be crushed by the heavy cans of tomatoes, or putting the light, fragile items in their own bag and the heavy things in a separate bag. Neither solution was satisfying: either I'd end up with bruised vegetables or a bag I couldn't lift.

Then one day I noticed that the woman in front of me in the check out line did not have any grocery bags. La pauvre, I thought. Is she going to carry all those groceries to her car? How awful to be new to a country and not know how things work. She unloaded onto the belt and then--and then--she reloaded the groceries into her chariot. (Aside: how plebian is a cart, how regal is a chariot, even if its wheels all roll in different directions.) I was intrigued. Then I fell behind in my own unloading procedure and forgot about it.

When I got to the parking lot, though, I saw the woman again. She was standing by the open trunk of her car. The trunk was full of grocery bags. She was calmly bagging her groceries, putting the heavy things in the bottom of the bags, the fragile things on top, distributing the weight evenly, sorting and ordering her groceries.

It was a revelation. I went right home and called C at the office. He was only moderately impressed, since he is the sort of person who is not overly concerned about the time it takes to bag groceries and doesn't notice the weight of a bag full of nothing but orange juice cartons and bags of flour. But the next time I went to the store, I left my bags in the car. I put my groceries on the belt, pushed my chariot through the detector, and put my groceries back in the basket. Instead of looking out for the lettuce, I just put everything in the basket as it came through and then, leisurely, took out my wallet and paid. I pushed the cart back out to the car and slowly, carefully, methodically sorted the groceries into their bags--cold things together; fragile things on top--while standing at the open trunk.

It's what happens, I guess, when you put a mind that is used to identifying problems, researching them, categorizing them, into the life of a French ménagère. I approach the Problem of the Grocery Check Out in the same way that I used to approach the Issue of Servant Life in America Between the Wars, or the always-delicate Debate About What Porcelain to Exhibit for Christmas. Identify the problem--stress at the caisse. Research solutions--open the bags in the cart? use boxes instead of bags? aha! bag at the car. Now I'm to the refining stage, making my system ever more elegant. I put the heavy items together in one part of the cart and keep the light, small or fragile items in another section. When I unload, I unload like with like. The caissière sends like with like, then, down the ramp, and like stay together in the reloaded chariot. And then I load at the car, and have bags that I can easily carry, with things that belong together in each.

It is, I know, a small thing, but like so many small things about living in a foreign county, mastery of it makes a difference. I'm not waiting anymore for the cans of tomatoes to come through before I bag. I can relax and watch the woman in the next aisle with the toddler, and speculate on the nationality of the older man with the chariot full of gin behind me (probably English). I can even eavesdrop a little and, maybe, if the cashier's feeling friendly, engage in a little small talk. It's one more step toward feeling at home.

Rome

We went on the overnight train to Rome. I told Olivier that’s how we were getting there, two days before we were leaving, and his exact words were: Ooh la la. Les trains italiens. Ooh la la. I don’t think I need to translate, do I?

But taking the overnight train to Italy: that was something that we had talked about from the get go, from the moment that L called me up and said they were moving to Paris, and I hung up and told C, and C said, well, we could go, too. (There are other, more official, stories floating around out there, but that’s the way I remember it.) We got out the maps, and C said, look, from there, we could take the train to Rome for the weekend. It’s not that we really especially wanted to go to Rome; we didn’t. It was the idea of it, the idea of boarding a train at night in a French city and getting off it in the morning in an Italian one. I think that taking the night train to Rome was one of the things that got us over here—through all the hurdles of making C’s transfer work, leaving my job, renting the house, selling the cars, preparing the children—it was the sense that if we could just pull all those things off, if we could just believe that we could pull all those things off, then we could have the kind of life that would contain such adventures.

So we decided we would go over E and G’s vacances de printemps. We asked people who knew Rome and two who didn’t even know each other recommended the same place to stay: the guesthouse of the Convent of Saint Bridget, on the Piazza Farnese. We took that as karmic instruction and made our reservations; once we got the neatly typed and hand-signed letter of confirmation back from the nun in charge of guests, we booked the train. Nice to Rome, departing Nice at 9.45 p.m., arriving Rome at 9.15 a.m. We had to go to the local gare to buy the tickets because, not so surprisingly, the French trains website and the Italian trains website did not get on well enough together to allow us to purchase tickets for a train that would go between the countries. Our hopes for the agent at the train station down the hill from the Collège des Vignes were not high, either. We have stood in enough lines in front of the guichets of French fonctionnaires to have adjusted our expectations.

We walked in, though, after lunch one day, and right up to the window. An agent appeared; we told her where we wished to go and when; she sold us the tickets. Real paper tickets in a special ticket envelope. For a moment after I put them away in my purse we felt almost dizzy: here we were, in France, buying tickets for the overnight train to Rome. Just what we had talked about doing.

And then everyone’s reaction was the same as Olivier’s: Ooh la la, Italian trains. They didn’t say a lot more than that—several did do that thing that French people do with their hand, when they hold it parallel to their waist or hips, palm facing in, and shake it up and down loosely, like they’ve just picked up a pot lid they didn’t realize had been on the stove. It means, idiomatically translated: Mmmph. Hmmph. As in, That’s a lot to manage. Or, Man, that’s tough. Or, Ooh la la, Italian trains. Once again, we adjusted our expectations. We did not expect to bump into Cary Grant or Eva Marie Saint in the corridor. We took along some antibacterial disinfectant.

It wasn’t bad, though. The train station in Nice was no darker or less glamorous than usual, and the train was at the platform when we arrived. We found our cabin—four bunks; shrink-wrapped blankets and pillows (the shrink wrapping was a nice touch); a room-darkening shade on the window; a working lock. The bathroom down the hall was no worse than you would have imagined. In fact, it wasn’t as bad as you might have begun to imagine along about the fourth time someone did the hand shaking gesture. And the train left on time.

We watched as Nice and Monaco rolled by, and then as we crossed the border into Italy (alas, no agents came to check our passports) we all peered out to see some sign of cultural difference. A train station in this part of the world, though, is pretty much a train station, so after a few more rolled by we pulled down the shade and went to sleep. The girls went to sleep, that is. C and I just laid very still so as not to wake the other one and, eventually, dozed off into parental half-sleep. At four in the morning, we stopped at a station and I woke and lifted the shade a little: the sign opposite my window said Pisa. I laughed a little. We were passing through Pisa, on our way to Rome. Here we were. Now.

A few hours later we pulled into the capital. The train station was beautiful, swooping arcs of light and space, and the wonderful mysterious sounds of a foreign city: the sequence of chords that announces an announcement, voices calling eagerly to each other in sentences I could not split apart into words, luggage trolleys and the clink of spoons on porcelain in the cafés. We walked out and into a taxi, and the taxi drove us through busy streets of shops and fountains and tourists and signs and locals taking their children to school and priests in their collars and nuns in their habits to the Piazza Farnese and the Convent of Saint Bridget. We were in our hotel by 10 o’clock.

The Sisters wore full length grey habits and black veils, plain wooden crosses on a long black cord around their necks. The white wimples around their faces had a red Swedish cross on the forehead, the sign of their order with its Swedish founder. They moved up and down the corridors softly, and when we met them they stepped aside and gave us shy smiles. The building was half convent, half hotel, all clean. I’m not terribly preoccupied with cleanliness, but I have stayed in enough hotels that were—well, let’s leave it at not as clean as this was. It smelled of incense and furniture polish and capers, and I think the capers may have been my nose’s interpretation of vinegar. Our room consisted of: a foyer, with a towering carved armoire; a large tiled bathroom to one side of the foyer; and, to the other side, a bedroom and then, past the bedroom, a smaller room with two cots for E and G, and two casement windows that looked out over the Piazza. On the walls were framed bits of needlepoint showing Saint Bridget reading and writing, and the Holy Family, and then, I think, a sampler or two. The tables all had hand-made lace doilies. The furniture was solid, not hotel-issue—the sort of furniture you would imagine finding in a family home that has been lived in for decades and by successive generations, where the side table is the one that Aunt Sophie got from her first husband’s mother, the one whose brother was a cabinet maker. It radiated a sense of place. As the week went on, we felt none of the dislocation that we commonly feel, that I think everyone feels, in an anonymous hotel in a strange city where you don’t speak the language and are far from home. We felt like we were part of the city, part of the life of the city. In the breakfast room each morning we saw priests who were staying with the Sisters while they were in Rome on business; one morning, there was a table full of Austrians on pilgrimage; every morning, an elderly lady from Siena who spent the month of April with the nuns every year. And we were there, too, part of the tablescape: the American family with the lovely daughters (it’s my story, I can say it if I want to), in Rome to see the sights.

One afternoon C had gone for a run and the girls and I were setting out for a walk when we saw that the door to Saint Bridget’s chapel was open. The convent is built around the house that Bridget lived in when she was in Rome in the 1300s. She was a Swedish noblewoman, married off at a young age, who, after bearing eight children, took up the religious life for which she had, so the story goes, always longed. Revered for her piety, she became one of the King of Sweden’s most powerful advisors until she gave him some bad advice. Then she heard the call to Rome and she went there—not by overnight train, but on horseback—and spent the next thirty years, until her death, setting up her own religious order, the Brigittines, and telling the Pope what she thought of his policies. Her room, now a chapel, is at the heart of the Brigittines’ house in Rome.

A young Swedish sister who spoke perfect English took us into the chapel in all its Gothic Revival glory and told us the story of Saint Bridget. It was a small room, as you might imagine a 14th-century nun’s room would have been, but it was decorated to the teeth. We looked around at the painted ceiling, the carved wood, the backlit 19th-century stained glass. The Sister led us to one side of the room where, hanging low on the wall, was a long piece of wood a couple of feet wide, framed in ornate gold, and resting against lace and velvet. We all squatted down to look more closely, and the Sister explained that this had been the Saint’s work table and her bed; that it was on this table that she had died. We nodded and stood up. The Sister showed us a smaller reliquary, even more ornate, on the shelf above the table. This, she said, was Bridget’s hip bone. We must have looked a little confused, or she must have had a moment of uncertainty about her English, because, to make her meaning clear, she put out a hand and, timidly, patted E’s hip. There, she said.

To her credit, E did not flinch, but her eyes got big and round, and so did her sister’s. So did mine, I imagine. I told C about it later that night, seeing the Saint’s relics with the girls and the Sister. I’ve thought about it more than once since, replayed the moment in my head, the nun timidly but also, yes, a little playfully, reaching out to E. It was so profoundly strange—the hip bone in the golden box—and so profoundly human—the reaching for connection. From Saint Bridget’s room we went on to the chapel of her daughter, Saint Catherine, who came to Rome and saw to it that her mother was started on the road to canonization. When our tour was over, I thanked the young sister and we went out for our walk. The rest of the week, though, when we met her in the corridor, or saw her at the reception desk or in the dining room, she made a point of speaking to us. A few times I caught her watching G and E as they ate their breakfast, and when she saw that she had been seen, she dipped her head a little at me, and smiled. When we left to come home, she came outside and loaded us into the taxi and shook hands all around. We slid away from the convent in the early morning drizzle and I glanced back to see her still standing, her hand on the door, looking after us. I leaned back against the seat and thought: this is what it’s like to have the kind of life we wanted.