Wherever Launa goes, There She Is

Bill Gets the Last Word. Eighteen Years Ago.

2010-09-19T21:27:00.004+02:00

This blog has been a kind of love-letter to one remarkable year of my life. As we unpack and settle back into our home here, the adventure slips away, even as its effects are etched into our new/old life. But every good letter has its p.s., and today Bill unearthed ours. It was a message in a bottle, in a way, and I'm opening it now, safe on the opposite shore.

Bill and I do a lot of things differently. This includes unpacking, which we have both been doing pretty much nonstop since the moving truck disgorged all of our stuff onto our newly-polished floors just a few weeks ago. I unpack fast, maniacally focused on what I imagine to be the big picture, while he moves slowly, looking carefully at all the letters and photographs he finds along the way. Sometimes this makes me impatient. But other times, he unearths rare gems that I would have missed, or ever-so-efficiently chucked in the trash. As he was unpacking one of his very last boxes last night, he came across this rather magical little talisman:

It was a postcard he sent me in the spring of 1992. He was then in the midst of his epic European tour with Alain, and I was in my first year as a teacher. Nearly every day during the ten weeks he was away, a beautiful postcard with his chickenscratch affection on the back would float into my mailbox at The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. E-mail hadn't really taken hold way back then, and there were no such things as internet cafés, texting, cheap cellphones, or godforbid, the magic of Skype. So I had only these slips of paper to remind me of his existence.

Nearly every one of the postcards featured paintings or sculptures of beautiful women from the museums of Western Europe. On the back of each one, he would tell me the ways in which that woman reminded him of me before describing his day's wild adventures. The particular one he just found was Toulouse-Lautrec, "La Blanchisseuse," (the laundress.) At that point I had not yet started to do anybody's laundry but my own, so I imagine that it was the set of her jaw and the intensity of her gaze that drew him in. The way she looks out the window, towards something that we can not see and she can not stop seeing.

When I saw that card yesterday, I totally swooned. But Bill quickly reminded me that at the time, I found his postcards sort of irritating. He said that I told him that I wanted him to stop looking at art, and look instead at me. That I wanted him to stop tormenting me with news of his wild times seven thousand miles away. One of the postcards featured the broad marble female back of a Rodin sculpture, and Bill wrote to me about how much he missed my shoulders. When we managed to talk to each other on the phone, I lit into him. "If you love my shoulders so much," I told him, in distress, "then why did you break up with me, and then leave for the whole spring and summer? You're not doing anything over there; why don't you just get on a plane, and come back!"

It's strange, really, that while he broke up with me before he left, his postcards described all the ways in which he did seem to be pining away for me. And as it turned out, I took better advantage of the breakup he initiated than he did. You know what they say: "if you can't be with the one you love..." I suppose on some level I was glad for him that he was having all these wild adventures. And I wasn't precisely unhappy about the wildness of my own. But mostly it felt complicated, and messy, and pointless. I just wanted him to come home.

In retrospect, I realize that this series of cards constitute one of the most romantic gestures that has ever passed between us. They were written at a rare moment of high drama, at least in part out of guilt. They were received less than graciously, and may have exaggerated the similarities between me and the subjects of the great paintings of Europe. But now it seems fairly astonishing that he took the time, nearly every day, to write to me.

We were young then, and break-up or no break-up, we were seriously in love. Each card landing in my mailbox was a telegram from forever. Back then I read his letters with profoundly mixed feelings. But now, whenever I come across one of them, and I read the rawness of his feeling on the page, the words and the images never fail to melt me.

Enough messy backstory: I should return to the card he found yesterday, and why it gives him the last word. The actual painting hangs in Paris, but this card he sent from the Piazza San Spirito in Florence, a beautiful square surrounding a spare, gorgeous church. In contrast to the wild rococco of the rest of the city, the church there looks downright modern, even New-Mexico pueblo plain, in its clean lines and lack of crenellated detail. It is on a much smaller scale than the Duomo, but still it leaves you breathless. It was the first place Bill dragged the three of us when we visited Firenze, and reading his postcard, I could see why: it had been there, in that square, that he had seen and predicted our future. The past and the present telescoped together as I read his familiar scrawl:

"I love this painting. Please let me have this card back. She's smart, hard-working, yet very sensual and enigmatic, a lot like you. I am sitting in Piazza San Spirtio in Florence, having finally broken away from what seemed like a ubiquitous throng of other tourists. You would like San Spirito. It's simple and graceful. I took some photos for you. I also photographed a meat market because it was packed in so beautifully. The counter-people thought I was a major loon but were also flattered, I think. 22 days left. This trip has been too short. We are going to live in a foreign country for at least 6 months. I'm sliding away from allowing CAREER to run my life. I've even thought about bagging my summer job so we could live with Alain in Paris.

Maybe next summer…."

Here on this card was the outline of our entire magical year, predicted like a tarot card from eighteen years in the past. He would see the best in me, and love me unceasingly, even when I least deserved it. While the romantic postcards would stop when he returned, the prosaic, daily act of creation that is our marriage would begin. (I would also start, à La Blanchisseuse, doing a whole lot more laundry than I ever had before, but that's a different story…)

We would travel, always seeking ways to break away from the throngs of other tourists, and he would find us great places to visit. We would become obsessed with the way that European markets arrange the food in ways both beautiful and appetizing; and yes, the people we met on our travels would find our ardent admiration of their foodstuffs both loony and flattering.

But I most love the flat-out statement he makes here: "We are going to live in a foreign country for at least 6 months." He put it out there, so long ago, as clear fact. And as it turns out, he also predicted the reason why we would leave. As it turned out, we waited until we both felt we needed to slide away, at least for a little while, from allowing some bully all-caps CAREER to run our lives.

His wistful "Maybe next summer…" turned into a wait of nearly two decades, but no matter. We got there. We were there in the Piazza San Spirito, drinking rosé while the girls sipped Orangina. The past became the future he had predicted. And, like a lot of Bill's crazy ideas turn out to be, it was good. Really good.

And now I realize that that future has once again become the past. The post-script of this entire love letter we have written to one another and to our children was written nearly two decades ago, packed away in a box with the rest of our memories, and has emerged in the here and now, when everything again feels new and open.

Sometimes my life feels random and pointless, a series of false starts and doubling-back. But this card from the past draws a through-line from the past through every moment that Bill and I have spent together, right up until now, unpacking our new/old house.

I like to imagine that I am the big picture gal of this family -- getting us to places on time, and making sure things get organized and accomplished. We pretend, sometimes, that Bill's role is to make it all interesting and fun, adding the icing on the cake of my rule-bound approach to things.

But this postcard reveals the bigger picture. This postcard proves that it is -- and always has been -- Bill who is truly steering this ship. Wait long enough, and the truth wills out. In the glacial pace of decades in a relationship, Bill's powerful desires often trump my momentary insistences. "We will live overseas for at least 6 months," he writes, from the fog of the past. And then, so many years later, we do. We escape the throngs. We walk away from that all-caps imperative. We stare into the eyes of our children for long stretches of time. We take pictures of the churches, the snails, the sunsets, our friends, and the beautiful stacks of meat. Just for a moment, we put down the laundry; we stare, intent on the beauty glowing right in front of our eyes.

Fait Accompli

2010-09-02T13:40:00.012+02:00

Today is the last of fifteen moves in fifteen months. Our major house renovation is complete enough (on time, no less) for the strongmen from Big Apple Movers to bring all our furniture back from wherever they have been keeping it. This morning I'll putter around, swiffering the corners a few more times, and then be drowned in heavy packed boxes at noon. By evening, I will be exhausted and dusty. I'll make sure the coffee maker is where I can find it in the morning. I'll put some sheets on the beds. I'll settle the girls down to sleep, then close my eyes in my very own bed.

Back home, where we once again belong.

Last night we barbequed and drank French wine at Bud and Toni's house, just a few blocks away. The kids ran around screaming like ninnies, like little children rather than the suddenly-big girls and boys they have become. We sat for a solid hour at the table and laughed, soaking in the luxury of friendship after a long day of work for Bud and Toni and Sean, and of a massive backyard weed-clean-out for Bill and me. Toni put fresh cucumbers in the water, and we ate corn and tomatoes, savoring the summer food of this part of the world.

We talked about school starting next week, and I didn't even think of the French panic over la rentrée. We talked about whether or not we actually would end up joining the Food Co-op, and I didn't suddenly lose myself in a reverie about the cheese counter at Intermarché. I've been even more in love with our brownstone than I was with La Bastide, and more fascinated by the city streets than gripped with memories of the rosemary bushes and juniper berries on Chemin des Devansaux.

Really, truly, home. Here to stay. Adventure over. The Word-a-day website sent me, via email this morning: "fait accompli: noun. A thing accomplished. A done deal."

At the end of dinner, Bud pulled out Toni's computer to show us their slideshow of photos from their trip to Paris and then to see us in Aups. There were the boys clowning around in front of the Louvre. There were the grey stones of Paris apartment buildings. There was a grainy video Sam took of the whole family walking down a street in the Marais, past a little navy Citroën Deux Chevaux. "I love Paris, I love Paris, I love Paris" Zeke singsonged, as he grinned and danced around, happy as a little American could be.

And there we all were, dying eggs in the kitchen of the Bastide. And there we were, at the egg festival in Tourtour. The kids were playing with Jessica and Gerard's puppy Frieda, and riding on the donkeys, and popping up and down on the trampoline in the bright sunshine on that high plain. It was five months ago, but it felt like a lifetime. It felt as though we were looking at photos we somehow captured from a particularly detailed and lovely dream. I know it was real, that it was the time of our lives. But it feels so far away I'm not quite sure how to live in that part of my brain and this one, too.

The past is past. Can't be there and here at the same time. As we unpack our house, we'll pack away our adventure. You might think I would be sad, but really I am way more than ready to stop moving and settle in deeply. It doesn't feel like loss to let what was go, and to lean forward into what is.

I like beginnings. I love the infinite promise of September. I like settling in, rolling up my sleeves, and laying the groundwork for something new. I don't dwell a lot on what was; when I see an ending on the horizon, I usually like to rush through it as fast as I can, looking for the next fertile field to plant and dream over. My magic words are all about what's next: evolve, build, ask, think, develop, grow.

And then, there is the most magic word of them all: home. I build a nest anywhere I find myself. This year, I became expert at making home out of a few pieces of luggage, a toothbrush, and a sofabed, trusting in the dinnertime bounty of whomever had taken us in. But this is our real home. As we settle in back here, we're going to take it slow, and get it right. We're going to put those little felt circles on the bottoms of our chairs to keep from scratching the floor. We're going to set the rugs in the right places, with just the right pads underneath. We might eat off of paper plates until the dishwasher is hooked up, but I'm going to line up the coffee mugs and cereal bowls just so on their shelves.

The last moving day. Fait accompli. Onward and forward to whatever awaits.

How I know it's time to go back to school

2010-08-31T16:20:00.002+02:00

The image quality on my iphone is not great indoors, but here is Abigail, standing on her head while reading A Wind in the Door.

Clearly, it is time for me to send her off to third grade.

Nomads of New England

2010-08-13T17:21:00.008+02:00

A year ago today we were settling our heads down on the deep pillows of a bed and breakfast in Dublin, too excited to sleep before our big trip to Nice. We had cut our ties to before, and were heading off to who knows what. We faced that future with our old eyes. Bill was not just glass- half-full about things, but glass overflowing, certain he would find adventure at every turn. I was on the lookout for danger, steeped in regret and caution and fear. Grace was pretty sure she would find treasure and beauty, while Abigail hoped for nothing more than a steady diet of candy and TV.

A year later, we're back in America, and still wandering, deeply changed by what we found. Now I have started to roll with the punches, and itch for new experiences almost as I crave the nest. Bill, having pitched all four of us up a big steep hill, is now slowly rolling back down towards the familiar. Our world has widened, but also contracted. We know that everything that really matters is here in the bonds among the four of us, in the family we create. This won't be true forever, certainly, but it's our new center of gravity. For now, who we are comes from right here, wherever we may be.

Grace did, in fact, find treasure and beauty, but along a windier path than any of us had expected. Abigail still loves her candy and TV, but also became the most patriotic child in America, with a serious Varoise accent and a hankering for the smell of thyme, the taste of duck, and massive squirts of Verviene eau de cologne.

And now, for the next three weeks or so, we are still on the road. We travel by Toyota rather than by Camel, finding new places to lay our grateful, weary heads every week or so. We're home-rich, rather than homeless, although none of these homes is ours. So far we have hit all of New England aside from Maine (I have an extremely rare allergy to our nation's 23rd state.)

We'll be back to some sort of routine in Brooklyn no later than the first of September. Until then, here are snapshots of some of our campgrounds (literal and figurative) and our fellow-travelers.

Friends since birth at Zealand Falls Hut in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

I forget the name for this rather adorable sort of relation: the children of first cousins. Second cousins, perhaps? At any rate, here are my cousin's kids, with one of mine, Little Lake Sunapee

Sisters at Little Lake Sunapee. (See, I really am taller. As long as I stand on a big rock.)

The whole gang, Zealand Falls Hut. This backpack and matching hiker-headband combination makes me cooler than I otherwise am.

City Cousin BFF's, Spring Lake. I love these children nearly as much as I love my own.

All in the family, at Rhoda's Pond. I have a second photo, where Finn's tongue is pointing the other way. Just as cute.

Finny-Foo, during a Menemsha sunset. He and Abigail were playing a pretty rough and tumble game of tag, but nobody fell in the bay.

Look very closely to see the sliver of a half of a moon, above the clouds.

I didn't realize, until I posted all these portraits of happiness, that every single one was taken on a gloriously sunny day, within spitting distance of still, or flowing, or deep salty water. Now that's some kind of summer.

So much for all the danger I worried so hard about. I still have plenty of cranky moods, but I'm not sure anymore why. For, as it turns out, there has been an oasis nearly everywhere we have needed one, each brimming with plenty of cool, clear water.

So were these safe harbors always here, waiting for us to find them?

How is it that we have only just learned how to look?

Memory, Menemsha

2010-08-06T08:32:00.008+02:00

We're here all together for a week's beach vacation, celebrating my in-laws' fiftieth wedding anniversary -- Gus and Linda, with their kids and grandkids, in a rented house on the Vineyard. We've cooked big meals and eaten on the wide wooden deck overlooking Rhoda's Pond. We have canoed around the brackish lake, bought sunflowers and eggrolls at the farmer's market, and all gone swimming at various beaches. Today was the only rainy day of the week, for all of two hours maybe, so we headed into town to go window-shopping and buy bags of gumdrops and licorice. I watched Abigail ride the Carousel in Oak Bluffs. She looked so focused, studiously grabbed at the rings each time she passed; clearly, she's just as susceptible as I am to the habit of turning life into a project rather than a game. "I got one every time," she told me, proudly. "It was easy. I got a whole big stack."

Tonight we drove to Menemsha, a little fishing town that faces each night's sunset. We ate lobster and steamers and fish tacos together on the porch of a restaurant, surrounded by other big (presumably happy?) families on vacation in their Wellfleet t-shirts and summer tans. It wasn't simply hot, but so stickily warm that we were nearly sweating as we sat still, so the grownups drank Var rosé on ice and the kids downed cups of fresh lemonade.

I write this all down, with every detail fresh in my memory: the taste of the sweet clams in the butter, the rosy shade of the setting sun on our faces, the graying shingles of the houses, the weatherbeaten American flag down at the end of the pier. I write it all down, knowing that this too will pass. It's midsummer now, but on days like this I can't help but remember that it is so much later than I think.

My memory feels to me like it has been fraying a bit at its far edges, for reasons I can only pretend to understand. Whereas once I felt like I never lost anything -- a name, a place, an idea and its origins -- now I sometimes feel like the past is a soap bubble, popping just as I reach for it. I tell myself that the details are dissolving for some reason or another: like the dislocation of all this travel. Like the impossible fullness of a life's experience. Like I'm suddenly here at forty, my brain is old, and there is just too much to recall. Like the new warm swelling of my heart is somehow overcoming the old, cold sharpness of my mind.

We walked down to the end of the pier and looked over the fishing boats, across an uninhabited green spit of sand, and towards the setting sun. This little place was almost impossibly perfect -- not a Disney fake version of a fishing village, but the thing itself. It was messy in places and worn in others, yet still so beautiful it might have been composed by an artist. You could look through one window of a blue-grey shack, entirely hung with fishing lures, through to the window on the other side, and onwards toward the water beyond. At the end of the pier, some awful destroyed hunk of an old building was slowly rusting into the salt water. We ate soft ice-cream-cones by some big grey rocks, but they dripped faster than the kids could keep up. The hot wind blew their hair around and spattered drops of melting ice cream on their shirts and onto the dusty ground.

As I am writing all this, I want to burn it into my memory. It is three hours of one day among the hundreds we have shared together, the thousands over the years, the tens of thousands we can only hope to have if we're as steadfastly lucky and wise as Linda and Gus. Today we have each other in a way that feels perfect. It feels like forever, but as I have started to learn, the best of our days fly away against our will. The sun keeps setting. The kids grow up. We ourselves grow older, and the warm wash of our summer memories together will slosh and dilute and slowly fade away.

And that's only if things go well. Fifty years worth of sunsets is almost too much for anyone to hope for.

I have set up my computer so that every five minutes a new photograph shows up as the screensaver behind whatever I'm doing. There, behind my word processing or pointless internet search emerges one random shot from the over seven thousand images stored away on it. A blue sky and soft blonde grass from a hillside in France. Hayden and Zeke, eating hotdogs on Katie's porch four years ago. A sea of a hundred freezing people at Obama's inaguration. My Dad's seventieth birthday. Mom and Dad's anniversary. Field Day. Full Moon. Christmas morning. Each time a new shot appears, unbidden, I'm back in some other happy memory, some other place elsewhere. Each one is an instant memory, but arrives with the shock of the unfamiliar: How could I ever have forgotten that?

On our drive home, we wound slowly around the twisting North Road through Tisbury, back towards Lambert's Cove. We put on music that made us all happy, bouncing around to Hawaii 5-O and Vida la Viva and eventually Abigail's other favorite, the Black Eyed Peas. As we pulled into the driveway, last summer's inescapable hit was playing. We turned it way up and got out of the car to dance on the lawn under a crabapple tree. When Gus and Linda, Laura and Finn drove up, they danced with us, too, just for a few minutes. The loud song echoed out into the quiet woods. I got a feelin…that tonight's gonna be a good, good night…

That song has played in a whole lot of places, on a whole lot of nights, almost certainly too many, on the whole. But for tonight it was just ours, as we jumped around on the fallen fruit, all three generations dancing together.

We all went inside, and the kids got cleaned up and ready for bed. Abigail read Finn a story, while Grace sat on the sofa with us and giggled. She's been a shaky and tentative these past few days, in the way she sometimes can be, but tonight she was fully herself. Maybe it was the ice cream. Maybe it was the dancing. But we were glad to have her back in full form. We sat together and made plans for our next day, and then all drifted off to our corners of the house to read, or watch a movie, or fall asleep. I haven't been sleeping all that well these past few nights, but the storms and the wind had finally started to cool the house, and as the cold air came in from below and the warm air drifted out the window of our sleeping loft, I fell in. Deep.

Maybe it was an hour. Or two. Or only fifteen minutes, but suddenly I saw Grace standing there, right next to the bed. She was smiling at me, just on the edge of speech. I started to sit up, started to ask her what she needed, and just as the words started to form between us, she dissolved into thin air. A ghost. A trick of sleep. I knew then she was down in her little twin bed, not there in the loft next to mine, but her presence had felt so real. She was there, and just as quickly she was gone.

Like all those memories I never write down. Like all those summer nights. Like all the photographs I never thought to take. Like all of these moments and days and years.

Sleepover

2010-07-28T17:28:00.006+02:00

Since coming back to the U.S. after so much time away, I've managed to finagle overnight invitations from nearly all of my close friends and most of my family, sleeping on their aerobeds or sofas or commandeering their children's rooms for a night or two or five. Since my own house is still in dusty chaos, and I have no permanent home myself, I've borrowed each of theirs in turn. In the months of June and July, I've slept in no fewer than a dozen different beds, none of them my own. Perhaps this is hospitality karma: after trying to learn how to be a more gracious host, during our time away in France, I've suddenly become a nearly full-time guest.

While I was gone, I missed each one of my friendships so very, very much. I had the interweb, of course, and even that magic free phone line from the Bastide, and we slowly got to know our lovely multinational gaggle of new friends. "Make new friends, but keep the old," we all sang back in Girl Scouts. "One is silver and the other's gold." But the further I tipped towards feeling connected there, the harder it felt for me to cross the ocean of absence and feel close to my golden girls. My everyday stories felt too flip, the good stuff was already in the blog, and the bigger, harder topics sometimes felt too hard to broach. It wasn't just the fact that Skype kept freezing that made it hard to connect. It was also that I was changing, and so were they, and the old patterns needed to be revised.

As I discovered on my five-state tour of sleepovers these last few weeks, there is nothing like 24-hour contact to bring you back in sync with somebody you have seriously missed. Spending an hour or so over morning coffee, with my face all smushy and hair unwashed, seems way more intimate than getting together for dinner. I've borrowed my friends' showers, their towels, their shampoo, drunk their beer and luxuriated in their A/C on sweltering nights. I've been invited into their inner sanctums, the places where they are most themselves, and where they have let me do the same. I've seen their housekeeping way up close, checking out their choices in tile and carpet and sheets. I swear, I'm not just being nosy. Renovation is always on my mind these days, and I sort of can't think about anything else.

(That Sleepover Hussy, I'm sure you're thinking, bragging about how many invites she has scored herself. So when is she gonna just show up at my house and use my good shampoo without asking?)

The sleepover level of intense intimacy in friendships among adults can feel the tiniest bit complicated. As much as I love each one of these women -- truly, madly, deeply, differently -- it's a little weird to just insert myself so fully into their domestic spaces. Sometimes I worry (as I am wont to do) that I'm overstepping, oversharing, or being boring by repeating random details from the New York Times or retelling some France story I've already beat to death. I want to talk about what is most important without stepping on any of the sore points that might sting. I don't want to wake up too early or sleep too late or make noise at bad times. I want to read for at least an hour every day (I go nuts if I don't) but not be too anti-social. I want to play with their kids or their pets or their stuff without throwing off the routine. I want to give my friends their space and still greedily gobble up their presence. I don't want to stay too long. I don't want to leave.

Presumably there is a reason that grownups with their own homes don't generally go on quite as many sleepovers as I have these past few weeks. We need our private spaces, even in the context of our closest friendships, and the best and most lasting friendships of our adult lives have at least a few good fences we respect by keeping in good repair.

But mostly all these days and nights with my friends have been reminding me, yet again, that I am seriously, seriously blessed in the friendship department. I've spent all this time away, and they welcome me back. I've spent all those years being overworked and under-attentive, yet these people I love still love me back. Enough to make me strong coffee with milk in the morning before I have brushed my teeth. Enough to give me a set of spare keys and tell me I can come back whenever I want. Enough to let me see how beautiful the simplest things of life can be when you really look closely, far too late in the evening, and in the brightest early morning light.

Stranger in a Familiar Land

2010-07-20T12:39:00.008+02:00

Now that Bill is back to himself, all is right in our house. He's back to playing bass riffs on his bass guitar, and creating elaborate plans for New Hampshire adventures, and finding pleasure in runs and swimming and the taste of food. But for awhile there, things weren't so simple. Bill was in crisis, in mourning, in a sort of eddy of culture shock that took him weeks to escape.

At the time, it was too raw to write about. It's not exactly the kind of thing you want to write to the world: my formerly dear husband is miserable and behaving like a Eurobrat. I pretty much clammed up myself back in January when the miserable one was me. When it comes to writing, the past tense makes it easier -- "he was in a phase," rather than "he is in a state." He was in a state -- New Hampshire, the one he loves more than any other -- but it wasn't helping. He missed those other hills and valleys of home.

When somebody's in a bad mood, they're always casting around for reasons why. If that somebody is me, I tend to try to pin the mood on just about anything other than the actual cause of my distress. For example, maybe the weather is making me miserable, and I blame it on the Bush administration. Most days I choose the things and people closest to hand to blame, just one of the lovely qualities that make me such a wonderful wife and mother. Only rarely, and in retrospect, can I figure out what was causing all that chafing.

After we got back, Bill kept trying to find the pebble in his shoe. For awhile it was me, and then it was the impending threat of returning to employment after all the months of happy sloth. But soon enough, we hit on the real culprit: Var Withdrawl. He couldn't really be happy here in this world while he was missing that other one.

Var Withdrawl looked at first like plain old snobbery: France was Great. America was Gross. Like the night we went to get soft ice cream cones. You would think that a trip to the Dairy Twirl would remind one of everything wonderful about America. This one has adorable high-school girls scooping ice-cream, including a flavor called Moose Tracks, and two different colors of sprinkles for the cones. We've always loved this place, so familiar and wholesome.

We parked, then ordered up "smalls," smug in the way we have downsized our appetites over the course of the year. Still, the cones were three times the size of any of the cones we were served Over There.

The cones were mushy-delicious, soft-serve, but all of the sudden it felt all wrong. First, we were eating standing up, in an enormous lake of asphalt parking lot. Second, the people around us seemed very strange. One couple was eating while standing right next to their enormous Sport Utility Vehicle. The car was on, with the radio booming. They were wearing something like pajamas or athletic clothing, although from the bulgy girth of their bodies it was clear they did not actually own these togs for the purpose of anything like exercise.

But what really got Bill's goat about this pair? Well, they appeared to be sharing their enormous buckets of ice cream (no "small" sizes for this couple) with their dog, a Great Dane. They would take a huge bite, then hold it up to the back window so that Marmaduke could stick his head out of the A/C and take a lick of his own.

I just sort of chuckled at the scene of gross over-consumption, but I thought Bill was going to melt down into a puddle of chocolate goo.

This was not an isolated incident. The next day, he walked into town and came back raving. "It was three in the afternoon, yet the town was full of all these people walking around sucking on things. Coolattas, donuts, bagels, hotdogs. Every single person there looked like a giant hungry baby, their maws full of nipple-topped bottles. Why can't Americans grow up and eat like normal people? French people? At a table. At mealtimes. Without their dogs???"

For a few weeks, all his pro-Var, anti-American screeds were getting on my nerves. Or, more accurately, his nerves were getting on my nerves. Everything was bad, and therefore we were somehow bad, for being happy here. I might have felt lost in the supermarket. He was lost just about everywhere, a stranger in his own home.

But like I said, up above, things are better now. The world has righted itself, and Bill is back to his multi-national affection for this big old goofy weird world. In honor of his return to "normal," I thought I would interview him and ask him to tell us all about what he misses most.

Launa: So, you miss the food.

Bill: Yes. No. It's more than that. I really mostly miss sitting down at meals for more than twenty minutes. It's very difficult to get this to happen. I've tried this on several occasions, by cooking big delicious meals for people, and it seems that inevitably they have already had a hefty snack on their way over. Or they want to lay on the sofa while they eat. Or sit in a car. Even at restaurants: they're already setting the table for the next people while you're still digesting what you ordered.

At my family's famous Family fourth of July, all I wanted to do was have everybody sit down at a long table and have a nice long eating and drinking session. Instead, I was American Bill, and led multiple games of capture the flag, softball, croquet, tag, swimming. I love both places, but I didn't like being torn. I also just wanted the kids to go off on their own, like they do in France.

Launa: Well, not all Americans "get" to spend as much time with their kids as we have with ours. When you're back to work, you won't necessarily want them to go away.

Bill: I know. That will change. Probably. But remember those French parents, who only got involved if a child was bleeding? That seemed so sane.

I also really really miss all of the personal interactions when buying things: I particularly miss my Lady at the Vineyard. That long, cool, lovely earthy woman who would sell me that incredible red wine. I don't remember her name, but her whole persona is entangled with the taste of Domaine de St. Jean de Villecroze Reserve 2007. I miss Chateau Beatrice, too -- that range of red wine that is cheap, but good. Not fancy.

The farmer's market was a huge bummer here. My mother was being really nice, and took me to the Farmer's Market in town so we could pretend to be at the Marché, but the Farmer's Market there seemed to be missing food. There was lots of little jars of canned stuff, but I missed the Artisan Rotisserie. And the dinde, (turkey.) Remember the lunch we would have? Dinde, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits. Goat cheese. Beaufort? Herbs?

Launa: Yes, sweetheart. I remember. I just had it a few weeks ago. With some rosé.

Bill: Speaking of rosé, what happened to drinking in the middle of the day? I miss that too.

Launa: I know. You hate it that Americans dress like babies and suck on bottles, but you really want your nap.

Bill: Here, in America, there seem to be no naps for anybody over the age of 2. This makes people crankier than they should be, and pretty much kills the concept of a carafe of wine at lunch. We used to have a nice two-hour lunch in the middle of the day, have a few glasses of wine, and then go to sleep.

Everybody in the world feels tired then, but only the French people do the logical thing and just lie down. Even when we are by ourselves out here all day, and still unemployed, we can't seem to do that. We don't eat the long lunch and go to sleep.

And that's because we have to be Americans here.

Launa: I know, sweetie. It's true. We're Americans. It says so in our passports.

Bill: I even really miss the hiking there. It's just different. I miss the fit between the manmade stuff and the nature: there is a different fit between people and the environment there. Not necessarily better, but a Tetris like connection. Like, when there should be a tower on a hill in the Var, somebody has had the sense to build one. The Tower is exactly where it should be put. And the things are made of the materials from the place. All the colors are very similar.

I miss looking at Moissac, because it fits perfectly into the hillside that it is on.

I miss all the fresh water everywhere. Drinking fountains. Lavoirs. The Var is blessed with an abundance of delicious fresh water, free in the center of every town.

Launa: But do you miss the open sewers? Even in fancy towns, like Arles? That was so gross.

Bill: (pausing, longer than you might imagine, to think.) No, strangely. I do miss the other smells. It doesn't smell here, unless they are cutting the grass.

I even miss the town planning. When I go to a town, I'd like there to be a parking lot and a nice bathroom and cold spring water right there. Put the car away, go to the bathroom, get a drink. And you can do this on both ends of the town.

Why do we have fountains here you can't actually drink from?

I sort of in an odd way miss the spooky stuff from the Var, too. I got into the habit of sneaking up on the stray cats and trying to scare them on my way home. I miss the guy with the accordion with the cat leashed to his neck.

There were definitely more bizarre characters there. The Puppet Lady. The jolly vegetable man and his wife. The beautiful earthy lady who ran the agricultural coop, her husband David, and their daughter Alice.

People had that great habit of stooping down, pulling up, and eating things right out of the ground - asparagus, raspberries, rocket, dandelion greens, chestnuts, wild onions, wild garlic, rosemary, thyme. Or Gerard's truffles.

At this point in the interview, I was called away by some child or another, probably to fetch yet another snack, which was definitely not made of truffles. I thought perhaps we would resume the interview later, but Bill grabbed the computer and started typing his own memories, in the form of a free-associative list. And here I do apologize. If you haven't been there, this isn't going to make a whole lot of sense. If you have, just take a nice deep draw of this bong-hit of Bill-style Provençal memories:

I miss: (Bill wrote)

The Music. Our trips to L'Endroit. Dancing with Cyril, the only Rastafarian for miles. My funk-a-delic bass teacher Janique. My rock/folk band with the Communist Town Mayor on lead guitar.

Paris. And just about everything associated with it.

The Animals. Hundreds of stray cats. The white Pyrenee Alpha-sheepherding dog. Also the smart little black and white sheepherding dogs. Come to think of it, I even miss the French-dog-naughty-I-am-escaping-fast-trot they do when they know they have been bad.

French tempests in a teapot: Should we cancel bisous to fight H1N1? Should we outlaw smoking entirely? What is the proper way to make pastis? Where should we go in Morocco? What's the best way to cook duck?

The Towns. The Offices de Tourisme. The old guys with the blue high-visibility Capri pants who sit in front of the church. All the medieval stone buildings. The plane trees that look like old women's hands reaching out of the grave. The recurring fete with different names: tastings of specialities of the regions, traditional dancing, wine, endless hanging out, important elders milling about.

All those Places. Lac St. Croix. Grand Bessillon and Petit Bessillon. The historical monuments dotted all around the Var, mostly to the dead teenagers in 1919, or the Maquisard Resistance fighters of WWII. Caves and troglodyte dwellings. Scary religious shrines tucked away everywhere. Variations in geography - the Mountains, the Med, the Camargue, the Luberon, the Massif Centrale, Les Gorges du Verdon all within reach of Aups. Les Cretes. The small windy Var roads with death ditches on either side. Why are our roads so fat and straight with giant shoulders? Are we stupid? Can't we drive? Do we think we are going to live forever anyway?

The ruined fort/chapel up the hill from Bastide de la Loge. The Bastide and everything in it and about it. I loved living inside all that Collins family history and the incredible collection and taste of Liz and Jessica.

The Food. Again, and of course. Fresh eggs, rabbit, goose from Gerard and Jessica. The consistently delicious mid-level brasserie meal to be found everywhere. Salade de Berger. CHEESE. The crazy hippie farm with the dead animal sculptures. Or Aperitifs, like kir, super strong homemade fruit and berry liqueurs - we don't seem to have these.

Our friends. Weekend days at Jess and Gerard or Laurent and Mathilde. Those endless hours laughing and talking with Anna-Maria and Dermot and Lajla and Paula at the Marché. All the children.

And, almost with every breath, I miss the incredible air.

And, with that, Bill put down the computer, somehow cleansed. Since writing that list, about a week ago, he's been even more himself. He's still a little testy now and then when people won't sit down to a real meal, but he's started to love this home just as well as his memories of the old one.

Perhaps it just took awhile to get it out of his system, and writing it all down felt a little like detox. For Bill, there was definitely an addictive edge to all those long draws of Provençal memories: smelling the rosemary, the thyme, the air. Eating olives, going out and looking at the sunset. Drinking a beer or three with Dermot. Hanging out at Jess and Gerard's house eating goat face. And flirting with the lady selling peaches.

I'm missing France, too, but mostly I'm glad to have my husband back all to myself. Perhaps world travelers get used to this feeling -- of being comfortable everywhere, and yet a stranger at the same time. Bill's theory is that our brains, deep down, just aren't able to adapt to the pace of modern travel. The lizard brain buried deep inside all that cortex takes days, or weeks, or months to fully absorb the subtle changes in light and heat and landscape. Until that happens, until the deepest structures of ourselves catch up with the pace of change, we remain strangers. Even to ourselves.

So now that we've got that out of the way, who's up for a visit to Dairy Twirl?

"Playdate" is a stupid word

2010-07-17T22:18:00.001+02:00

As we drove to Brooklyn on Tuesday, I illegally sent a text from my phone to Abigail's best school friend's mom. We were coming into town for a few days, and could Abigail and Viveca spend the day together?

Viveca's mom is pretty much the portrait of mommy cool, so I didn't worry too much about the last minute notice. And Viveca is pretty much the coolest friend an eight year old could imagine, so I hoped she would be free. If only for my sake, because it was time for a long-overdue day of little girl fun.

Abigail hadn't seen Viveca in over six months. Most eight year old kids don't have email, so it's not like they would be able to manage to keep in touch awfully well through mere words. Kids need presence to connect, and Skype doesn't really do it. Abigail had been asking for this, in more or less patient language, for an awfully long time.

I've wracked my brain on this, but I am pretty sure that I have never spent an entire day just enjoying being with Abigail and another kid, with nothing at all else to do. Shocking, I know, and perhaps horrifying for those parents who find ways to make themselves more available to their children. So it was long overdue in this sense as well -- nearly nine years overdue.

Viveca was in fact free, and so were Abigail and I, and so the three of us set off. We went shoe shopping, bought Gatorades, run through the sprinklers in the park, found and re-purposed an abandoned scooter, ate at the local cool pizza place, saw a funky movie, and ultimately finished the day with a swim in the local school pool. They traded silly bandz and opinions on Justin Bieber. We went to the paint store and I let them take as many paint swatches as they wanted while I sought out exactly the perfect shade of peachy yellow for the living room (Benjamin Moore Lighthouse 2018-60, if you're wondering.) They begged me like crazy to let them ride the mechanized horse outside of the candy store and the mechanized alligator outside of the pizza place. And I let them.

In exchange, they laughed at all my jokes and good-naturedly berated me for my bad parenting manners. They made me the happiest mother in America, just for this normal nothing of a day.

Our day together had all the hallmarks of the best parenting moments: it was everything, and it was nothing, all wrapped up into one. The kids knew it was special ("This is the best playdate we've ever had!" VIveca very nicely gushed at one point) but it wasn't so out of the ordinary that they couldn't just be their goofy selves.

I think I'm going to like this next phase of my life. I know there will be awful moments of child rudeness, and crushingly boring moments of not-enough-to-do. I'll have to negotiate the unfamiliar social landscapes of the Parents' Association, the food co-op, the subtle ways in which people greet and ignore one another at pick-up time at school.

But if my day with two excellent nearly-third graders is any sign, being a stay at home mom back in the city that I love is really going to be great. A little like the languor of my year off and away, but with more happening. Better movies. Stores with terrific shoes. More English. It's been a long wait, Abigail -- but you and me, we're almost home.

Just Sayin'

2010-07-17T21:28:00.002+02:00

Check out this New York Times article on French women.

Just another reason why I will never be French. Or be noticed
by French men. That, and the whole language thing.

Lost in the Supermarket

2010-07-08T19:53:00.004+02:00

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All / I take a box / And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens...

--Randall Jarrell, "Next Day"

"I'm all lost in the supermarket. I can not longer shop happily."

-- The Clash

I should have known that this day would come. Like the Clash and the nameless speaker of "Next Day," one of my all-time favorite poems about middle-age, I have lost my claim to mindless happy shopping -- the birthright of all Americans. What's worse, I have given it away in exchange for a hunk of cheese, and thus have nobody but myself to blame.

Flash back twelve months. July 2009, Bill and I had recently extracted our family from Brooklyn, where the only grocery options are Bleak, Bleaker, and the Byzantine systems of the Park Slope Food Coop. There are terrific greenmarkets, certainly, and the Fairway over in Red Hook, but those both demand a major commitment of time and planning. For the greenmarket, you can only buy what you can carry on the subway, and they don't sell Cheer, or Joy, or All. And for Fairway, you have to drive, park, negotiate the chaos of other crazed shoppers, shuttle your grocery bags up multiple flights of stairs, and then re-park the damn car somewhere in the neighborhood. Hardly something you can do every day when you just need a few pork chops and some peaches.

So when we got to New Hampshire's Upper Valley, home of the Hanover Food Coop, we thought we had died and gone to homemaker heaven. They had everything you can buy in America, and lots of it. They had little specialty sections, and a bulk food aisle, fancy artisanal dairy products and real beef. Unlike the Key Food on 7th Avenue, the store didn't smell like a long-abandoned port-a-san. And unlike the Park Slope Co-op, you didn't have to sign your life away to join.

And so we spent last summer in happy shopping bliss, grazing the snow peas, the clover honey, the organic soda spritzers, and the freeze-dried edamame pods and the polenta chips that taste like Bugles with a Ph.D.

And then came France. I stumbled there as a shopper, hard. Nothing in the supermarket looked familiar, and nothing came in an extra-large. All the words for things were different, so that it took me forever to find horseradish (raifort) and sour cream (crème fraiche, but only sort of) and toilet bowl cleaner (bleach is, I think, javel, although I left without ever being sure.) Do you miss those early days of this blog as much as I do? Yes? Well then, click here and take a stroll down Aisle Six of memory lane.

As the year unfolded, I learned a whole new way of living, which of course included a whole new way of shopping. Which of course required forgetting my old life and its ways, at least in part. Which leads me back to the disconnect I felt today.

I thought I had readjusted to the U.S. unscathed, but as it turns out, I was only pretending. You see, last weekend I went back to France. I know, it sounds ridiculous, just to jet off to France for four nights (one of them spent crammed into seat 42C on a British Airways 747) but it was terrific. I'm still working on writing about all of the nuances of this little tidbit of France, but the upshot was that I went there for Jessica and Gerard's wedding -- perhaps one of the most joyful celebrations I've ever attended, (aside from your wedding, of course, which was every bit as nice, except without a gypsy band, a circus tent, raspberries in the champagne, and a cheese course.)

I went back to Aups by myself, leaving Bill and the girls back home, and in between the parties and catching up with friends, I spent a lot of time just wandering my old haunts. The road up from the Bastide, where I would pick thyme and rosemary to put in the dinner. The marché, where I would get fresh apricots and asparagus and beets and carrots and dinde: food all the way through the vegetable alphabet. The boulangerie, the spice store, the place that sold only olive oil and wine.

And the Intermarché, which I eventually memorized. I nearly burst into tears when I saw all that rosé and chocolate and cheese. I waved my carte du fidelite and picked up a little wine and candy to take home in my luggage, plus a mushy round of Banon cheese, all runny and wrapped in oak leaves, and then ate the whole thing with a baguette in the courtyard of my hotel.

I had never realized it then, but I think I spent nearly every moment outside of the house that year procuring some particularly delicious sort of food from some specific place. I thought I was going to France, when really I was going grocery shopping.

But then I had to come back. It's nice to be here, and while we're still not back in Brooklyn, it feels a lot more settled to be here with no other major trips planned for the foreseeable future. In fact, it's not just nice. It's deeply, deeply good in a settled and happy way I had hoped it might be. Perhaps this is just because the kids are in camp, and I have some time -- and Bill -- all to myself, but I think this sense of bien-etre, wellbeing, has to do with the sense of being at home.

(Even so, Abigail keeps checking with us on this: "We're going to stay here, right Mommy?" She will even try to guilt us into letting her watch T.V. rather than go swimming, in the middle of a heatwave. "But I don't want to go to the Pond and swim! This family moves around way too much." We took her to France as a sweet little pixie of a seven-year old, and we brought back a master manipulator.)

So we're home, but there remains the business of adjusting back to shopping reality. The Hanover Food Co-op is just as wonderful as it ever was. It's me who has changed.

All the vegetables were stacked up in their usual, hopeful way, but for some reason they all just seemed cold and uninviting, as though none of them had ever seen a real farm. Fruit that could sit in my fridge for a week and move straight from unripe to pointless without ever aquiring flavor. Industrial-strength cucumbers. There was a bounty of choice, (plenty of it in plastic bags) but no straw panniers to put it in. I started to get a little disoriented.

I left, looking for sanctuary in the wine section. I said to Bill, "I'll just go over here to the wines and pick up a rosé."

He warned me in a gentle, coaxing voice, having already tried this, "There won't be any, sweetheart."

"OF COURSE there is rosé, I said," as though saying would make it so, and then set off to find it.

I kept pacing back and forth in front of the ports and shirazes and merlots, certain that if I scanned hard enough, that nice bottle of rosé would float off the shelf and into my waiting arms. It's only about 92 degrees here today, (not a life-threatening 103, like in New York) but is there anything else that anybody else wants to drink when it feels like this?

(Those of you who knew me when must be wondering: what happened to Launa, the Queen of Beer Drinkers? Dear old Launa, whose last name rhymes with Budweiser? Can't she just pull a Stella out of the fridge for old time's sake and just can it with this snobby rosé stuff? Short answer: no. At least not yet.)

I finally saw something pink, but then looked at the label and saw it was just some awful old Zinfandel. I had a nasty run-in with that stuff in the early 1990's, and it will never again cross my lips. I recoiled from the bottle as though from a semi-poisonous snake.

In the wine section I came up short, but in just about any other aisle I could hardly breathe. There were simply way too many options among packaged foods. I know that Americans are known to thrive on super sizing and rampant variety. I used to be that person. And now, when I look at all those different things, it makes my head hurt. All that Cheer. All that Joy. All that All.

All I wanted? A little clarity. A little less process. As Jarrell's poem goes on to say, quoting William James, "Wisdom is learning what to overlook." I would like the edicts of a thousand years of French culture to swoop in and organize the foodstuffs in a particular and specific way, and help me to wisely overlook.

I want fewer options.

I'm all lost.

It's a phase, I tell myself with one soothing, reassuring voice. Corn syrup and I had a vibrant, thriving relationship before, and we can rebuild that again. Jarred salsa is my friend. Olives are not the only fruit.

I'm all lost.

"FOOOOOOD SNOOOOOB!!!" some other awful voice shouts at me from within my own head. "You're full of pommes de terre and foolishness juice! Snap out of it, and pick up some of this nice guacamole for dinner!! Get yourself down to the store and buy some of America's favorite tropical fruit: Guar." (This voice is very bossy.)

I'm all lost.

The sanest, quietest voice tells me this: Get a grip, and make a little spaghetti with red sauce. There is no ill on this earth that can not be addressed with a nice plate of pasta.

I'm back. It's just my tummy that still hasn't quite returned.

We Like Good News

2010-07-01T17:21:00.002+02:00

In case you were staying up nights wondering, Grace's Lyme Test = Negative.

Death takes a holiday. Then gets back to work.

2010-06-30T16:50:00.003+02:00

So it turns out that Grace's little tick bite healed for a full week, then got all bumpy and weird and started to itch. There was no classic bullseye rash. But since Lyme Disease is bad enough that you treat it even when you're not sure, Grace's Brooklyn pediatrician told us to get her checked out.

To add to the medical fun I've been so enjoying this summer, this entailed yet another visit to the E.R. at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

You would suppose that in a civilized town like Hanover, New Hampshire, there might be a walk-in clinic for minor medical events like this one. If you had lived in any other developed nation for any length of time, you would confidently expect there to be something like the cabinet medicales in France, and expect to be able to pay twenty-two euros for the privilege of visiting it and getting a simple blood test.

You would be wrong. Instead, Grace and I were to take up space in an All-American E.R. for an hour and a half, and likely will pay several hundred dollars. This country is completely nuts, making its Emergency Room doctors take up all its slack.

We showed up just before dinner time on a Monday night, only to find the waiting room packed with distressed-looking people sitting under blankets in wheelchairs. Apparently Monday night, after work, is when all the injuries and illnesses of the weekend come in for attention. Nobody was actually bleeding from a gunshot wound in the waiting room (as we once discovered in the Jamaica, Queens E.R.) but a whole lot of people's grandparents looked pretty darn ill. The very nice lady at the intake counter suggested that we might have better luck early Tuesday morning, when sick people tended to be sleeping rather than showing up in droves to the hospital.

So the next morning, I dragged the girls out of bed as early as we could and showed up a little after 6:30 AM. Grace got her hospital bracelet, and went right into one of the little rooms to read and wait. Grace was pretty nervous, and started asking me a series of questions that revealed her vague and dire sense of what might be happening to her.

"What kind of parasites are inhabiting my body right now, Mommy?"

“What are all those tubes and dials on the wall for?”

"Is Lyme Disease like cancer?"

"How do you keep from getting cancer your whole life?"

“How does cancer kill you?”

Having been Grace's mother now for so long, I've gotten pretty good at offering reassuring, yet accurate answers to enormous questions about life and death. I keep it simple and boring, and point gently to the bright side of things, without lying to her about what's actually going to happen. I told her that a lot of people live for a long time, even when they do get cancer, and even gave her some examples of people she knows who have done so.

And today’s visit was a pretty simple matter, I told her. I said, I know that the ER is scary, and even a little bit scarier to you in particular, but all those tubes on the wall don’t mean that they will need those for you. They will use a small needle to take a little bit of blood out of your arm. They will either give you some antibiotic pills, or not. Since we were lucky enough to have noticed the tick, and since we were lucky enough to have good doctors to take care of us, you are going to be just fine. You do not have parasites. Or cancer.

(Which was all to say, without saying it in so many words: don't worry honey, even though we’re sitting in the ER for a simple blood test, you're not going to die. At least not today.)

She smiled a little half-smile, and we both quieted down to read our books and wait.

After a few minutes, I couldn't help but overhear a conversation going on in another room across the hall. We were screened by curtains, but the voices came right through.

First I heard a nurse talking on the telephone, friendly but matter-of-fact. Yes, she said, we need you to come right away. No, not later this week, that wouldn't be a good idea. Sir, I'm telling you as a daughter and as a nurse, it's important that you come here right now so that you can spend some quality time with your father. We've given him some medicine to slow the rise in his potassium levels, but they’re going to go back up very quickly. He wants to see you now. Before it is too late.

I'm no doctor, but I remember how my grandmother June died. She had lymphoma for a long time, but at the end, the tumor took her away on a sea of potassium. She was with us, lucid and clear and herself, and then she was gone. First in a coma, and then gone forever.

While I didn’t tell this to Grace, this is in fact how you die from cancer.

And this was in fact the phone call when somebody told this man's son he was about to lose his Dad.

"Would you like to talk to your father?" the nurse finally asked. "We've just explained what's happening to him, and he understands it all.”

I realized that I had been hoping that nurse had been talking out of earshot of the dying man with the reluctant son. No such luck.

But the father's voice sounded young and strong. He didn't weep, and he didn't curse his fate. He sounded resigned, and philosophical, and like he was talking about the weather. "It's all just happening faster than we thought, James. I'd really like to see you before I go." Eventually it seemed that James got the picture, as his father talked for just a few minutes before signing off. "So long," he said. I couldn’t help but start to weep.

After he and the nurse had lit that awful fire under poor James, they sat and talked for awhile. The nurse had clearly been there before, and she had no trouble letting him know what he was in for. She used his first name a great deal as she spoke, every chance she got. She was speaking straight into the window that had opened to his soul, no pity and no bullshit.

"You know, they say you do fifty percent of your lifetime of psychological learning right before you die. You're going to grow a lot today. Keep growing."

The man replied. “It’s really just so fast. And I had hoped to drag it out a little more, but it’s not to be. I was always a believer in destiny, and I guess this is just a part of it. “

They talked about some of the things he had done in his life. He had fought in Europe during the Second World War. He had sold insurance just outside of New York City for fifty years. After he retired, he and his wife had moved here for the quiet pace of life. She asked him if he’d like to go outside. Or if she could get him something to eat. She didn’t say it, but we all heard it: these were in fact his last chances to do either one.

The dying man was not weeping, but I still was. As silently as I could, and with my head sort of turned to the side so Grace wouldn't see. But she's a smart kid, and has super-hearing for any detail that alludes to illness or death.

She spoke as quietly as she could. "Why are you crying, Mom? Is it because that man is going to die today?" I could only nod.

After some time, at his request, the nurse dialed the phone so that the man could leave a message for his wife. The wife had just left, probably to get a little sleep or walk the dog or something, and she was going to arrive home to the voice mail message that this was his last day. The nurse left the room while he talked, but I still could overhear.

"We need you to come back right away, I guess." He talked for a little while longer, and I tried hard not to listen. After that, he was quiet, except for some little noises in his throat for what felt like a long time. When I poked my head out to go check on Abigail in the waiting room, he called out to me.

Our curtain had been shut, but his was half open. He was holding the phone in one hand. I realized that those little noises were his way of trying to get somebody's attention without his being too demanding. He was a lot older than his voice had sounded.

"Miss," he said, calling to me. "Miss, could you please hang up this telephone for me?"

Mostly these days people have started calling me "Ma'am." I loved that “Miss.” And I loved this sweet, dying man, so polite that he wasn't willing to call out for help, even on his last day, even for this last phone call, ever. I would have hung up a million telephones for him, every phone of his whole life.

I so badly wanted to tell him it was OK for him to tell James "I love you," instead of "So long." But instead, and thank god, I said "You take care," which I hope he knew meant the same thing.

Last night, as I was putting the girls to bed, I stopped to really look into their little faces. Abigail suddenly looked to me a full year older, after just two days away at summer camp. We hadn’t had the best evening together, as they had been tired and cranky, but I wanted to tell her how much I loved her. “You’re getting so big, Abigail. I’m so proud of the way you’re growing up.”

“I know.” She said. “But I don’t like growing up.” And then, although I couldn’t believe my ears, she said exactly the words Grace and I had heard from the dying man. “All of the sudden it feels like it’s just going so fast. I want it to last longer.”

I thought of the man, moving so quickly through that last half of what he had yet to learn. “Maybe growing makes time go faster,” I said. And then, “I love you so.”

Today the girls are at camp. Bill and I are at home. The sun is shining, and I can go outside anytime I want. I can pick up the phone and hang it up. I can have any meal I wish, and be pretty sure it’s not by any means my last. Grace could need some more antibiotics, or maybe she won’t. But today we’re safe. Today we’re whole. Today we are still building up towards that first fifty percent of whatever it is we’re here to learn.

James and his mom and dad are elsewhere. They are in that place from which you never return. I hope somebody eventually convinced them to go outside. I hope he threw off his politeness enough to ask for whatever it was he most loved to eat. I hope James heard him say I love you, even if the words never came out that way.

Thanks to Kristen, whose entries these last few days at mothereseblog.com set my thoughts off in the direction of the metaphysical. And thanks to the talented staff of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock ER, who treat little girls and dying old men with remarkable professionalism and skill.

Storyland

2010-06-28T04:29:00.006+02:00

We spent our 15th anniversary with the girls, at Storyland, which is the world's cleanest, friendliest, most adorable and un-scary amusement park.

How did our fifteen years pass so quickly? How did Grace's eleven? And Abigail's eight? My forty? I ask myself these questions a lot lately; but here in midlife, I am starting to ask new ones, like how many more years like this one do I get?

And why are so many signs in the world punctuated improperly?

This place made me love America. It was kinda like Wholesomeness Incarnate.

You would think all that wholesomeness, and all those Red Sox hats, would make us Cranky New Yorkers even crankier. But try as we might, grouchy old Bill and I, we couldn't come up with a single legitimate complaint about the place.

This is me on the Raft Ride. I recognize this look on my face. It's that same one from June 25, 1995. It's happiness.

The whole park was simply adorable, as were the girls, all day long. Note the candy necklace and the rainbow swish she asked to have painted around her still-fresh eyebrow scar.

The park was full of kiddie rides, but we all rode them anyway. For once, nobody got scared or overwhelmed.

So yes, enjoy yourself, wherever you are. It is later than you think.

Early Summer in New Hampshire

2010-06-28T04:19:00.002+02:00

Our big adventures these days consist of trips to the town library, soft ice-cream cones at the General Store, dinner with the grandparents, and finding beauty everywhere we look.

Moving Day

2010-06-22T15:44:00.001+02:00

We moved again on Sunday. Since the first of July of last year, we've played musical houses, moving about a dozen times. Each time we have to pack up all the crap we brought the first time, try to organize it in some sensible fashion, and then cram it into some vehicle (or several vehicles, serially) to get it to some place we've chosen, essentially at random, and often sight-unseen. We now have developed almost a ritual, or at least a satisfactory division of labor, to balance our own family see-saw of chaos and order.

This one was a relatively easy and close move. We packed a few bags and boxes, threw them into our car and my father in law's car, and drove fifteen minutes from their house to a rental house we had actually already seen. Everyone spoke English. There were no trains or airplanes. My mother-in-law even watched the kids while we unpacked their little tshirts and novels and toothbrushes. Now, as I am writing this, everything we own is once again in its appointed place, and neither of us had to shout at anyone to get it there.

Most of our moves were not so sanguine. The very first one caused no end of angst and pain and family-wide distress as we downsized from an entire Brownstone into six cardboard boxes and about duffel bags. Each one since then has gotten progressively simpler, but I still sometimes have terror-stricken flashbacks to the moment that the TGV pulled into the train station in Paris as we were heading back to the U.S. At that moment, we had two children, four regular bags and five elephant-sized ones, and two bad backs between us. We had three minutes -- four at best -- to use those bad backs to get everything off the train.

You don't mess around with the TGV. It arrives on time, and leaves a few minutes later, no matter what group of American idiots is still fussing with heavy baggage. Very unfortunately, our seats were up on the top level of a very full train, which meant that we had had to haul our enormous bags up a flight of stairs. We had thought that we would move some of our bags downstairs as we approached Paris, but by the time we got up to do so, the smarter Parisians had already clotted up the space between our bags and the doors.

As soon as the train doors opened and the line of French people ahead of us started spilling out onto the platform, we began dragging several of the larger bags down the stairs with us. We shooed the girls out onto the crowded platform, forbade them to move from the bags, and then Bill went back inside to rescue the rest of the luggage. I stood blocking open the door of the train, which is something I never do in normal circumstances.

I know that I've maligned the French seven ways to Dimanche in this blog, but I have to credit the two incredibly sweet fellow passengers who realized what a pickle we were in: two Frenchmen on the train -- they themselves with luggage -- got moving to evacuate all our bags, firemen-style.

At the same time that these nice French guys helped us out, two older-lady American tourists stood yelling at us. I'm serious: yelling at us that they were worried about our kids standing there, while we tried desperately to move all those insanely huge bags and end up with all four of us on the same side of the closing doors. Once I realized that they were offering criticism rather than help, I added to the chaos by yelling back at them while throwing bags in and out and using my body as a doorstop.

It was quite a picture: all those Americans yelling, Abigail and Grace frozen in their spaces on my command, and a bucket brigade of smartly dressed Continentals chucking our bags onto the platform. Bill and his human-being-sized backpack came spilling out last, just as the doors slid shut and the train sped its away towards Belgium. After thanking the nice French guys, we just stood there for a minute, panting and cursing our bad backs and the buttinski Americans who shouted at us. Immediate crisis averted, we gathered up our stuff, only to realize that once again, the French had failed to install an elevator where it was most needed.

So in contrast, this was a much less anxiety-ridden situation. We spent the first part of the day, Father's Day, morning lounging around the breakfast table, then tried to cram everything we own (everything that is not in storage, in the dusty Brooklyn apartment, in my parents' house, or still stuffed in a closet at Bill's parents house) into bags and then into our big fat Toyota for one of the shortest trips we've made so far -- just ten miles north of Hanover to Lyme.

I tend to really like unpacking. It's deeply satisfying to put things in their places. In fact, this was actually how I generally played as a child. I'm a sorter, and the idea of taking a whole bunch of disorder and turning it into order feels like fun to me. The house we have rented for the summer is perfect for an unpacking game: it's fairly made of closets and shelves and empty spaces to fill. Unlike the other places we have rented and borrowed this year, this one is short on charm and long on good old bloated American-style convenience. Everything is new. Everything is labeled. Everything works. And while there may be that icky-looking textured sand paint on the ceiling, and the landlord won't let us wear shoes inside or bring our dog, it's also located smack in the middle of a lush pine forest, not even a mile from the town beach on Post Pond.

So tonight, after we finally got the girls to doze off, Bill and I sat together on the deck. We drank a French red wine that Toni and Bud found in Brooklyn, and which tasted pretty much exactly like the kind we liked back there. We looked up at the moon and thought about the solstice. We listened to the frogs down in the marshland below our house, as they beat out the multi-note tattoo of their giant amphibian orgy.

A little over half a moon hung in the sky, just high enough so that we could see it over the trees. The night was deep, deep blue, with the last of the setting solstice sun glowing in the west behind the houses, between the pines. Once again, we find ourselves nowhere in particular, and somehow right at home.

Death Stalks Our Family. In Three Acts.

2010-06-16T13:19:00.007+02:00

Act One: Tick. Tock.

Death is after me, I’m sure of it. It all started last Friday, with a tick.

We were visiting Brooklyn, staying at our friends Toni and Bud’s house. Gracie was wandering around instead of getting dressed, as she is wont to do, when she asked me, from the other room, “What’s this black thing on my back, Mom? It hurts.”

As she walked in to show me, I first thought that she had grown an enormous black mole. As I am wont to do, I overreacted. In the speed of a lightning flash, I could suddenly see all the steps – diagnosis, melanoma, terrible surgery, and then my sweet blonde girl wasting away like Amy in Little Women, her lips all stretched and cracked.

It's incredible how quickly my frantic imagination can kill off my kids.

But as she got closer, and I could see more clearly, it was suddenly horribly, awfully worse. There is nothing worse than thinking something is inanimate, and then watching it start to wiggle. Since I had never before seen a tick engorged (what a gross word, don’t you think?) I thought it was a spider there on her back. When I realized that I couldn’t flick it off, the gravity of the real, rather than the fake-frantic situation hit me. Not only was this a tick, the kind that causes Lyme disease – but I was going to have to figure out how to pull it out of my child’s skin.

Where was my damn home family medical book? Oh right. Packed, like just about everything else.

These days we are home – as in no longer in France, where we spent the school year. But since our house is being renovated, "home" is a series of borrowed, rented, improvised, cobbled together places. I prefer to think of us as home-rich, rather than homeless, as there are plenty of people loving and generous enough to take us in. My in-laws in New Hampshire, saints that they are, are hosting not only us, but also our dog. So in case you wondered how Grace got a tick in Brooklyn, you should know that just a day before then, she was at their house, romping and snuggling with our dog, who is both chick magnet and tick magnet.

We’re incredibly grateful to have a place to live, ticks and all. However, the fact that we’re in constantly borrowed digs means that in a time of crisis, confusion, or other sort of upheaval, I’m even less prepared than usual. Even if I knew precisely what tool(s) were required to remove this spiderlike thing embedded and cemented in by its jaws, I wouldn’t know where in Toni’s house to look.

For me, necessity is the mother of panic, but I’m also pretty sure that it, rather than Al Gore, is responsible for the Internet. While I used one hand and one part of my brain to keep Grace calm and quiet on the sofabed, I used the rest of me to google “tick removal” on the iphone.

The instructions were simple. (Now that you are reading this, you are more than prepared for a tick-crisis of your own. Let your gladness at this fact cut down on how much this paragraph grosses you out.) Grasp the tick around its awful little neck with tweezers or a piece of thread. (Toni is the crafty sort, and their spare bedroom is right next to her craft room, so thread was easy enough to find. ) Bill ran down to fetch a plastic bag, so we could save the thing in Toni’s freezer, just in case Grace started later on to fell Lyme-ishly ill.

The next step is for you to yank on it hard enough and long enough and steady enough so that the bug pulls the flesh up into a little skin tent.

In case you didn’t realize, at this point your child will commence yelling bloody murder.

Pull longer and harder than you think you really should have to. The tick will protest by wiggling its little leggies, trying to get away. Eventually, and after a long pull and a lot of yelling, the icky and potentially deadly beastie and a long string of rubber-cement like stuff will detach from your precious child. Now put it in the baggie. No, I mean the tick.

That’s the crisis part. The scarier part, however, is Lyme Disease. Immediately after the tick was out of her skin and she stopped yelling, Grace turned to me and demanded: “What am I going to do if that tick had parasites!?” Since then, there has been no fever, no aches and pains, and no gross red bullseye rash. We’re still watching carefully for the next few weeks, to be sure, but for now it looks as though death has stalked away, thwarted for this moment at least.

(Except for that poor dead tick we left in a plastic bag in Toni and Bud’s freezer. Whoops. Sorry, guys.)

Act Two: Falling. In Love.

We drove back up to New Hampshire the next morning during a rainstorm, sheets of water washing the car as we traveled up I-95 and I-91. It’s likely that these were actually the most dangerous few hours of my week, although driving always feels perfectly safe to me -- as long as I'm the one doing it. My weird anxieties tend to attach to unlikely occurrences, rather than actually dangerous things, like cars.

Monday we got back to the routine of our other borrowed place, with Bill taking Grace to work on her fish project, and me putting Abigail through the paces of her 2nd grade end-of-year math test. After a few days as tout la famille, it's always good to divide and conquer.

Things were going swimmingly, in that Abigail had put on her new sparkly leotard (thanks a million, Toni) with her kneesocks and was acting like some kind of Superhero Girl Genius -- doing gymnastics while solving word problems. Say what you want about the French educational system: that girl certainly learned a whole lot of arithmetic. To get her ready for her test, I was just layering a little bit of thinking on top of her rote skills. "I'm smart at math," she likes to inform anybody who will listen. Sometimes she also does somersaults.

After a solid hour and a half of math review, she was ready for a break. She darted out of the room and Abby-scrabbled as fast as she could up the slippery oak stairs.

Without holding the railing.

And wearing her kneesocks.

You can guess what comes next.

I was about to write the phrase "the worst thing about when your kid has a bad accident," but then I realized that there are myriad worst things, and that they follow one another like possessed dominos.

The first worst thing is the horrific sensation of knowing something bad is happening, and not being able to make it stop. As Abigail was falling down the stairs, I kept hoping she would catch herself. Instead, she just started to screetch louder and louder. I kept hoping that she was screaming in fear rather than in pain. I kept wanting her to fall more gently so she wouldn't break anything, but somehow also wanted the fall to be over already; how could this agony possibly be going on so long?

Time really does slow down when something terrible is unfolding. I thought I was leaping out of my chair to run to her, but by the time I got there, she had already taken three hours to fall all the way down and somehow right herself. She kept screaming and screaming and screaming -- those of you who know Abigail might take this opportunity to imagine just how loud that was. The screaming was the next worst thing, followed by that worst moment when I had to determine whether moving her would make it worse. She tried to crumple into a little pile on the linoleum, but since she was standing up, I figured I could help her to the part of the floor with the carpet instead. I just wanted her to lie down so that I could start figuring out how to fix whatever was wrong. And to be sure she didn't pass out. (Abigail passes out a lot.)

But suddenly, there was a whole lot of blood. She was grabbing her leg, and holding her head, and her hand was covered in it. "My leg! " she screamed, "My leg hurts so badly!" so at first I thought she had cut herself there. But as she pulled her hand away from her face to grab at her leg, I saw her curly blonde hair soaked in angry red. Copious bleeding is another worst part.

Suddenly the (dark-red) linoleum seemed like a far wiser place to be tending to her wounds, wherever they were. Leaving a tick in somebody's freezer is bad enough. Allowing one's child to gush blood all over a white wall-to-wall carpet is inexcusable, no matter how much Grandma dotes and adores. So I dragged my poor daughter back onto the hard surface so she could bleed in peace while I ran to get a towel.

Mid-run-to-towel I remembered my Emergency Voice. This is the voice I first discovered in myself when Grace started having these super-fun inexplicable freakouts at age two and a half. My Emergency Voice sounds a lot like a lady Mr. Rogers, soothing and narrating while my brain races ahead to find the nearest fire alarm. I got to hone and perfect Emergency Voice during terrifying episodes of croup, again when Abigail broke her leg, and then during all of her later thrilling fainting episodes. Emergency Voice was also awfully useful when I had to direct fire drills at school, particularly when the drills were actual fires.

The calm I project when speaking in Emergency Voice is the precise opposite of my ability irrationally to fear things that will never happen. It's as though my brain says, "Well, that worst thing you hoped for is finally here. Now you can stop all that pesky dreading!"

So there I was once again, in crisis mode, but where was that stupid family medical book? Where was the gauze? Where were the Band-Aids? Why did we pick today to run out of paper towels?

All of these questions I asked internally. From the outside, I looked and sounded like I was just strolling out of a yoga class.

As opened all the cupboards looking for something to stanch the blood, I spoke as slowly and quietly as I could. I told Abigail she was going to be OK, that she could let herself stop crying, because I had checked and I was sure her legs were fine, I just had to get this little boo boo on her head to stop bleeding so we could get a nurse to take a look and make her all better.

There was a particularly bad moment when Abigail opened her eyes and noticed how much blood had pooled on the floor. I also had to wonder for a second how the folks at the ER might feel about seeing a kid with a sparkly leotard, knee-high socks, and blood dried in her hair. As I pulled on her regular clothes and put on a ponytail, I kept talking quietly and steadily, telling her how brave she was being, how she was safe and secure, how proud I was of her. The scary thing had happened, and nothing bad was going to happen now. I said this not because it was true, but rather to make it true.

Her sobs started to lengthen out, and her breathing slowed down. "I just feel shocked," she said again and again, but I'm pretty sure she meant that in the emotional rather than the medical sense.

After the bleeding stopped, and her crying quieted, she looked steadily into my eyes. Her fear melted into something more like need, and trust. "Mom," she breathed, "Can you just hold me before we get in the car? I like it when someone helps me when I get hurt." I snuggled there with her for a minute or two, and then she clung onto my side while we walked to the car.

At the ER she lay with her head on my lap for the two hours we waited, an ice pack on her eye and a warm blanket over her body. She was quieter and stiller than I have seen her in years; now that I think of it, the last time she was this quiet and steady was her last visit to the ER. When Abigail stops moving, even for a few minutes, you really notice, and her mind quiets down as well. She just lay there and talked to me as though I were the only person who could protect her. As though I were the only other person in the world.

I tried, for her sake, to be that person. I told her how terrific she was. I told her as honestly as I could what might happen, and what we would do to make it OK, even if there were stitches or needles.

There were. Both. First, the doctor pulled off the bandaid to reveal an inch-and-a-half gash running just under her left eyebrow. It was pretty deep, he said, and if it were his daughter, he'd be sure that she got the stitches.

She nodded as said all this. She liked that he was telling her the truth, that he was being straightforward with her. He would stick a needle in to "put her skin to sleep," and that would certainly sting. The stitches themselves wouldn't hurt; she'd only feel a tugging. But she had a question for him before he got started. She looked up at him, as seriously and thoughtfully as she could, given that one eyebrow was slumping all puffy down into her eye.

"My mom makes me feel safe when I'm afraid," she told him. "I would feel better if she could hold my hand."

Which of course I could. The doctor, the nurse and I all stood in total silence while he stitched. It was gross to watch the needle go in and out of her eyebrow, but less gross than detaching a fishhook when it's catch and release. I held both of her hands, actually, just to help remind her to stay still, although I didn't have to worry. She didn't move a muscle or make a peep.

But as soon as he was done pulling tight his four cool little knots, she hopped right off the table and nearly ran to the vending machine she had scoped out earlier when she had been so weak and scared. Great relief should always be followed by salty snacks.

With this return to perpetual motion, she was my little girl again. Four little stitches in her brow, the thread bristly and black. But she was back: back in the mode of hopping and leaping and wiggling around and demanding treats from the vending machine. She and I back to our version of normal, as we defeated death once more.

Act Three: Groundhog Day

Since we've been out of our house for nearly a full year now, with nine of those months in France, our goofy lab mutt Samson has been in exile from his family, and we from him. However, being a pretty smart dog, he quickly adapted to life with my inlaws. My father-in-law takes him for long walks on the Dartmouth campus, where all the co-eds coo, "Isn't he so cute!" My mother-in-law brings him along in the car on her errands, and he sits under the piano while she plays. He is the granddoggy supreme in their house, and has quickly made himself fully and happily at home.

He's also appointed himself the early warning system and game warden for their entire yard and the giant field that stretches away down the hill. He barks at the postman, who always greets him by name with a biscuit. He barks when he sees his friend Olive, a Great Dane who started out their friendship as a puppy, and now towers over him. But mostly he barks at smaller animals. Squirrels make him go completely nuts, as do cats, and groundhogs. His barking is usually loud and scary enough to ward these little critters away, and once they're gone, he'll stand there barking until he has forgotten why he started.

Until today. When death came silently, and I couldn't chase it away in time.

I was hanging clean laundry on the line outside when he came to the door, apparently just for the innocent purpose of keeping me company. His little floppy black ears appeared in the doorway, and his nose pushed up into the air by the screen door. I let him out and hung my soggy sheets. When I turned back, a few seconds later, he had his jaws clenched around an animal, and he was shaking his head violently. He would unclench for a minute, then bite down harder, his sharp teeth (I guess this is why they call them canines) ripping into the flesh. It was weirdly banal and silent. The only sound I could hear was his jaw opening and closing.

At first I was actually afraid for him. I've always thought of him as a total wimp of a dog, all bark and no guts. I didn't want this icky badger-like thing touching my sweet dog.

I yelled at him in my Stern-This-Is-Danger Voice as loud as I could, trying out commands he had never heard before, like "Leave it!" and "Stop Biting the Groundhog!" But it was as though my mild-mannered dog had gone all bloodlust and vampiric. He couldn't seem to let go. I realized that the groundhog was getting by far the worst of it, and eventually decided it would be most humane to let him finish things off.

This little bloodletting episode also seemed to go on for a long time, although the groundhog stopped moving awfully quickly. Then and only then could I get Samson to listen to me, and to move away from the meaty, bloody lump. I called him over to me, a little afraid that the groundhog was just playing possum (do groundhogs even know that game?) and would hop up and sink its own teeth into me.

It didn't. It just lay there, while Samson slunk over and crouched down at my feet. "Bad dog," I Danger-Shouted, but in retrospect, I'm not sure why. Nobody in their right minds cries over a groundhog, even when that groundhog has been mauled to the point where its eye is hanging out of its socket. And maybe animals are supposed to kill one another. Silently, and without drama, fear, yelling, or guilt. At least this is what I am telling myself so I can still look Mr. Woofums in the eye.

Once again, there I was on my own in someone else's house, without tools or clues. What does one do with a bloody groundhog sitting on Grandma's doorstep? I wracked the Little House on the Prairie part of my brain for the right thing to do, but all I kept thinking of were episodes of The Sopranos. I wiped the blood off of Samson's face as he looked up at me, all happy and proud. Then I went out into the garage and found a shovel with which to fling the dead body into the bushes. My shoveling his groundhog made Samson totally nuts, (as though it were once again alive) so I had to shut him in the side room.

A little later, Grace came home and let him out without asking me, at which point he raced straight down to the bushes. He must dragged the carcass out of the deep grass and onto the lawn and started chewing the groundhog's head off. When I caught him, the top third of the animal was gone, exposing all its guts inside. It was gross, but mostly because my dog decided to treat his murder victim as an afternoon snack and I had to shove it in a garbage bag so he wouldn't finish it off.

This week I have seen it all. Including death.

Death didn't look, or sound, or even smell like what I imagined. It wasn't a predictable, dry-lipped wasting death, or a long dangerous falling death, or anything particularly scary or dramatic. It's nothing like the kinds of things I fear all the time. Instead, it was quick, and nearly silent. A snap of the jaws, a few crunches and silent shakes of a neck, and suddenly no more movement at all.

An American Girl

2010-06-15T03:11:00.005+02:00

(This is a photograph that Abigail took with my iphone, of a page from the American Girl catalog. It is just one of a series of, oh, like 300 that she took over the course of the year.)

Well she was an American girl / Raised on promises. She couldn't help thinkin' / that there was a little more to life /somewhere else.
After all it was a great big world / with lots of places to run to…

Perhaps it's bad karma to let Tom Petty's anthem to wasted youth waft through one's brain while wandering the American Girl store in midtown Manhattan. It's certainly a recipe for cognitive dissonance. But then again, it's hard to imagine somebody like me feeling any kind of straightforward emotion in a place like that.

I got Abigail and myself there just as the store opened last Friday morning. I had assumed that we would have the place pretty much to ourselves, since even the private schools hadn't yet released their students for summer vacation. But the place was humming with adorable little girls clutching their adorable dolls. Each (live) American girl was tended and buzzed around by at least one beautifully, expensively, conventionally-dressed adult. Often a child would be surrounded by as many as three or four grownups, all cooing and oohing and ahhing over her and the toys.

I liked all the girls. I'm a teacher, after all. To me, just about any kid is like a beautifully wrapped package filled with dreams. I will admit that I even liked the dolls. I particularly liked watching Abigail scamper from room to room seeking out all the stuff she had been lusting for in the catalog she toted to French school for months.

Still, I wasn't so sure about all those other fancy-pants grownups spoiling their kids. As happy as I am to be back in America, with two happy kids, the jury is still out for me on how I feel about all those other people with whom I'm sharing a nation. I love my family, my friends, and the random strangers filling up the streets and avenues of my city.

But I'm just not so crazy about the species of Homo Shoppus Americus -- that bloated desire-balloon armed with a credit card itching to be swiped. I like walking down the streets with my fellow Americans. I just don't like the way they (we) turn into salivating idiots when given the chance to buy things.

For some reason, Abigail's desire for American Girl dolls (or even my own) struck me as wholly deserving and lovely. The poor kid had gone months away from her home. She got herself through the rough patches by re-photographing just about every item for sale in the catalog. Now was her time to be a kid. But everybody else there seemed gripped by less lofty emotions. You know, like wanting to buy things like happiness and joy. (I know, I know. Crazy talking here.)

Why should I be so cranky and conflicted about something as wholesome as American Girl? If the looks on the faces of the other patrons were to be believed, American Girl Place is a paradise of girlhood. A secular temple to all things doll. It is sweet and innocent, tasteful and adorable, and you can even have a prix fixe lunch there for only $24.00 a head (pink lemonade, kid-friendly apps, and a tiny chocolate mousse included.)

So why the trouble, Ms. Conflicted Pants? Well, when I wasn't following Abigail, or checking email on my iphone, or singing Tom Petty under my breath, I came up with the reason.

It's because American Girl Place organizes, displays, and puts a (hefty) price tag on a set of products that tap deeply into the raw ingredients of my own psyche: American History. Beauty. Money. Desire. Order. Motherhood. Girlhood. Independence. Houses. Stuff. A place like the Nintendo store is just as commercial, just as packaged. But it doesn't get to me. American Girl hits me where I live. Abigail and I? We learned this year that we're both American Girls, bigtime. Defiantly so.

I've been to the store before, and here is how it always plays out. We do a little vague wandering, and end up in the fantasy room of dolls with plucky, perky American-History backstories. There is Felicity, the Colonial-Era girl who dares to tame a mean neighbor's horse, and Addy the courageous escaped slave girl, and Rebecca the spunky New York Girl with the toy menorah and all the cool Progressive-Era clothing.

But then, just as soon as I get a little frisson of pleasure in gazing at the neatly ordered fantasy-world of Kit, Depression-Era Girl Reporter -- and all of her related products tidily arrayed behind plate glass -- I am hit by the ask.

"Mom, I really really really want Kit's typewriter" (which, as I have already noticed, is sold with a totally awesome historically-accurate tiny newspaper in a gingham-covered box.) I'm totally taken with the item already, but being the kind of devil-mother I am, I shoot out a reflexive "No!" even before scrutinizing the box for a price ($24.00 for the two small pieces. Add that to our lunches, and we're already approaching ridiculous.)

But then, realizing that my reflexive answer has been unreasonable, I have to weigh all these complicated factors, at a nearly subconscious level.

On Money: Is it worth it?

On Order: Will she lose all the adorable little pieces?

On Girlhood: Does it set a good example for her fantasy play?

On History: Isn't it cool that she wants a historically accurate typewriter?

On Desire (mine): Shouldn't we gaze longingly at every single other possible American Girl accessory item in the entire store before we get our hearts set on this one?

On Houses: Maybe we should get the awesome treehouse as well?

On Existential Dread: Why am I even here in this store in the first place?

My final answers to these questions this time around were, if you're wondering, No, Yes, Yes, Yes, No, No. And then, on the more open-ended question of why I was there in the first place, I will again quote Tom Petty. In this case, the American Girl was me, and she had one little promise she was gonna keep.

Because (as you may recall) this trip to the core of American Girlhood was the result of a particularly desperate bribe. Once she realized that things weren't going to get better for her, yet she was still facing the prospect of several months of French school attendance, Abigail started digging in her heels. Realizing that I'd have to pull out the big guns to keep her walking to le portail, I promised that upon our return, we'd head straight to American Girl Place and find a whole bunch of deeply American things to buy. The trip last week was one American Girl keeping her promise to another.

Go ahead, frown on my judgment if you will. But if this kind of harmless-enough bribe sounds bad to you, presumably you haven't been awfully happy about my other parental antics of late.

Since we're friends here, I hope you won't mind my embarrassing myself even further. I feel the need to admit to you that just behind my feelings of distaste and confusion in the face of all that commerce, I was really, weirdly moved by it all. It sounds ridiculous, but the way those toys evoked the perky, plucky backstories of generations of spirited girls kept tugging at my heart. I'm the kind of person who occasionally weeps at Hallmark commercials, and always weeps at sappy underdog stories. So watching all the real girls look up to their pluckier, historically accurate doll counterparts just made me all misty in ways I can't even start to explain.

As much as the people and the prices and the perfectly dressed suburban parents made me cringe on one level, I must admit how much I liked seeing the little girls, and all the dolls and their overpriced stuff. I loved seeing Abigail so darn happy, and relished the opportunity to practice saying yes more than I said no.

All the yeses we gave each other that day felt so good. The yes to the chicken tenders at lunch, and the yes to the typewriter. Yes even to a hairstyling kit, and believe it or not a 1930's style washtub, drying rack and ironing board. (For the record: I do not even own a real ironing board.)

I had dragged her all that way and back. I had raised her on promises and then finally gave her the keys to the kingdom. We had both earned our share of Yes, even if the yes for me was just a reminder to chill out and go along for the ride.

For, as Tom kept reminding me on that tapeloop in my head:

God its so painful
Something that's so close
And still so far out of reach.

J'ai écrit, j'écris, je vais écrire

2010-06-14T08:35:00.003+02:00

I've managed not to post (or even really write) anything at all for over two weeks while we've all been adjusting to being back in the U.S. Serious bloggers would find this sort of holiday to be borderline irresponsible, and a few of my more loyal readers, friends, and relatives have pointed out with varying degrees of irritation that I really shouldn't have just left them all hanging this way.

They generally tell me how disappointed they are that I am not writing just a few minutes after they have given me a huge hug and told me how glad they are that we are back. But really, I probably was much more interesting when I was 3,000 miles away, and felt like I pretty much had to write in order to communicate anything of consequence. There, I would sit down for a few hours, think it all through, and spill my guts onto a computer screen. I would polish my thought, give it a shape and a sheen, and send it out to you.

But here, I am sitting with you in your kitchen, blathering on incoherently instead of writing something clear.

The talking part of my brain feels all rusty and weird just now, and I can't always find the right words. It's not like I have the ready excuse that French took over my brain and hasn't given it back, as I was even more hopeless searching for the right words in spoken French. Perhaps my gummed up tongue has more to do with the switch from cooking and typing to talking all day long. Until I am proved wrong, I'm choosing for now to believe that this is a great big cultural-temporal-personal adjustment, rather than early-onset dementia.

But whether or not I can always say what I'm thinking, I've been soaking in the incomparable luxury of being back in a place where everybody speaks English, where things make sense without my having to try too hard to "get it" all the time. I can find nearly anything I need in any grocery store. I can drive nearly anywhere without Diesel Liesel's guidance. I can make small talk with nearly anybody without having to trip over myself just to say the simplest things: I was, I am, and someday, I will be.

Sometimes I get the old urge to write about something, to fix it in time and pull out all the meanings that one moment holds folded up inside. This has been particularly true the last few weeks as the girls have suddenly blossomed into nearly unrecognizable new beings. It's like the American parts of them were those little dry compressed sponges, and as I am pouring on the water of home, they are expanding into the shapes of American adolescents. We seem to have left our little girls behind in France, and arrived home with tweens.

Just a few afternoons with their friends, and now they know who Justin Bieber is, and the whole backstory of Lanie, (the American Girl of the Year, of course) and the names of Coldplay songs. Being around them and watching them grow so fast and grin so largely just about makes my head spin. I am guessing that having my girls enter Teen World will make the puzzles of French culture look like fun and games.

I want to write about them, but then the moment passes, or I have made plans to go do something else with some actual person, and the pleasure of living trumps the desire to write. Surrounded by so many people I love, by so many books and magazines and newspapers -- all published in English -- so many stores that sell exactly the things I've wanted to find for five months now, I'm like a kid in a candy store, or a pig at the trough, a gluttonous gorger just stuffing myself with the sweet savor of familiarity.

Here, I can put my face in any old shape it naturally assumes (which these days is kinda old, and somewhat wrinklish, but happy) and I fit right in. I can jibber-jabber with the Pakistani taxi drivers and the sweet-faced Latina ice-cream scooper and the Polish guys fixing the scary old electrical wiring throughout our house. I can wander onto our block and talk to our neighbors about their kids and my kids as though I never left. We catch up on ten months in two minutes and get back to the serious business of talking about the weather or the food co-op, or where somebody's eleventh grader is looking at colleges.

Since returning, I have walked into no fewer than seven different kitchens and felt as comfortable as though I were in my own. (Which is a good thing, since my own is ripped apart and covered in construction dust.) I had built up this tidal wave of longing to be here, to be with my family and my friends, and now I just feel giddy to be swimming around in the warm shallows of things and people I completely understand. Living, rather than writing.

So, if you've wondered what happened to me and whether I will ever write again, please accept this as an apology. I do have more to say, either on this blog or on another one I'm starting to dream into being, but I'll start with this:

I wrote. I write. And someday, I will write again.

Oxygen Tank

2010-05-31T02:39:00.004+02:00

For the last nine and a half months we four have all been explorers, pushing again and again into new places and languages and cultures, adding place after place to our list of conquered territories. Now we voyage back to the familiar.

Just this afternoon, we finally closed the giant circle of the trip. It started back on August 10 as we boarded a Dartmouth Coach bus in front of the Hanover Inn, bound for Logan Airport. We landed back in New York last Tuesday, and since then have been working our way slowly North back to that same exact place.

On our way here, we have stayed with friends, then with my parents to celebrate their 44th wedding anniversary. Last night we stayed in a dorm room for a reunion at the college where Bill and I met and fell in love. But today as I drove into Hanover and past the bus stop, I finally brought us all back full circle to where we began.

42 weeks away from then till now, which is the same number of weeks I counted and waited until Grace was born.

Now we're diving back down into the lives we left, learning what has changed and what still remains. While Thomas Wolfe (You Can't Go Home Again) and Bon Jovi ("Who Says You Can't Go Home?") disagree on what happens to the concept of home once you've been gone a long time, the jury is still out for me.

Complicating things is the fact that we've taken the year away, and we're back, but we're not actually home just yet. The philosophical question -- what is "home?" -- is a literal one as well, since the home we left eleven months ago is now completely ripped apart, under construction in the process of being put back together.

We rented out our house in Brooklyn for the first part of our trip, but since the tenants didn't want to commit to a full year, we came up with what seemed like such a wonderfully practical idea: once they left, we'd renovate the house while we were away. We'd move our furniture into storage and hire contractors to fix all the broken stuff and reconfigure the house to fit our new stage of our family's life.

It was a good idea, and totally practical in terms of timing. But psychologically, for two little girls weary of being dragged from place to place, returning here without a place to land was perhaps not so very straightforward. Right now they're excited to be back, but also jetlagged and not a little bit confused.

So this week, we're circling around that desired-for feeling of home like little bugs around a light, relying on the places and the people we love to keep us warm and fed and safe. They have not let us down, but instead keep filling me with exactly the things I most desired.

My friends and family are giving so generously to me, which means I have more to give to the girls. As we've been traveling -- on the train, and then on the airplane, and then even on the familiar streets of Brooklyn, or on the path to Memorial Hill at college, the girls have been sticking closely to my side. They are too big for this, I suppose, but they actually hold my hand when we walk, leaning a little on my arms. They keep finding ways to lean their little heads on my shoulder, and when it's time to go to bed, they want to snuggle up close to my body. "I love you so much, Mom," Abigail will breathe into my hair. I know she means it with all of her heart, but what she's also saying is, "So much is changing. This feels weird. Please keep telling me that I'm going to be OK."

I am an oxygen tank for them, full of the air of home. I've learned to distill the essence of home to fit it here in this tiny vessel of myself. I've also learning how to refill myself, so now when they need me I know how to charm the tiniest little circle and give them that feeling of place, even when things are rocky, or uncertain, or strange. Or even French.

It took me awhile to recognize that I could do this for them. But now I see it so clearly -- I feel it in their little hands grabbing onto mine. Whenever we make a change from one place to the next, the girls suddenly need my undivided attention, my care and watching. I open up the regulator on the tank, and give them as much of myself as I can. They breathe in home, they breathe in confidence, they breathe in the feeling that they themselves can make their way.

Because comforting them is not the whole point. It's lovely, really, to have such sweet girls holding my hands and breathing into my ear how much I am loved. But my aim is always to give them what they need so that they can do whatever we are up to more independently. This extra air builds them up so that they can strike out on their own. Gradually they adjust to each new atmosphere, and start to stay away for longer stretches. WhereverWeGo, home travels in me, and then suffuses into them. They breathe the air of home, and then they go back out again -- strengthened, older, stronger -- into the world that awaits.

The First Americans We Encountered on the Way Home

2010-05-27T04:56:00.004+02:00

Dear American Family in Room 206 at the Paris Charles DeGaulle Best Western,

Hey there, it's us over here next door in Room 208. Yeah, we were sleeping, actually, but you know, as they say in France, ce n'est pas grave.

First, I just want to say how sorry I am for you guys that you got in so late. Getting to your hotel at 2 in the morning must have been a huge bummer, as the two of you parents pointed out to one another. Several times.

Since you so nicely raised your voices so that we could hear the lengthy conversation you had following your arrival, I'm just going to weigh in on a few things.

For instance, I tend to agree with Mom, that it really wasn't her fault that you got there so late. But Dad was right when he said thirty-eight times that a continental breakfast doesn't usually include scrambled eggs. So you see, no need to argue -- particularly at 2 in the morning. Sometimes she's right, and sometimes he is. Just put in your order, trust the breakfast gods, tuck yourselves in, and call it a night.

Because you know, actually the rest of us were sleeping. I mean, until you got there.

And just because I could hear you so well, I thought I might offer a tiny bit of parenting feedback. When you stick two kids in the bath at that hour, sometimes it's a good idea to sort of hang out in there with them and help them calm down. You know, sing a sweet little (quiet) song or something, keep things moving along. If you stay in the hotel room and argue about the scrambled eggs and how you're going to get to "check your *&^%$* e-mail, goddamnit, Roger" the kids do tend to get a little out of control.

Also, you might not have noticed yourself doing this (you know, we've all been there) but you told the kids "Five minutes left in the bath, I mean it" no less than four times, at about eight-minute intervals. So next time you could just say, " 32 minutes left in the bath, I mean it!" And then mean it.

And if you already have an opinion on whether they should wear their jammies or their clothing to bed, it's best not to ask them which they would rather wear.

You know, eventually I started to think that it would have been more fun if we had opened the balsa wood door between our rooms and decided to have a huge American Battle of the Grumpy Families from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. Not to brag, but we would totally have kicked your butts, as we are the original Bickersons. We're kind of like the F15 figher plane in this area - we've never been beaten in open battle with another family. As a matter of fact, we only shoot each other down.

But you know, I'm sure you wanted your privacy. You didn't want some other family all up in your business, bickering. So we just lay in our beds quietly. And seethed at you.

So finally I also wanted to say how sorry I am that you had to get up again at 6:30 to catch your flight. Huge bummer right there. It did seem a little hard for you to get those little kiddos out of the p.j.'s they so badly wanted to wear. (Just speaking as a mom with a little more experience: sometimes when we stay someplace and have to get up super-early in the morning, I just pretend I didn't bring the jammies with me at all.)

It must have been a pretty big disappointment when those scrambled eggs didn't come (as you told Roger) but I really don't think it's his fault either. You know, the French and all. At least you got your morning coffee, even if you still couldn't work the *&^&^%! email.

And just so you know, I also totally heard him say you didn't have to leave until 7:30, so he probably shouldn't have been rushing you out at 7:15.

But like I said, we've all been there.

So, anyway, safe travels. We'll see you back in the U.S. But let us know when you're traveling next, so we can be sure to book the room a few more doors down.

Thanks so much for reminding us why we're so excited to get back home.

Best Wishes,

The sleepy family in Room 208

On Making New Friends

2010-05-23T11:02:00.006+02:00

Learning the delicate dance of making friends in a new place has been one of the more dizzying experiences of our time here. At first I blamed all my troubles on the place. But now with my special 20/20 hindsight glasses, certain things have become crystal clear.

When we first arrived, I was continually taken aback that nobody greeted my massive people-pleasing American smiles with anything but a glazed, distant hauteur. I tried to be friendly at the portail, the big green gate dividing school from home, but I couldn't find anyone there who would meet my gaze. It was as though I didn't exist.

Making the classic rookie error of interpreting another culture through my own assumptions, I assumed that I had done something shun-worthy, or that nearly everyone we met was massively stuck up. For awhile I imagined that I were walking around with spinach in my teeth.

Had we stayed here on a vacation of only ten days or so, I would have left with the typical Anglo-American complaint about the French. (Stand-offish. Pretentious. You know, French.)

But then I figured out Hard-won Travel Socializing Lesson Number One: Strangers are treated differently in different places, so it's not a great idea to confuse the friendliness of strangers for real intimacy. When I got here, I was so down on the whole place for being so unfriendly, when in reality, it was just that I had chosen to surround myself with strangers. They were behaving the way one behaves towards strangers here, which is to keep one's polite and respectful distance.

But once I did make friends here, I had plenty of people to kiss on both cheeks and invite over for dinner. So what if the good people of Aups walk around looking as though all of their cats just died? If that's how they do it here, who am I to judge?

Which leads me to Hard-Won Travel Socializing Lesson Number Two: when you live somewhere long enough, the "weird world" you inhabit starts to make sense, and you realize that it's you who is not fitting in. It's not their blank stares that were odd. It was my big American grin. Now that I've been here long enough, I can totally spot an American tourist. They are wearing oddly bland clothing. They have safe, symmetrical haircuts and have good teeth, which you can see because they are smiling like total idiots. That was me, nine months ago (and will be, again, as soon as I'm safely back on American soil.)

Hard-won Travel Socializing Lesson Number three: I feel like smacking myself hard in the forehead for this one, because Bill was right. I really shoulda, woulda, coulda learned French. The language barrier and my own lack of preparation only made things worse where friendships were concerned. Even if some French someone did turn up with a friendly, engaging smile, I would usually respond with something like "I like your cheese," or "Weather good now in town think I hope." I missed my own ability to articulate anything other than a pleasantry or a poorly-conjugated literal translation of a banal observation. Back home, I kept wanting to tell people, folks thought I was smart. And funny. Only I didn't know the words for any of that. Who knows how many lovely new people I could have made had my French been less awful.

(Oh, and then something I learned from watching the contrast of Bill and Abigail: once you can speak another language, it's best to do so as freely and un-self-consciously as you possibly can. Bill may have made some mistakes now and then, but they were never, ever begrudged. Abigail spoke French mostly to her American Girl dolls, in secret. Felicity and Elizabeth may have benefitted from the tutoring, but that didn't help her to get the real flesh-and-blood kind of friends.)

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I've ever taken the time back home to befriend someone whose English wasn't already serviceable. And what's worse, I'm not sure I ever even though of it this way before now, after nine months as a babelfish out of English waters. Now that I think about it, that may be Hard-won Travel Socializing Lesson Number Four: to have a friend, you have to be a friend, particularly in a second language. I think I'll try a whole lot harder after what I learned this year.

OK, down to the last two lessons. Remember how before I said I stood there at the school gate (le portail) and smiled, assuming that would be the place to make friends? Well, it turns out that ended up just not being the right place. I've felt only icky vibes there, pretty much all year. Back in the U.S., nearly every friend I have made since having children has been a parent from our kids' school. In fact, schools across the U.S. are social hubs for parents as well as for the students themselves.

However, that turned out just not to be the case here. Our friendships developed around café and dining room tables, not around "playdates," weekend soccer games and children's birthday parties. They were private family moments rather than public occasions. So Hard-won Travel Socializing Lesson Number Five: you might have to look somewhere other than where you are used to to find friends.

A lot of things changed as we got to know Jessica and Gerard. Although Jessica grew up in France, deep down she's English, with an extra dose of devil-may-care spontaneity and pretty exceptional hospitality skills. (This means that you can go over to her house for dinner every two weeks or so for a whole year, as we have done, and never be fed the same thing twice, even though everything was so good you wouldn't have minded a repeat.) She was kind right away, and quickly welcomed us in to her life. Her fiancé Gerard, so open-hearted and welcoming and deeply human, became our first real French friend.

Over the course of the year, they have welcomed not just us, but also our visiting friends and our family to their farmhouse. Jess seems to think nothing of whipping up a seriously large batch of several dishes to serve over the course of hours to her happy, comfortable guests. We've eaten lamb sausage, chocolate mousse, stewed rabbit, perfectly cooked duck, (and that ain't the half of it. ) She has given me endless translations, multiple assists on school quandries, and many, many glasses of red wine. She and Gerard have become true friends.

And, what's more, they -- along with Anna-Maria and Dermot, who we met our second night in town -- have introduced us to lots of other people who have also become our friends.

Ready for Hard-won travel Lesson Number Six? Here it is: if you're a lonely American traveler, go out and listen for someone who speaks with a pleasant lilt. Colonialism maybe wasn't such a great thing, but the upside is that the world is dotted with all different sorts of lovely, friendly people, and a whole lot of them seem to be British.

But I'll finish up with a story that taught me one final thing: one that wasn't so much a hard-won lesson as a pleasant surprise: Whereveryougo, however long it takes to meet them, Friends are Friends are Friends. And here's how I know.

Twice in the past week Jess and Gerard invited us up to their beautiful farm, which is perched right on the ridge between the rolling hills to the south and the craggier bigger peaks of the Alpes-de-Haut-Provence. First they had a mechoui, with three goat kids roasted all afternoon long on spits. Gerard had made a sort of herbal broom out of branches of rosemary, thyme and other herbs he plucked out of the field, and swabbed at the little beasties all afternoon as they turned slowly via a contraption run by a windshield wiper motor. It was attached to a tractor battery, and he had adjusted it precisely so that the spits would turn slowly, but not too slowly. Gerard is like some kind of MacGuyver for food.

We ate goat ribs, goat legs, goat cheeks, and even the goat head. We ate our friend Paula's guacamole and boiled quail eggs, some lovely anchovy paste, as well as cauliflower and spicy sausages (yes, even the children ate all that) and finished up with brownies and Grace's now-famous choux-cremes. The only thing better than the food was the warm and friendly conversation.

The mechoui, like the bouilliabaisse party we attended a few weeks ago was mostly Francophones, but really smart engineering sort of ones who can speak plenty of English when they choose. A passel of exceptionally adorable children vacillated between joyfully frolicking about and ruthlessly smacking one another in the head, but none of the parents paid all that much attention (pas des helicopter parents here in France, bien sûr.) The kids would be kids, the grownups stuck close to the table, and everyone had a perfectly lovely time.

And, perhaps because our kids knew that leaving was safely on the horizon, they played too. This will amaze habitual readers of the blog, who know that generally at the social events we have attended this year, Abigail circles the periphery and waits for somebody to put on a movie, while Grace chooses the place furthest away from all the other kids, and either knits or reads a book.

But that day, they jumped right into the fray -- quite literally, as they were bouncing on a real-life trampoline. They spent the whole day with all the other kids, and then at the end of the day, asked us if we all could stay even longer.

Then, a few nights later, Jess and Gerard invited us over again, with just the littler crowd of our closer friends that have sort of congealed together in our year here. We are a loose group of five British, American, and French families who get together to switch back and forth between two languages, drink red wine, laugh, and let the kids run wild together. Once again we sat outside at a long wooden table for hours while Gerard made everybody pizza after pizza after delicious wood-fired gorgonzola-pesto-sausage-olive-mozzarella pizza dinner. The ashtrays gradually filled up with cigarette butts and olive pits, as we laughed and talked and ate Gerard's incredible food.

After awhile, I looked up the hill, and there they were -- eleven of them -- a passel of happy kids bouncing around inside the netted trampoline. There were Spike and Toby, Elise and Clement, Zach, and Cameron and Louise. And then, holding Layla's two hands, on either side of her, were Grace and Abigail. Seamus was too little, so he just stood clinging on to the net, watching the grand drama unfold.

I watched them all hold hands and jump in a charmed circle. They all -- each one of them -- spoke some sort of combination of two languages, and understood one another perfectly.

I swear it was just the setting sun in my eyes that made me tear up just then.

Perhaps as a result of nearly a full year of being around me 24/7, Bill has been awfully attuned to my moods lately. He saw me looking at the happily playing kids, he came over and hugged my shoulder as we watched the kids jump and laugh. "Now they have some European cousins."

As I walked back to the table, Mathilde and Laurent presented us with a bottle of something that looked like magic gold elixir. It was marked with the name of their home and the succulent words, "huile d'olive": olive oil pressed from the fruit of their very own trees. Now the bottle is sitting in a place of honor on our mantlepiece, ready to be packed with exceptional care so we can bring it home. Then, when we need a little golden drop of Provence (or, more likely, a huge swig of flavor) we'll have it.

I put the bottle away in the car for safekeeping. The kids kept leaping, while we grown-ups settled back into the serious eating and drinking. After awhile, Dermot -- the charismatic one of our mini-clique -- stood up. "Before anybody has to go, we have something to give Bill and Launa." He pulled out a framed photo that everybody had signed (even the under-five set.) He had photoshopped pictures of the four families to look as though they were grinning at us from inside the fountain in the center of town.

Just then, one of the kids wandered by and suddenly grabbed me around my midsection, in an American-style hug rather than the usual French bisous. Perhaps it had taken a lot longer than I had suspected initially, but once somebody's kid hugs you for no apparent reason, you no longer have to wonder if you've really become friends.

Then of course, I was standing with my back to the sunset, so I had nothing but joy to blame for my pesky tears.

Yes, it can be done better

2010-05-23T09:21:00.003+02:00

Pardon this last-minute rant on the superiority of the French approach to the social contract. Those of you whose flesh crawls when I start to talk about politics should probably skip this one.

No, I mean it. It's not worth the irritation, as this one isn't even particularly funny. Just look at the pretty food picture, and enjoy today's other post, the heartwarming one. We'll all be happier that way.

OK, now we're down to the socialists, liberals and independents still reading. With no further ado, here is my list of things that France does way better:

1.) Travel. The whole time we were building all those big fancy cars, the French were putting in high speed rail. The trains arrive on time. They are clean and shiny and super-fast. They aren't exactly cheap, but that seems worth it when you're going 200 miles an hour through gorgeous scenery. Who cares if you have to drive a silly little two-door Twingo around town, if you can travel the long distances in comfort and style?

2.) Shipping. To get our stuff mailed over here via Fed-Ex cost an ungodly amount of money, and took pretty much forever. Customs hassled us like crazy so that we could be reunited with our winter coats, extra hats and American Girl dolls.

Here, we bought about ten nicely-constructed little boxes, each one about 40 euros. We filled each one of them up with seven kilos of our stuff, and then just dropped them off at the post office, where the woman at the desk was super nice to us. (Did you hear that, Park Slopers? Nice postal workers?) The boxes arrived yesterday at Bill's parents' house, about five days later, zero hassle. I heart La Poste.

3.) Basic Medical Care. Here, the doctors see you as soon as you call, they give you a referral right away, and you see the next medical specialist soon after, until they figure out what's wrong with you. An E.R. visit cost us sixty bucks, and resulted in an accurate diagnosis and a speedy solution to the presenting problem, served up with total professionalism.

If you get a test done, you get a letter with the test results delivered to your house the next day.

Look, if I'm going to contract some horribly rare disease, I would rather be able to be treated by the super-geniuses at some incredible teaching hospital in the center of Manhattan. But it's not like most of America's sick people get anything like that level of rarefied treatment.

So, for the basic stuff we're all more likely to suffer, how great is it not to have to fight with the doctor's secretary over whether they accept BlueCare Plus or CrossHeart Freedom Plan Extra?

Show up, see a doctor, get medicine from the smart and adorable pharmacist, and feel better. Go back to living your life.

4.) Local, fresh food that actually tastes like something. And is frequently served with butter sauce.

5.) Fresh spring water pouring out of fountains centrally located in every town. Back home, we have two choices: gross water fountains or bottled water. Here, you just cup your hands and gulp. Hooray for the Romans and their ancient aqueducts, and hooray for the French for knowing a good thing when they drink it.

6.) Nuclear power. Somewhere back there in time, the U.S. took a wrong turn on the way we power up. We cut off the tops of mountains in West Virginia and pulverize them to extract coal, then fill in the valleys with the remaining bits of chopped up rock.

And now, we've got an oil slick the size of Kansas spreading into the open ocean, and no particularly bright ideas for how to make it stop spilling.

Only history will show which of us made the better choice. But so far, France's history of nuclear safety seems to kick the ass of our search for more and more dead dinosaur carbon.

7.) A real social contract. Look, I don't relish the idea of giving half of my paycheck to the government. That's money I could be using to buy Cheetos and Coke (oh, and paying to health insurance companies.) But if I were paying high taxes with the idea that that money would be used for things to make my life and the lives of my fellow citizens more pleasant, secure, and fulfilling, I don't think I would complain all that much.

On the flip side, it would be easy to argue that part of the reason France can spend its citizen's money this way is that it doesn't have to spend such a huge percentage on its military. For some awful reason, the U.S. has ended up as the N.Y.P.D. for the entire planet, charged with protecting and serving all of Western Europe. But, I guess, good for them for figuring out how to sponge off the military largesse we seem so eager to provide.

OK, rant officially over. No matter where you live, dear reader, you can now go back to enjoying the things your own country does best, and complaining about the things that really could be done a whole lot better.

Last Day of School

2010-05-21T16:13:00.008+02:00

The other day I wrote that I was trying not to count the (three) days we have left in Provence. I'm torn between feeling excited to go home and being woebegone we're leaving.

Well, I'm torn between those two things, and also the lurking fear that the unpronounceable Icelandic volcano will spew straight at our airplane while it is midway across the Atlantic. But that's just the new form of the same old anxiety. If it's not a blizzard, it's a volcano or a guy with explosives in his shoe. When you get right down to it, I'm just afraid of planes.

At any rate, it's another one of those transitions, and as any reader of this blog knows, we're just not great at them. We're travelers who do OK as long as we don't have to move.

These days, between school and eating and sitting in the sun that has finally shown its face, we're either being sent off or sending ourselves off. We've said goodbye to the three French teachers, to the tennis pro who taught Grace to play, to the bass teacher in Lorgues, to the guitar teacher. We've given away the sewing machine I used twice, the bass amp, the clothes the girls outgrew between then and now. If any readers happen to be nearby in the Var and want a few used hamster cages or a couple of kids' size tennis rackets, you know who to call.

Bill and I are being all melancholy and sad about it, and are mourning the silliest little things.

But the girls, particularly Abigail, couldn't possibly be happier.

Today is her last day of school. Last week in her backpack we received the Great Ceremonial Conferring of the Official Letter allowing her to move on to French 3rd grade. When I translated the letter for her, she looked at me positively stricken, as though we were about to snatch away the Promised Land of her old school in Brooklyn. I had to swear -- immediately and in no uncertain terms -- that just because France was ready to send her to French 3rd grade (CE2), that didn't mean that we were. It just meant that she had passed. She had survived. She had won. She smiled then, but still warily. Abigail has become the Missouri of children, always saying "Show me." I think she won't truly relax once the plane settles back down onto the familiar runway at JFK.

And then, a few minutes later, she'll start asking me for magret de canard. Mark my words. This is Abigail I'm talking about, the girl permanently perched on a knife's edge.

And while I'm going to have to kill you once you read this paragraph (skip down past the italicized bits if you'd prefer to live) the girls have finally been inducted into the inner sanctum of our secret traveling adventure society. Bill devised a super-hokey candlelit ceremony to mark the occasion involving all sorts of little rituals, the scent of lavender, and the taste of honey. The Elders of the Secret Society (which may or may not be yours truly) wrote up official certificates in fancy antiquey-looking fonts for each of the girls. Grace received special commendation for several of her more remarkable achievements, including

A trip to the Emergency Medical Department in a Foreign Land

Learning French from a demented professor, and

Conquering a fear of flying by facing down an Historic Blizzard,

then walking through three foot snow drifts at four in the morning.

For her part, our little uber-patriotic American Abigail was duly recognized for

Nine months of attending school in a Foreign and Often Hostile Land

Learning French in Dread Secret with an enviable Accent Provençal, and

Eating lapin, âne, sangliers, grenouilles, escargots

(special citation for sheer amount of Tome de Pyrennes consumed)

It was clear to me that Abigail couldn't decide whether or not to be mortified while we were doing this funny mumbo-jumbo to try to more dramatically mark the end of our adventure. Part of her wanted to be flattered as we recognized her bravery and flexibility, but mostly she was just hoping to get some bling or at least a cookie out of the event. She was happiest when I put a little necklace on her, with a heart charm that I told her was the amulet of compassion, which would protect her from all harm. I'm pretty sure that she didn't register the subliminal message in my gift, but she certainly was glad to get a present.

The poor kid. She hates weird things, and seemed to be mortified that we were doing little secret handshakes and talking about her achievements like she were becoming a Jedi Knight. If any totally normal parents out there have a weird kid and would like to trade her for Abigail for a weekend every now and then, I'm sure that she would be totally grateful. Stuck in this oddball family, she feels like a round peg surrounded by squares, and often seems to be wishing we'd just settle down in suburbia, buy all our clothes at J.C. Penney, and get respectable jobs.

Grace, however, got right in on the fun, and immediately adopted a faux-serious British accent to give a sort of Hogwartsian dignity to the proceedings. As we read her certificate, she laughed in all the right places and fairly glowed with pride.

Afterwards we tried to roast marshmallows in celebration, but as usual Bill's stack of firewood was more ambitious than it needed to be for the size of the firepit. As the flames leapt into the air towards the little plastic roof that covers part of the terrace, I got more and more nervous, and eventually ran into the house to get a bucket. By the time I was back, even Bill had gotten scared, and we threw a gallon of pool water on his raging inferno. That pretty much wrecked the fire, ruined the mood, and made Bill really sad, so we just gave in to Abigail's impulses and snuggled around the warm hearth of the Disney Channel for a bit. Another classic example of the way we roll.

So our bags are packed. Lessons are finished, and our more thrilling travel adventures are all (hopefully) in the past. I pick up Abigail from school in twenty minutes, at which point she will have spent more time immersed in the French language than any of us all.

Congratulations, Abigail. As soon as we get back home, the next trip to the American Girl store is on me. I'll turn off my usual rant about girly-girl commercialism, and let you revel in the totally familiar and totally normal. We will have tea and buy overpriced plastic things and wave wildly the American flag.

This hasn't been easy for you, our sweet-and-sour little girl, and you won't let us forget that for a minute. But watching your flinty stubbornness hone itself on the challenges of this year has made me so very proud. You've grown more than any of us will ever know.

Bonne Anniversaire

2010-05-20T14:44:00.005+02:00

To my soulmate,

The much-loved father of my children,

My traveling companion in good times and bad,

The most wonderful man in the world.

I love you so very much, and I always have. But now, I have so many more reasons why. I will always be grateful that you dragged us out of our old life and into this remarkable new world. Let's never forget a minute of this year we gave each other.

I remain in awe of your enthusiasm for new places, for new experiences, for new tastes, for music, for being outdoors, for thinking, and for living our lives with the volume turned up high.

Happy Birthday.

Bon Voyage (or, Getting to “Bah, Oui”)

2010-05-19T10:42:00.008+02:00

Today's post is the final one of five inspired by the five for ten challenge. If you like this one, inspired by the word Yes, read more at momalom.com.

The sun comes up and I wake up without an alarm clock. I open my eyes once more in this remarkable house. It’s not mine, but I am so at home here, so at peace. During the day, we four are à table together three times, with learning, writing, walking, talking, and looking at the flowers in between. Late in the evening, the sun sets, now off in the northwest rather than straight on from the windows. The garden gets quiet, and the white roses that have spent the day blooming are luminescent in the dusk.

Another day gone, another day truly lived. For this moment, I have everything I need, and I'm trying very hard not to count how many more of these days I have left.

A few years ago I decided to try to adopt this motto for my life: want what you have. I coined this little phrase as I was writing a toast for my father's 70th birthday party, trying to distill the essence of this wise and remarkable man. Dad never said this phrase to me in so many words, but rather enacted it on a daily basis.

During the times in my life since then when I have been able to follow this example, I have been happy. But as with any goal, sometimes I hit the mark and sometimes I fail. "What Would David Do?" Bill often asks me when I'm making myself nuts with worry. He's reminding me to model myself on my dad's steady positive nature and to want what's right in front of my face. But like any normal, non-David-like human being, I can't always do it. Often I find myself consumed with desire, sometimes bordering on lust, for something distinctly impossible, something I not only do not have now, but could not have ever. Now and again this drives me forward to the next big thing, but mostly it just drives me crazy.

Like about a month ago, when we decided to leave here somewhat earlier than we had planned. I was full of distress and regret (or as full of regret as one can be when one is also full of baguettes and nice cheeses) because I hadn't mastered much French, because Abigail was so stubbornly resisting anything French that was not a meat product, and because the girls hadn't really made friends.

We were frustrated that our girls still hadn't gotten comfortable enough to just walk into our little town, to take themselves outside to play, or to strike up a conversation in a park with a new kid. Part of me felt that we had failed -- failed them and ourselves. And we were tired of cheering them onward to a place they didn't want to go.

So we rebooked our tickets, skipping the big culminating tour de France we had planned, and decided that when our time in Aups was Up, we'd call it a day. We told Abigail that we were going to stop asking her speak French at home. The forced march aspects of the adventure would be over and done, and we would send ourselves packing. Bon Voyage.

It was a regretful, deflated little yes. Feeling defeated and not a little loserish, we said yes to our tired, cranky children (rather than the No we use more frequently and reflexively.) It wasn't a particularly loving yes. It was not a particularly patient yes, but it did the trick.

Everybody relaxed.

Without some faraway finish line to cross (we will all speak perfect French, we will all love France all the time, we will all embrace this place and one another in joyful kum-ba-ya harmony) our sense of being on an impossible mission evaporated. Or, to put it in a more positive, David-like way, we realized that our mission had already been accomplished.

And suddenly, in this last month here, a whole bunch of tiny victories started to unfold.

One day the sun came out on a Wednesday Market Day, and some of the little girls in the town rounded up our kids and convinced them to go play. The girls had asked before, but our kids had always been too shy. But this time, much to our surprise, they both said yes. Bill and I sat at one of the little tables and drank our breakfast beers with Dermot and Anna-Maria, and the girls went off with some kids to play. It was lovely. We had friends. They had friends. They were off on their own in the market square on a sunny midweek morning. Family victory number one.

One day Grace came to me and asked me, quite out of the blue, how she might get Abigail to respect her. She had real concern on her face, and actually listened to my answer, which was that she might first try to actually like her sister. We talked about it awhile, and she seemed to understand that there were things that she could do herself to improve their relationship, rather than waiting for her little sister to magically be less annoying.

The biggest fight between the girls is always about who gets to talk, when. Grace has a hard time waiting for Abigail to finish a thought, and Abigail has a hard time getting her words out fast enough to finish her sentences and her stories. When Grace asked me what specific things she could try, I suggested that she work on trying to be patient with her sister while the words form in her sweet little brain. And then suddenly, after eight and a half years of unabated poisonous sibling rivalry, Grace is taking actual steps to listen to her sister and show her a little love. She's saying yes. Family victory number two.

And in response? Well, a few nights ago Abigail told a long and involved story. For once, nobody interrupted. The story got longer and more detailed, and then slowly drew to an end. She finished up, looked right at Grace, and said, "Would you like to speak now? I'd like to hear what you have to say." Abigail finally had gotten her thought out completely, then politely asked whether her big sister would like to contribute. We all stared at one another in astonishment and surprise: one of us had actually finished a complete thought, then ceded the floor voluntarily. Family victory number three.

And then, one day (with fewer than ten school days to go) Abigail just woke herself up in the morning, put on her backpack without any fuss at all, and skipped all the way to school. That afternoon, she came home from school, made her own snack, and immediately sat down at the kitchen table to do her own homework. The homework consisted of conjugating partir and danser in the future, and multiplying big numbers by little numbers, so it wasn't baby stuff like coloring in a worksheet. And when Bill came into the kitchen to ask her a question, she answered, without any effort at all, "Bah, Oui, Papa." She didn't even hear herself speaking a foreign language as she said yes.

Once she was relieved of the fear of losing America, once she was certain we'd be going home, she let the words that had piled up inside of her come spilling out. I'd say that this was family victory number four, but this one was all hers.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Bah, Oui, Papa. When you decide to want what you have, the messages you hear from all around sound a whole lot more like yes.

(Happy Birthday, Dad -- I know that you already know how much I love you, how much we loved having you and Mom here in France with us, and how much your support of this bon voyage has meant to all of us.)

Bonsoir

2010-05-17T15:51:00.003+02:00

Sometimes the sky itself is full of desire.

But sometimes, lust is a little less lofty. This post is in response to day four of Momalom.com's series, Five for Ten. I want to give massive thanks to the women behind Five for Ten, as I've found the thematic inspiration and conversation inspiring. But they didn't make it easy. While the first three 5-for-10 topics were Courage, Happiness and Memory, for the fourth, they've suggested that participants write about Lust.

I wrote this one, I put it up, then I took it back down. Now it's back. (But really, Mom, this racy post is here only because all the other kids are doing it. I swear.)

France is great, don't get me wrong. We love the food, we love the scenery. We love the time we have had together as a family, and boy do we love all the new meats (read all the way to the end for a full list of the ones we have tried. Just FYI: we have only eight days to go, and still nobody has consumed any horses.)

But even a place as terrific as this one has its downsides.

One particularly enormous drawback of this year away is that I'm getting hardly any flirt love here. Aside from one guy, who seems to flirt with everyone, I'm getting nothing. Nada. I know I'm 40, sure, but I don't think that means that I'm dead. Back in NYC, 40 is like the new 25 or something, which means I'm only a few years out of college, even without the aid of Botox. I have it on very good authority that a head or two still turns my way when I'm on my game. Just not, apparently, here in France.

Bill, however, is on fire. He gets flirted with at dinner parties, while walking Abigail to school, or even at the grocery store when the clerk gives him his change. The woman standing at the cash register tends to hold his hand in her two, just for an extra moment or so, and say, "Merci, Monsieur" in her most suggestive tones. (I know this because he likes telling this story. When I'm standing in line next to him, she is perfectly discreet.)

His favorite vineyard is the one with the beautiful and attentive caveiste, a snazzy dresser who apparently was put on this planet to stand in a damp underground space and pour glass after glass for her male patrons. She gazes lovingly into each man's eyes and compliments his excellent taste in reds and rosé. (I know this because he's taken all of our male visitors there, and they invariably come back with a half-dozen bottles of wine and a dreamy expression on their faces, a look that can't entirely be attributed to the effects of their degustations.)

I can joke about this (and I'm quite sure I'm joking, really I am) because Bill is just not the flirty type. Back in Brooklyn, a borough chock full of male hotties from all over the world – at least some of them heterosexual— he barely earns a glance or two a day. He certainly doesn't invite female attention particularly aggressively, but here in France he has to fight them off with a stick.

As for me, I might as well be wearing a fanny pack, a brown paper bag, or a nun's habit. It doesn't matter whether I wear the jeans and high heeled boots, or sport a little extra lipgloss. Now and then some old guy with his sweater tucked into his pants might smile my way in an avuncular way, but the rest of the time it's as though I don't exist. Not at 25, not at 40.

Apparently, I'm not even qualified to be a cougar.

One (large) part of me would like to have some sort of horrible freak out about the sharp waning in my formerly powerful charisma where men are concerned. It's not like I'm going to use it for anything in particular; it's just that I'd like it not to be gone.

So instead, I've attributed this sharp decline in the strength of my man-magnetism to cultural differences. I've chosen to deal with this by theorizing that the mechanisms of attraction work differently here from what we're used to back home.

I've decided to believe that lust -- just like everything else -- is culturally determined.

So how are things different here? To make one massive overgeneralization, the women are drastically more attractive than are the men.

This is of course a matter of taste, and you are free to disagree with me as strenuously as you'd like. See Big Little Wolf on French Men for a terrific counterpoint. But when we first got here, Bill and I would often see a French couple walking together, and then quietly sing to one another a few lines of the Joe Jackson classic, "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" Now, we're just used to it. No offense, French guys: from where I sit, you're just not all that in the way the ladies tend to be. I have felt my jaw drop upon seeing a French guy precisely three times all year long. Probably only one of them was straight, and two of them were in Paris.

You would think that this disparity between French and American men would mean that I would get more attention, rather than less. That the not-so-hot men would be grateful to encounter a friendly blonde like myself. But mostly it means that the attractiveness ratio between Bill and me has been redrawn. Bill is just a whole lot more attractive, relatively, than he was back home in the States, which throws things off between the two of us.

Plus, in contrast, French women are generally relatively pretty. They don’t tend to go all droopy and soft in the middle, or turn all skeletally work-out-obsessed, but instead hold onto their tidy little shapes.

Then, they really extend whatever they've got by tarting it up. They don't wear exercise pants in public. They don't slouch around in sweatshirts or wear anything functional like backpacks, hiking boots, or warm wool hats. I’m quite certain that French women are issued a set of beautiful flimsy silk scarves by the national government, and never leave the house without one knotted smartly around their necks. (The scarf phenomenon is also true for Parisian men, but not of the men out here in the countryside.)

French women work the makeup and tight pants pretty hard, and they have really terrific hair. Beauty products are serious business here, sold in medicinal-looking packages by fully-qualified pharmacists, rather than stacked offhand in bins in a grocery aisle. Women either have either a bold cascade of hair in a messy-sexy “I just copulated” sort of updo, or a super-chic short crop that says, "I am the gamine of your Breathless dreams." They often wear a leather jacket and boots, plus a long, tight sweater, (a "butt-hugger" as Bill calls it.) Very infrequently they will choose an unfortunate oversized blouse and some strange I-dream-of-genie pants with an oddly distended crotch. But usually it's tarty-sexy all the way.

There is simply no way that I could ever keep up.

So there’s the shift in the attractiveness ratio. But also, if our limited frame of reference is any sign, the women tend to do the flirting, rather than the men, or rather than the mutual way we're used to back home. French women appear to initiate most of the bisous, their eyes do the lingering, and they stoke the little fires that lead to minor social dramas.

The men seem to hang back -- cool and detached and barely breathing. Perhaps they are just used to being wooed, or desired, or getting to date women drastically more attractive than themselves. 'Cause if my eyes don't deceive me, there's something going wrong around here.

Of course, the more likely interpretation is not so much that this world is weird, but that we – the newcomers and outsiders – just have no idea how to read the cultural signals. Perhaps here in France, female coquettishness is simply required. Perhaps it means much less than it does back home. Perhaps, like bisous, all these women apparently flirting with my husband mean nothing more than, “Hey, nice to see ya!” Perhaps that caveiste is just getting a really hefty commission on all the wine she sells. Perhaps I'm getting so little interest because I'm just not feeling the lust, myself (except for that terrific American man who lives in my house.)

Because it’s almost too disturbing to interpret French flirting (or lack thereof) at face value. That would mean that things here operated by a particularly louche and unfamiliar set of rules. That this world was not just weird, but actually threatening in some way. That maybe I should leave not just in eight days, but now, on the next plane out once the volcanic ash clears.

To understand what's really going on, in my real life and in France, I often turn to books. Edith Wharton is one of the American women I have used as a guide to France, despite the fact that she's been dead for decades. Wharton had a whole series of fascinating things to say about France (including the caution that one should not write off-the-cuff massively generalizing armchair anthropology, as I am doing in this post.) But it seems she traveled to Paris mostly to have the first sexually satisfying relationship of her entire life. Her hot stuff was with an American businessman, not with a French guy, but they seemed to use perceived French morality as a convenient excuse.

In her book, French Ways and Their Meaning,” she tells her American readership that French marriages are made for stabilizing families, rather than for love. According to Edith, French husbands and wives simply assume that they will find their life-sustaining passions in affairs, rather than in one another. When I first read this, I assumed that she was looking to explain away her own shady behavior. But then, all those cute scarves and longing looks and messy up-dos got me wondering whether she was more right than I first wanted to admit.

Some aspects of France we’ve taken in as fully as we can: the visual beauty, the remarkable smells, sights and sounds. And certainly the food. As of today, we’ve eaten a veritable ABC's of animal products: andouiette, beef, canard, donkey, eggs, frogs, goat, huitres, lamb, oeufs, pork, quail eggs, rabbit, snails, tête de veau, veal, wild boar, and at least forty different kinds of cheese. If this post were about gluttony rather than lust, I’d have tales to tell that would make you blush.

But other parts of the French experience might just have to go unexplored, certain lines clearly drawn. Bill can soak up the attention he's getting, and I'll just assume that in some other country, I'm still all that. But, like steaks made of horse meat, lust à la français is one mystery I think we’re both pretty happy not to plumb any deeper than the very surface.

Poppies and Memory, Another View

2010-05-15T08:35:00.006+02:00

Back home, in the Walmart Parking Lot, or out in front of the VFW Hall, Veterans sell little paper poppies to help us remember. Here, real poppies are growing wild everywhere we look.

On our drives through Provence, we have seen a war memorial in every single tiny town. The roadsides are dotted in these little nowhere-places with memorials to the Maquisard Resistance, decorated with French Flags and plastic flowers. Bronze plaques list the names of the men from that place who died fighting or resisting the two world wars fought here not all that long ago.

American soldiers killed in those same wars are buried in tidy lines in enormous cemeteries all over Europe.

Nearly nine-hundred American soldiers killed in August, 1944, are buried at the Rhone Valley American Cemetery. They died in Operation Dragoon, a sort of Provençal D-Day, and were buried just outside of Draguignan, a few miles from here.

They landed here on the southern coast of France instead of the coast of Italy, the beaches of Normandy, or the fields of Flanders.

We're headed home in a few weeks, but they will always be here.

Bon Temps de Vieux, or The Good Old Days

2010-05-14T11:09:00.003+02:00

I tell myself that I won't forget this. And this, and this, and then, oh, also this. I won't forget the way Abigail's hair smells when she crushes in for a hug. I won't forget the shine of Grace's face as she was driving the boat, fishtailing back and forth through the Gorge de Verdun.

I won't forget the way that millions of wild poppies have just started to bloom all along the roadsides, on top of stone walls, and interspersed with the grasses of the fields. They grow at random, apparently unplanted, so astonishing in their color and in the fragility of their papery petals.

By writing a moment, or taking its photograph then posting it here, I somehow reassure myself that I have preserved it for some imaginary someday. For some Launa yet to be, somewhere else. So aware of the fact that we are leaving, Bill and I have been sorting through our belongings and scraps of paper, looking for what to save and what to cull. Which old ticket, or to-do list, or tiny shell from the beach will help us to remember how we have lived here, what we did, how we felt?

What could possibly remind us just how sweet the air smells?

I won't hang on to everything, of course, because those who live too powerfully in memory can't truly live in the present. If everything becomes a souvenir the moment we experience it, we merely curate our lives, rather than living them.

And, more importantly, the biggest memories, the ones that endure, are rarely the ones we stow away so consciously. Who knows, from day to day, which chance encounter or bold move will grow into our defining legend, shaping all the living we have yet to do?

As Bill and I have been packing, we also have been absorbed in the mystery of what our girls will remember from this deeply different year we've lived together. What will they tell their friends about this experience -- so separate and so distinct from their tiny pasts and their vast futures? What smells will they remember? What tastes will they crave? What will become their Proustian madeliene and bring their France spilling back?

We parents are in the Memory Business, but we have no idea which ones will stick. We provide the stage for our children's experiences, we tell them their own stories, and then have to spend the rest of our lives living down our inevitable mistakes. But although we live in the same houses, share the same days with one another, our children's memories are only their own, vastly more unpredictable than the ones we stash away for ourselves.

To totally oversimplify their reactions, I can say that Grace has loved this year, and Abigail has resisted it every step of the way, even as its challenges and sensations have seeped in to become a part of her. (Now, when she plays with her American Girl dolls, she is likely to be speaking to them entirely in French, as long as she thinks we're not listening.)

When I asked them today at breakfast what they would remember from the year, that was pretty much how they called it. "This is the year I became amazing," Grace told me. "This is the year to which I will never return," countered Abigail. But I'm not so sure that those are the stories that will endure.

I say this because memory is tricky. For example, Grace and I totally hated Disneyworld when we went there a year and a half ago. There were meltdowns, and we both got totally overwhelmed by the crowds. Abigail, who thrived on all that (godawful) sensory stimulation, still slowly fell into a horrible mood over the course of our few days there. She greedily took it all in, but by the end of it, she was so down and numb that she wasn't even sure whether she was hungry or full.

But then, just a few months later, they were both maintaining, to our shock and surprise, that it was the best vacation of their lives. They narrate stories about the fireworks and the Flume Ride and even the expensive, nearly inedible chicken dinner at our hotel as though they had visited Valhalla itself, wearing mouse ears instead of Viking Helmets, little warriors armed with a deathless supply of Fast Passes.

Even as I am here, partly still living our adventure, partly packing it away in its boxes, and into this blog, I am also realizing that we are here, in large part, because of at least two generations of family memories. We dreamed up this trip in part to echo trips taken years and years ago, trips I can only remember through other people's stories.

As we drive up and down the A8, I think of my Dad, in a VW beetle, on his legendary post-college trip fifty years ago with three (yes, three!) girls. I think of Uncle Kim and Aunt Maria, Experimenters in International Living, who met fifty junes ago on a ship bound for Europe, and then told one another that if they were meant to be, they would meet on September 3 under the Arc de Triomphe. They later lived in France with their young children for two and a half years that became the stuff of family legend.

Bill's parents lived overseas as well, and he started telling me about his memories of his own family's overseas sabbatical almost as soon as we met. In fact, one of the reasons I fell so deeply in love with him was the way he loved to tell me stories about his happiest of childhoods. Back in college, we would lie together on the (filthy) futon in his dorm room and he would unspool his life for me, story by story. I heard all about Vermont, and his sister and his cousins. About his parents, his Grandma Mil, and Inky the dog. But a lot of the time I heard about his family's year in England when he was in the second grade.

You could say that our entire family was born out of those early hours of storytelling. When he told me those stories, I felt safe and warm and loved. I heard the echo of my own happy childhood. Those stories convinced me that Bill was a man with whom I could build a life.

Years later, when we decided to get married, I promised him that someday we would get a dog, and that we would take our kids to live overseas. It was a decade before we made good on those promises, but the dog we found looks a lot like Inky, and the trip we planned was built on the model of the stories he remembered. This is the kind of adventure I would never dream up all on my own; it has had Bill scrawled all over it from the start.

But now I'm the one who has written it down. And the girls are the ones who have lived it, and will decide -- either consciously or by chance -- what to make of it all.

Now at the end of this year of being so deeply enmeshed within this little family of mine, I realize our memories are interwoven. I have my own distinct universe of memory, for sure, but now so many of the memories that shape my life in the present are shared.

Some memories are all our own. We keep them deep inside, all to ourselves. They form the deepest core of who we are; each individual's web of memories is no more and no less than her soul.

But other memories travel along the lines of generations -- through parents to children, then on to the children who may become parents themselves. It's just that we can never truly predict the paths that those memories will take, as they snake themselves forward in time.

A few things that won't fit in our bags and boxes

2010-05-13T10:42:00.008+02:00

I spent yesterday packing ten boxes to mail home. I packed the books we couldn't bear to part with, along with Bill's headlamp, Grace's craft supplies, and all six of Abigail's American Girl dolls. None of it is worth the money we paid to la Poste to mail it home for us, but it's all stuff we would rather not live without.

But some things won't fit in our bags and boxes to go home. So I took the camera around the house to make a record of the things I don't want to forget:

The enormous earthen pots of herbs growing just outside the front door,

The key to Diesel Liesel, best damn car on the planet: my trusty companion, navigator, and fellow traveler for eight happy months,

The t-shirt Abigail wore nonstop, even when it wasn't such a perfect day,

The small ceramic platter with the scary warning, on which she kept her barrettes,

The enormous housekey,

The big stacks of cookbooks and serving bowls (Ripailles, published en français, is coming home in one of the ten boxes.)

The oils, salts and spices sitting on a piece of marble next to the stove where I learned to cook,

Wildflowers bunched in Bill's hand, (we are taking the hand back with us),

Just a few of the books I read during the cold months of winter,

And the little piles of fresh herbs Abigail is always leaving around the house.

Bonheur

2010-05-12T13:43:00.009+02:00

(Henri Matisse, Le Bonheur de Vivre, 1906)

Since coming to France last August, the four of us have learned an entirely new way of living our life as a family. By settling in here, gradually stepping out of the role of tourists and into the unfamiliar rhythms of a new place, we have slowly discovered not only a new language, but also different ways of experiencing all of the elements of everyday life: food, school, friendships, color, light, health, growth, and even our very own family.

At the start of our adventure, I named this blog in a lighthearted burst of cynicism, assuming that I would drag my own little bagful of likes, dislikes, quirks, hopes and disappointments wherever I went. Bill could take us three girls out of Brooklyn, I thought, but we would be defiantly the same wherever we went.

But that hasn’t been the case. It’s different here in more fundamental ways than any of us could have imagined. And therefore, I am different. We are different. Even our happiness is different. (Thanks again to Five for Ten for the thematic inspiration.)

I believe in the setpoint theory of happiness, which is that each of us has a happiness thermostat. As individuals, we tend to hover around the same degree of happiness, despite even radical changes in the circumstances of our lives. As Daniel Goleman put it, writing in The New York Times, in July 1996,

“There is…scientists contend, a set point for happiness, a genetically determined mood level that the vagaries of life may nudge upward or downward, but only for a while. With time, the grouchy tend to become as cranky as before, and the light-hearted cheery again.”

When we came here, I assumed that this would be true – that despite embracing a life centered around my family, away from the stresses of work, and in a totally idyllic location, I would find myself swinging between ebullient and cranky just as I have my whole life.

If you read this blog start to finish (as I am sure only a few members of my own family have done) you would see that that has in fact been the case. My glass is generally half-empty or half-full from day to day, but rarely overflows and never ever runs totally dry.

But the precise quality of the happiness I have found here is different. It feels more steady, somehow. More daily and rhythmic. Fewer amusements rise like soap bubbles, only to burst into the air as disappointments. As an armchair anthropologist, I’ve tried to puzzle through exactly why.

I have to credit the French. It’s not for nothing that people love to come here, as the French have preserved and cherished a landscape and a lifestyle to which the rest of the world likes to escape, on the order of 85 million tourists per year.

The people who have lived in this countryside for basically all of human history appear to me to have a different way of being happy from the way Americans define the word. While the U.S. Constitution reminds us of our right to pursue own own innovative forms of happiness, the French seem dead serious about insuring the preservation of their shared vision of bonheur.

American-style happiness is individually-defined. Mine may look like yours, but it might not. Our happiness is also often fleeting and elusive. It is characterized by enormous smiles, fulfillment in one’s career, good times rolling on the weekend, and a feeling of freedom of expressing one’s emotions and ideas. Americans are often surprised – shocked even -- when the forms of happiness we promised ourselves we'd find are shattered, or turn out to be hollow. But, hopeful as ever, we get up the next day and pursue happiness again. There is always something more amazing on the horizon to consume or achieve. And we're just the ones to invent it.

In contrast, the Bonheur of the French appears to be the sum of a long series of carefully thought-out shared cultural decisions about how to eat, what to drink, when to work, and how to love. It is less about smiles, about individual choices, or the pursuit of the next amazing thing. Instead, it’s much more about a comfortably shared sense of how the moments, seasons, and years of life should unfold.

In its true form à la proveçal, bonheur is maintained in a series of careful steps from one pleasant, comfortable moment to the next. In the morning, the churchbells chime and we all open our shutters in pretty much the same way. We take our coffee and croissant in the café, sitting down and chewing and gazing out languidly into space. The stores open and we all get big straw baskets to collect the day’s worth of whatever is freshest. (Fruits and vegetables here are bred for their taste rather than for their shelf life: they are ripe and perfect one day, and mush the next.)

School and work happen for a few hours in the morning, but then lunch is long, and relatively leisurely. It is taken at a real table, often followed by a nap. (A nap! I’m not kidding!) Here in the South, the stores close for a few hours in the middle of the day, after which everybody learns or works again in the afternoon. Later, there are aperitifs and dinner and salad and cheese and the pulling shutters closed to mark the end of the day.

Bonheur is sustained through the process of these milestones of daily life being reached and savored fully and in turn. A true French person moves deliberately from shutters to coffee to shuteye after lunch, recognizing that this order of life – so carefully developed over generations of habit and cultural agreement – is the cornerstone of his or her share of the joy of life. Happiness is not located in novelty, and it isn’t individual. (That is passion and pleasure – another thing entirely in France.) Rather, happiness is found in a carefully choreographed series of pleasant and predictable tried-and-true experiences.

To an American, this all has a touch of the boring. How could happiness be so predictable? Someone French might answer: this is just how we do things. Fewer promised peaks, perhaps – but also fewer perilous tumbles into the depths.

I would also add that the rigidity and the specificity required to preserve the French way of life hasn't been my favorite aspects of this year: the French may have bonheur, but they aren't exactly likely to be cheerful, friendly and fun about it.

French president Nicholas Sarkozy got a lot of press back in the fall for suggesting that nations measure themselves (and one another) not just on the basis of gross domestic product, but also by the degree of bonheur of their citizens. To the degree that any Americans even paid attention to Sarkozy, they rightly saw this as a shot across our bow – and just as quickly dismissed his serious argument as typically French fol-de-rol.

But he meant something a lot deeper than most Americans would care to seriously entertain – for example, how might the quality of life change for typical Americans if we had the kind of security provided by universal health care and low-cost university education? To put it another way: how many leisurely lunches could we enjoy in our lives if we weren’t struggling to hold onto our health insurance and pay off enormous college loans?

But I digress.

When we were living in Brooklyn, our little family took our happiness where we could find it. Since we were then wholly occupied by the process of being a two-career, two-kid family, running ourselves ragged during the weekdays, we generally took up the pursuit in little bursts of a dance party each evening after dinner, or a Coney Island trip on the weekend, or a vacation with our families. In between to get us through, there would be the fleeting joys of on-line shopping for the grownups, or Poptropica for the kids.

We saw happiness as an escape from the routine, or the routine's successful completion.

Here France, bonheur has been the routine in itself.

Sometimes back home we found the happiness we pursued in our escapes or our achievements, and sometimes we were thwarted. We were reminded to find happiness in the little things, for sure, (and we certainly did.) But we were also routinely encouraged to covet other people’s happiness, and then purchase our own, ideally in supersized quantities, in the form of an ever-improving panoply of amusements, objects, and rarefied experiences. America holds out the promise that there is always a bigger happiness in store. This is especially true in the city of New York.

Don’t get me wrong – I love New York, and precisely 51% of me can’t wait to get back. I love it even when I hate it, and I’m convinced that life there is its own version of perfect. American happiness is unpredictable. It's magical. I stand ready once more to pursue it with vigor to the heights and to the depths.

But maybe, just maybe, when we all return, I'll find a way to infuse the routine of our lives with the balance of bonheur.

Family

2010-05-11T14:31:00.004+02:00

Our last visitors from America -- Grandma, Grandpa, and
the original family francophile, Aunt Maria.

Bon Courage

2010-05-10T21:43:00.006+02:00

I'm not ready to go.

I wasn't ready to come here, and now with two weeks left of our life-altering-sabbatical, I'm not ready to go. Actually being faced with packing our bags has flooded me with regret for all the could- have-beens that never were. And anxiety about whatever lies ahead, in the world I used to know.

(Damn if I could just for once get with the program and just be whereverIam.)

As we were preparing to go on this trip, our friends told us how brave we were being, just stepping off a convenient ledge of our lives into the unknown of a foreign world.

This always struck me as a wholly charitable interpretation. They spoke about our trip to Southern France as though we were off to Zimbabwe to dig wells or something.

From my vantage point, as the one setting out on the trip, I just felt stupid and scared. Stupid to jettison a terrific job and a lovely, settled neighborhoody existence for a place I’d never been and couldn’t adequately describe when people asked about it. A place we had never even visited.

I was scared to leave my life and my friends to face the big fat unknown. France was the least of it. I was also facing stay-at-home motherhood for the very first time, and that truly struck fear into my feeble little heart.

I wonder if people who are actually being courageous ever recognize that quality in themselves. On the few occasions when I have been accused of displaying courage, (as opposed to the more frequent occasions when I have been called a rank coward, if not in so many words) I have never seen myself as others see me. In all of those instances, I felt motivated by mission, or passion, or avarice, or sheer dumb bliss. So when it looked from the outside like I was being courageous, odds were that I saw it differently.

For example, there’s our girls, who have showed more courage this year than you could possibly imagine. Grace, the fifth grader who fought back panic every day for two solid months until we finally relented and discovered the miracle of homeschool. Abigail, our sweet little eight year old girl who has fought French school tooth and nail, but still gone to class every day. I’m quite sure that from their vantage point, their own courage has felt at times like failure and futility.

Now, I’m facing down the return trip (on a cheap flight via Iceland, if that counts as bravery rather than stupidity), and going back feels awfully scary again. Today I started packing to bring our little family back safely to its shores, and suddenly all these feelings I had been so assiduously squirshing down into their awful little holes came surging forward.

Anxiety and regret, mostly. Anxiety for all the change I can not yet foresee, and regret for every change that never got made. For all those verb tenses I never mastered, for all those dishes I never learned to cook. For the friends the girls never made.

We've been here for nine months now -- nine months of discovery, confusion, loneliness, and really terrific cheese. And now we're suddenly about not to be, and I can't help but wonder about what I'll bring back, and what I'll have to leave behind.

Here, away from everything we knew before, I've been able to really dig deep and make a home for our little family. What will happen to that home when we uproot it and drag it back?

Here, I've really been able to pay attention. I have nothing to distract me, nothing to get in the way between me and my girls. What will happen to that focus once we’re back in the land of too much to do?

Here, I’ve been able to fall back in love with my family more deeply and fully than I ever thought I could. What will become of that love as we leave our cocoon of French life – à table, and tout la famille?

So far, I’ve only found my answers on this trip by moving forward. Call it courage, if you'd like. Mostly we've gone forward because that's the only way to go.

But this time around, moving forward takes us back.

(thanks to momalom.com for the thematic inspiration provided by their five for ten challenge. Click over to their site to find many more posts on courage.)

Provence Rainbow

2010-05-06T12:50:00.002+02:00

Guest Weather

2010-05-05T15:11:00.005+02:00

Each time our lucky guests arrive in the land of 300 days of sunshine? Il commence à pleurer. I've started to think of rain as guest weather.

Today, Bill's parents and Aunt Maria got up for their first day of five here in Aups, and it was pouring so hard that even the marché was a bust.

But still, even in all this water, the garden is beautiful: orange, blue, and green.

Yellow

2010-05-04T16:02:00.003+02:00

Provence, you had me at orange, blue, and green.

And then, as you turn towards summer once again, you bust out all in yellow. Just because you can.

Those huge fields of blooming rapeseed are not only stunning, but practical. When we stopped to take a photo, a million bees were going crazy in the flowers, pollinating and making honey and making the loudest collective buzz I have ever heard. Once the blooms are gone and the plants are fully ripe, the crop is pressed for oil.

So much useful beauty.

The Garden and the Game, Part III: Mimicry and Vertigo

2010-05-03T15:44:00.009+02:00

When she came for a visit not long ago, our friend Hillary gave me a great piece of information. I was asking her about the key to being a happy ex-patriot in France, as opposed to a half-hearted one, a mere tourist who loves the landscape and the food -- this great big lovely blooming Garden -- but hates everything (and everyone) else French.

Her answer was swift and sure: to love France, one must enjoy playing the game of France, and be a good sport. I trusted her opinion on this, as she is the most successful ex-pat I have the pleasure to know personally. We were on a long car-ride, without any responsibilities aside from alleviating her daughter Stella’s carsickness, so we had a long time to talk. She told me about game theorist Roger Caillois and his definitions of the different kinds of games people play. After she left, I couldn’t get her idea out of my mind as I thought about our experiences this year, the books I have read, and the people we have met.

Parts One and Two of this little muse discussed the first two categories of Caillois’s games, but in case you’re in a hurry, here’s the gloss. To enjoy the adventures that came your way, you could play against France (and its waiters and weird schedules and odd bureaucracy) because you like the competition. An ex-patriot could also relish the element of chance in the game of France, the element of Alea, reveling in its many oddities and surprising twists and turns.

But there are two other kinds of games in his schema. For example, lots of games depend on mimicry. These are the favorite sorts of games in the Pre-Kindergarten where I used to work, as the children would play by demanding imagination from one another, again and again: “Pretend you’re a baby. Pretend I’m a fireman. Pretend we’re in Alaska and this is my monkey.” Games with a strong element of mimicry require a suspension of disbelief, a willingness on the part of the spectator to allow the player to become something else. To quote the theorist, in a game requiring mimicry “the subject makes believe or makes others believe that he is someone other than himself. He forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another.”

What better way to play at mimicry than to shed one's own language and take on somebody else's? As one friend pointed out when he came here, "Geez, they have a word for everything, don't they?" But as I have discovered, language is a lot more than putting one word behind another. To be a true ex-pat, you need to take on the facial expressions, the little turns of phrase, the very way of being that the French language encourages. Watching our friend Mary fall effortlessly into French was just like that. As a matter of fact, she even fell into British English when talking to Jessica. Once again, that girl was born to live here.

Julia Child strikes me as the best possible literary example of somebody deeply at play at the game of pretend French. As she describes in her memoir, My Life in France, the whole first part of her life was sort of one long flail, before she discovered the real purpose of her life: mimicking the great French chefs.

Importantly, she was not one of those awful snobs who actually believe they can somehow become French with enough affectations. In her funny asides in her cookbook, as in her television show, she always maintained a sense of humor. Caillois again: “The pleasure lies in being or passing for another. But in games the basic intention is not that of deceiving the spectators.” Instead, Child constantly relished the ways in which being here – and puzzling through the game of France – could be fun. (And watching Streep mimic Child mimicking France? Priceless.)

According to Caillois, a central quality of games of mimicry is the requirement that the actor “fascinates” the spectator. However, it seems clear to me that many of the successful ex-patriots I know who are cooking like the French, dressing like the French, decorating or swearing or shrugging like the French, are also hard at work fascinating themselves. If you’re looking for a country to go and play house, this is a great one to choose.

So to enjoy one’s ex-patriot French experience, you can like the competition, the sense of chance, or the fascination of dressing up and using different words for everything.

Or, perhaps, say, if you’re nothing at all like me, you are the sort of person who enjoys games involving Ilinx. This term can be translated literally as “whirlpool,” and refers to any game that induces vertigo. These games turn on the feeling of falling free, on the pleasures of disorientation, on the way one’s mind tends to swirl in the face of being upended. If you’re that sort of good sport, you find your fun in leaping from high places, speeding down hills in cars or on skis, or in being utterly turned around and lost and then suddenly finding yourself righted. All things that leave control-aholics like me white-knuckled, panicked and sobbing, or simply very, very carsick.

I’m with Hillary's girl Stella when it comes to long car trips and windy roads; I almost can’t bear them unless I’m the one driving. But Hillary herself, the woman whose quick answer to my question about expatriots got me puzzling about these different kinds of games, has been happily falling into the abyss that is France for twenty years now.

When we first met her, back in college, she was the school’s champion high diver, literally hurling herself into a whirlpool at high speeds to win games. Her hair then, as now, fell in lush corkscrew curls, as if to advertise how much fun it is for her to twist her way through life.

And ever since she decided to come here, she’s been doing just that. She threw herself into the task of mastering French, then she fell from one challenging, interesting sort of work to another. She has leapt from project to freelance to company to art installation, making her choices fit her circumstances. Right now she’s balancing raising her two tiny children (both absolutely delicious little human beings) with a photography exhibition planned for a public park in Paris and a dance project with a choreographer in Berlin. She has enjoyed the freedom of an artist and the freedom of an entrepreneur, learning to work with photographs and computers in highly complex and sophisticated ways. I know that she has had decidedly dark days – just like the rest of humanity, and sometimes perhaps a worse. Yet because of the way she plays the game, because of her way of being in this weird world, she’s never fallen victim to that lurking fear that things might not work out.

When you like to dive from high heights, spinning all the way down, you have to have a little more faith in the unknown than an ordinary dogpaddler. France has just given her a higher platform from which to execute her more impressive leaps.

Somehow, despite all this leaping, she’s not the least bit flighty. Instead, she’s an awfully grounded and solid person. Over the weekend she and her kids were here, we talked about the ways in which she’s recently tried to become more systematic, more deliberate, more careful in her choices. Having little kids can do that to you, I guess. The more they spin and dive and leap, the more we have to stand firm, becoming the solid ground from which they fly.

But to me, even with two little kids to worry over, Hillary seems utterly fearless. Me? I hoard my own fears as though they are face cards in a poker game. I feed them and keep them alive, despite the greedy way they tear at me. In contrast, she sees a situation where she might be a little out of control, and tries to find ways to make it even more interesting and compelling.

France also seems to make her laugh. She loves everything worth loving here, but she also sees the country’s ridiculous side, and she relishes the opportunities to face down its strange quirks. When she switches into French, her whole affect changes, and she she’s diving headlong into whatever comes next. Living here has become her life’s big adventure – so far. Who knows what spin might come next.

Hillary’s fearlessness reminds me of Bill's. Back in college, Hillary founded the school’s Outing Club, and Bill was one of the first to join her merry outdoorsy band. (Bill and Alain had one of their first brushes with outdoor disaster as a result of this club. When they left to take twenty new members on a pre-freshman multi-day canoing trip, they left school without any tents, and found themselves having to hire a wedding tent to keep all those poor new first-year students dry. He also finished the weekend with a bruise on his face in the exact shape of the gunnel of a Grumman canoe.)

Ilinx, like the great outdoors, is meant to be thrilling and disorienting, rather than safe and secure. Thus these games require a wholehearted willingness to fall wherever you land. As long as I have known Bill, I have been watching him plunge headlong into things. I’ve admired it – either from afar, or from alongside – but have never quite been able to share his joy in the speed and the slide.

Back in college he threw himself into political theory, or theater, or dangerously masochistic sports. Before too long, it was teaching, and travel. Eventually it became love. He has taken me camping during several hurricanes, striding purposefully into the heart of a thunderstorm just for the rush of it all. I used to think he was heedless of danger. Now, thinking about Ilinx , I can see that to him, disorientation and chaos just make things a lot more fun.

This trip has been no exception. While I held back all last spring, clinging tightly to the familiar, despite its difficulties and frustrations, he plunged us forward and onward. I sat immobile in my brown chair, wishing days away, while he packed the house, made arrangements, set events inexorably in motion. He started diving forward, and dragged us all along over the precipice, confident that we would land on our feet. Or, if we didn’t, that he’d find some way to rent us an oversized tent.

Over the summer, he took a Rassias Method intensive French course based on all sorts of vertigo-inducing games. During the 100 hours of instruction, over ten days, he was plunged into French. The Rassias method works on the basis of disorientation. Using theater games and heightened emotion, it seeks to get to the part of our brains that is less guarded and controlled. To Rassias, foreign language is like a game of pick-up basketball. You can’t learn to speak by doing endless drills in a quiet room. You can only learn to play by playing, and the program he has created forces you to do just that. According to Rassias, if you’re still in control, you’re not learning much. We speak foreign languages not to get all the grammar in order, but rather in order to communicate, to love, to play.

Bill’s French was always good, but this injunction – to wade in without fear – has been invaluable to helping him to really relish this year. He has faced down bureaucrats, he has gotten into debates with his French teacher, he has bought and sold a car. (Farewell, sweet Liesel.) He has sought out conversation and connection at every turn. Thus of all of us, Bill has loved this experience the most. This year, I have often sat just off to the side, listening and watching as he spins his stories and dives into situations that leave me frozen. Marveling at him. Proud of him. And so very in love with this magical person, who is so different from me.

Me. Ah yes, by the way, me. Where do I fit into this schema, I keep wondering. What kind of ex-patriot am I? Well, I certainly like all the playing house we’ve been doing this year, although I find I turn to the Joy of Cooking more often than a real French cook would ever deign. Not that I am trying, but nobody would mistake me for a French person, (it’s usually Swedish, or Dutch.) Chance makes me nervous if the stakes are higher than your typical game of Yahtzee, and vertigo’s even worse. As much as I like competition, I haven’t seemed to find many games I could even enter here, much less win. I've been much more of a spectator than ever before in my life.

Instead, I think I’ve seen France this year as a great big puzzle. A French Sudoku, perhaps, boxes numbered un a neuf in impossibly complicated patterns. I've taken pleasure in trying to take things apart to figure out how they fit together, through thinking and wondering and musing. To the extent that I’ve been able to get myself in the game, rather than hanging back in the hammock, it has often been through writing this blog.

As I sit down to write, I step back and puzzle through our time here – the successes and failures, the mysteries and mistakes. In retrospect, in words, and in pictures, I feel like I can enjoy it more – I can find more of the joy of play. So perhaps my joy is in discovering the rules behind the game – or in fact making them up when I can’t discover them. Writing this all down, and making meaning in the process has been one of the things I’ve found most intriguing, engaging, and fun.

But any writer needs a reader, even if I just have to imagine you're still there finding all of this entertaining.

So those of you at home? Thanks for playing along.

Everybody Loves Ruins

2010-05-03T11:00:00.002+02:00

In Arles

2010-05-03T10:48:00.002+02:00

On the Roman stage, from the lookout tower of the Arena, and in the park.

At L'Elephant Vert

2010-05-03T10:40:00.003+02:00

The girls kept wanting to know, "So where's the Green Elephant?"

The Camargue

2010-05-03T10:36:00.001+02:00

Sightseeing Trip

2010-05-01T11:02:00.006+02:00

Alain is one of Bill's oldest friends. They met back when Ronald Reagan was in office, and then campaigned together last fall for Barack Obama. Together they have shared college dorm rooms, death-defying hikes, heartbreaks, fatherhood, and a ten-week trip through Europe. Alain has loomed large over this trip in part because he's tall (the two men's actual height is a constant source of discussion, but Alain's excellent posture means he has a good 1/2 inch on Bill.) But mostly Alain is so ever-present with us, even when he's not here, is because he and Bill visited most of the places on our itinerary first.

So if we loved Nice, they were there first, whooping it up in a Communist League Youth Hostel on the beach all night until sunrise. If we loved Paris, they had been there first, attending a debauched graduation party with the city's etudiants. Of course we loved Florence, but for twenty years in Bill's parents' kitchen there has been a photo of Bill eating gelato on the Pont de Vecchio. Taken by Alain, almost twenty years ago. They were always there first.

(Not that I am seriously jealous. I mostly wish I had been able to come along.)

We were pretty excited when Alain and his family, (the stellar-and-talented Mary, and his superkids Alexandra and Miranda) made plans to visit us. Over the course of their week here, we did our best to make them feel at home, and watched as they luxuriated into the slow amble of France. Alain, a total health nut, gradually succumbed to the pleasures of new cheeses and wine in the middle of the day. He and Bill lounged around in the comfort of their decades-old friendship, finishing one another's sentences and regaling our girls with tandem-told stories of their near-death hiking experiences.

Mary, a total Francophile anyway, let her inner Frenchwoman rise to the surface like bubbles in champagne. She lived in Paris for years as a young woman, and later worked with a French theater troupe, L'Elephant Vert, where she honed her exceptional grasp of the French language. If this were a wedding rather than a sabbatical, and if there were a bouquet for us to throw at the end of this trip, to the family most likely to follow in our footsteps, I would chuck it straight at her.

Alexander and Miranda are pretty much too little to care awfully much whether they are in Florence, Mass or Florence, Italy, but all four of the kids fell into a lovely symbiotic pattern of wrestling, play, reading together and laughing hysterically at one another's jokes. There is something magically comfortable about children's friendships that are rooted back in genrations. Our kids seem to prefer hanging out with the children of people we knew before they were born. Together the kids made paper-maché piñatas, filled them with candy, and smashed them to little bits out in the garden. The gummy worms and marshmallows went flying into the flowers and the greenery of the yard, under all the flowers that are blooming us towards summer.

(Mary, you should know, was fully responsible for this arts-and-crafts project, just as Toni was responsible for the cool egg decorations at Easter. I could not craft my way out of a paper-bag puppet.)

During their time here, we took a road trip to Arles, one of the few cities of Provence we had not yet seen. The main purpose of the trip was so that Mary could see her friends from L'Elephant Vert. Pierre and Claire live just outside of Arles, in a giant estuary known as the Camargue, a watery lowland inhabited by bulls, flamingos, and white horses, and planted with local varieties of rice. They have re-purposed several buildings of an old fruit plantation (a "domaine"), turning them into a theater rehearsal space, a home for themselves and their two grown girls, and a space under an old fruit barn for their outdoor dining table. We spent several long, lazy hours sitting around that table in the open air, making our leisurely way through multiple delicious courses and finishing up with an apple pie made from Nona's recipe, Gerard's honey, and France's magical ready-made crusts. Not surprisingly, Pierre and Claire turned out to be exceptionally fun, interesting, and generously kind to us, we complete strangers at their family table.

(Once again the baguette theory of French social life turns out to be true: from the outside, the French are so crusty you can barely make your way in. But once you've broken through the hard exterior, it's all mushy and welcoming and extra bisous coming and going.)

In the afternoon, we climbed into our cars and took the world's shortest ferry trip (it couldn't have been more than 200 yards) to a vast wide, sandy beach totally devoid of any houses, shacks, or even signs. Instead, the beach was dotted with cars and campers and little clusters of families enjoying a lazy day by the water. The nearest family on the beach was about a hundred yards away from us, wearing no clothing whatsoever.

No signs. No snack shack. No rules. No permits. French beaches kick butt. Bare butt.

Mary and Alain spent the evening with their friends in the Camargue, then Bill the girls and I spent the night in an ancient hotel in Arles. I say "ancient" because there were literal ruins of Roman baths in the lobby, which you could view through the plexiglass floor.

At homeschool the day before, Grace and I had gussied up the trip with a little historical and cultural research, which I will now share with you. If you already know more about France than I do, and are reading this for the food porn, skip ahead to the magrets de canard.)

Arles grew up around a Roman theater and amphitheater, then gradually rose to engulf its own ruins, repurposing the ancient stones and building houses on top of where the stage and the arena had been. In the nineteenth century, the people of Arles decided to excavate their history. They found the money for this enormous undertaking very slowly, and are only now doing a major cleaning and repair job on the amphitheater.

Arles was also the town where Van Gogh so famously discovered the powers of blue and yellow, and then cut of his ear in a fit of fury either at or near his friend Gauguin, who then fled France forever. When he was painting Arles, the Roman buildings were still in shreds and pieces, awaiting the future that would restore the past. But the colors and the light, presumably, have been the same for millennia. On the day we were there, it was as though Arles had reinvented the colors of sky, stone, and sun. In the city center, you can drink your morning coffee or swig your late-night wine at a café restored to look like the one in his painting Le Café de Nuit. Before we went, Grace spent a morning ostensibly researching the Roman history of Arles, but she kept being drawn in by Van Gogh's lurid colors and even more lurid personal history.

(Weird things are total Grace- magnets. Other girls her age might like Miley Cyrus. She's spending the morning reading about Van Gogh's ear. Boy does she make us proud.)

That night, we found a restaurant that served a magret de canard that made Abigail claim in total earnest, "I am now in heaven." Grace ordered a stew made of Camargue bulls. That dinner was one of the rare nights when every single one of us was in a terrific mood. We giggled our way through dinner, polishing off every single bite of our dinners and desserts.

The next morning we visited the ruins, and I will just post photos rather than try to describe them. The kids clowned around on the same stage where Romans performed in the year 350. Although the lawn was piled with old bits of broken stone, the structure of the back of the arena looked a whole lot like the entrance to a contemporary ballpark. Only the hotdogs and Yankees caps were missing.

We spent most of the afternoon in the park. Although we had planned a lot more sightseeing, we discovered that it always works best when the people seeing the sights actually want to look at them. The kids only had eyes for ice cream, snacks, and one another, so it seemed wiser to let them enjoy one another's company rather than dragging them from one ancient place to another. Lesson number four-twenties-seventeen of this trip: when traveling with children, keep your eyes on things very close at hand.

Abigail gave out free backrubs after our picnic, and all of the kids enjoyed following a stray yellow lab around the park. It was enormously gratifying to watch Grace play with Miranda, as she reprised all the games we used to play with her when she was small. The kids found a pigeon leg in the grass, and arranged twigs and dead leaves into models of walls and crumbling ruins. Mary got to catch up with her friends, and Bill and Alain spent some time reprising their big European trip of ages ago. I mostly just lay on my back and looked up at the pattern of the sunshine in the branches of the trees.

Another great day. Twenty-four to go.

Grace's French word challenge

2010-04-26T21:15:00.009+02:00

Since we started homeschooling, Grace has done all kinds of amazing projects. We have studied ancient art, we have read mythology and great fiction, and we have slogged along methodically through the peaks and valleys of fifth grade math. We have also studied human rights together, focusing specifically on the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Grace also has been gradually pulling ahead of me in terms of her spoken and written French. Her secret? Natural talent for languages, plus the dogged determination to work on learning new things every single day.

Out of two of her main interests -- French and human rights, she knit together her own project. When the major earthquake hit Haiti, she wanted to do something to help. I told her about Partners In Health, an organization started by activist physician Dr. Paul Farmer and sustained by donors, volunteers, and an ever-widening web of ordinary people who wish to support their ability to do the extraordinary.

She decided to launch a 400-Word-a-Thon in support of Partners In Health. She said she would learn 400 brand-new French words to encourage her friends and family to donate to this remarkable organization. She has been working on collecting and learning those words ever since.

Here's what she wrote about the project on her own blog:

While I was studying for a research project on children's rights I was forced into the lives of children whose lives never should've turned out the way they did. There are children in the world who are forced to be married under the age of thirteen, children who are isolated from their families and forced to go to war, children without healthcare, children forced to skip school and work in factories, children dying of preventable causes, and many other horrible things.

It was only shortly afterwards when I heard about the earthquake in Haiti. When I learned that Haiti was already one of the poorest countries in the world, you can probably understand how sad I was for the children growing up there. And that's when I realized that not only children are suffering from abuse and lack of safety and healthcare, but people of every age, kind, and civilization. By this point I was overpowered by sadness and I knew I had to do something about it.

So I decided to do a French-Word-a-thon. I didn't want to do another read-a-thon because people do them so often that every school has one at least once a year. I wanted to do something different that no-one else would think of and that was really hard to do because then people would be really excited about it and would want to pledge more money for Haiti.

And I hope that at least a few of you can find love in your heart for all those dying parents and their uneducated, sick or injured children who need them to continue living and loving them.

Today, four days early, she finally vanquished the enormous stack of flash cards.

She and I hope that you will learn more about Partners in Health (and donate, yourself) by clicking here.

Our special thanks to the following, who have already pledged or donated: Nona, Grandma and Grandpa, Auntie Gaela, Katie, Jackie, Kate T, Kate W, Maria, Lucia, Anna-Maria and Dermot, Aups Jessica, Paris Jessica, Hilary, Peter, Hawthorne, Aunt Mary, Aunt Bonnie, Zaro, Toni and Bud, Wendy, Hillary, Hilary, Terence, Auntie Eileen, Mary, Alain, and Buck

These Are a Few Of My Favorite Children

2010-04-26T21:09:00.002+02:00

First Summer Day, with Alexander

2010-04-26T09:47:00.003+02:00

"My Pom-Poms are Tired"

2010-04-26T09:17:00.005+02:00

Our good friend Dave lived in France after college as an au pair, mastering not only the French language, but also the technique for making a really killer tarte tatin. He was my classmate in college, and married Megan, one of Bill's classmates, an American who was brought up in Paris. So back when we were in the idle chatter phase of planning this trip, we did a lot of our musing in their direction. They had introduced us to a whole bunch of great French words, French foods, and French wines, and had generally made France seem awesome -- certainly more real, less pretentious, and more enticing than anyone else ever had.

Dave could also give us great advice about this trip because his brother, a world traveler like himself, had just finished his own family sabbatical. Like me, Dave's brother kept a blog about their adventures, in which he explained the joys and the reality of relocating one's children to a foreign country.

At the end of his time away, he said about his experiences overseas supporting and nurturing his children, "My pom-poms are tired." Dave, wise man that he is, passed this comment along to us -- in part because it was so funny, but also by way of a gentle, warm warning: it might not be so easy to uproot our kids and hope they would grow where they landed.

Dave is the best kind of person to provide advice. His brother had clearly lived through exactly what we were setting out to do. But, true to form, Bill and I didn't really listen to him. Or if we did, we didn't believe that we'd have the same problem, and so we failed to take some of the precautions we might otherwise have taken.

You know, like being a little more systematic about teaching our kids French, or finding them a decent bilingual school, or living somewhere that feels a little less rurally woebegone in the middle of winter. Or airlifts of bagels.

Bill's and my decisions are frequently driven by our theories about things, rather than by actual evidence or learning from the smart things that other people tell us. Which is why Dave's brother's strange condition -- Tired Pom-Poms, or TPP -- struck us only as strange at the time.

Or perhaps it struck us as something that a different sort of parent might say, as we simply couldn't imagine it could be all that tiring to take care of our own two kids. Back in Brooklyn, when we both worked full-time, we both got awfully tired. Bill sometimes got so tired, in fact, that he would spend an entire weekend lying on the sofa. But back then, we weren't exhausted from cheering on our children, but rather from the competing demands of our lives at work and at home.

How hard could it be to help our kids through a single year away? We set what we thought would be entirely reasonable goals. Each child would learn French. Their math skills wouldn't atrophy. They would each make a friend. When we put it that way, it seemed nearly impossible that we couldn't achieve what we set out to do.

So here we are, nearing the end. Neither one of us has a job. We have had acres of time to share with one another, punctuated by remarkable trips and really wonderful visits from our family and many of our closest friends. And what do we discover?

Our pom-poms are so tired that they feel like barbells.

Because of our initial lack of understanding of Dave's brother's malady, TPP, it took us an awfully long time to admit it. As stubborn as our children are, we are only moreso, and we had to come up with a whole bunch of ways to justify that the challenges we had set for our kids were not beyond them -- or beyond ourselves.

But very recently, our kids had been driving us nuts, in the way that only kids can – and that kids who have been trapped 24/7 with their parents for nine solid months really must. In the last week or so, we temporarily lost patience with them, and to some extent we had even lost sight of the reasons we are here.

We lost patience as a result of committing the unpardonable sin of letting ourselves get frustrated by who our children really are. Instead of seeing their qualities are positives, we were starting to see only the negatives. Rather than "persistent," Abigail was seeming "stubborn." Rather than "creative," Grace was seeming unfocused and impossible, unable to finish anything useful. And, as awful as this sounds, we were both angry at them -- so unfairly so -- for not having made close friends here in the village.

As the date of our departure approaches, we have to face a number of unpleasant minor realizations, including the fact that not everything we thought would happen really has. My French never got awfully fluid. The girls never really got comfortable enough to make strong friendships here in town. Bill had to recognize that several mountains in the Var will have to go unclimbed, and that he has not yet learned to play the bass guitar like John Entwhistle. At the start of things, a year feels like forever. Now our year is a memory and a month.

When I started this blog, back in a hotel room in Dublin on our way to France, I named the purpose of our adventure "taking a year away to get back home." I assumed that the year would be all about gathering ourselves together in the face of a foreign world, about pulling together in the face of challenges. About becoming a stronger family.

And then Bill and I discovered, we like it here. We really really like it here. Bill may not be able to play the bass line to "My Generation," but he has joined a band, fallen in love with the landscape, and become a full-fledged expert in Cote de Varois wines. I've learned to cook, learned to love homeschool, and become utterly comfortable here (except for that whole portail thing, and all those frowny faces.) We miss Brooklyn like crazy, but we've made some lovely friends, and feel we've only started to explore everything we could learn here.

We've found a home here, in ways we never expected. But the whole truth is that the girls really haven't. Grace is happy enough here, despite missing her friends something fierce. But for Abigail at least, this isn't home, and will never be.

From her perspective, we took away her home, her friends, her language and her dog. She even was strangely attached to our jobs, seeing them as status and stability. While this year she has learned, and grown, and experienced remarkable things, she has stubbornly clung to a spar called "America."

"It's hard to be in another culture where nobody cares about you," she told me today, during the usual Monday morning school-induced misery. "I won't live anywhere but America for the rest of my life."

Thus our pom-poms are tired from cheering the girls through all this solitude, all the challenges that we set before them. As much as we have loved watching the girls grow and change from little into big, from monolingual to bilingual, at times it has all seemed just too hard. Mostly for them, but more recently, even we cheerleaders are a little bedraggled.

Don't cry for us, Argentina; this really isn't such a huge change. We had hoped to get in one more adventure before we left, and went so far as to make a reservation for an apartment in Paris for the start of June. (Anybody want to take our place? We've already put in the deposit.) But the more we thought about it, the more clear it became that "family" means "we do things together." "Home" has to be where we all can thrive, where we all can find a place.

So we've made the call. It's time to go home. Tickets changed, airplane booked. One French month to go.

More Cake, Anyone?

2010-04-25T21:16:00.003+02:00

Birthday Party

2010-04-25T15:40:00.003+02:00

Back in the fall, just after we moved to Aups, I held our first real dinner party, for three other French families who live in our town. Everybody’s kids ran around like lunatics, then fell in a giant pile in front of the television, watching some Disney movie or another while the parents sat around the dining room table. We poured lots and lots of red wine, and I very nearly understood small portions of the conversation unfolding in front of me.

I was nervous as heck trying to throw a real party in a foreign place, as despite my advanced age, I have long suffered from a sort of learning disability where domesticity is concerned. But while I barely knew any of the people at that table, I was comfortable in their collective presence almost immediately. So what if I couldn't speak their language, or serve cheese with the appropriate utensils (apparently individual clean knives are always a good idea with a cheese course.) I really liked them. And as far as I could tell, everybody had a good time.

As it turns out, the people who came to that party have now become real friends. After all my complaining about how unfriendly French people are in general, we now have actual friendships, a loose web of them quite nicely leavened by the presence really excellent children and some of the coolest Brits you will ever wish to meet.

It happens slowly, this building of friendships in adulthood. You have to suss people out, and you see only gradually what they're really like. When you're in the eighth grade, you can make a new friend almost instantly -- or at least in the process of a 45 minute study hall on three or four consecutive days. But with grownups, particularly with other families, it's more complicated. Some people you might like immediately, and then find that your spouse finds them impossible. Or others you might think were a lot of fun, and later discover that they don’t return your emails. The good news is that friendship drama doesn't sting nearly so much in adulthood; there are just too many other things going on.

Although I felt immediately comfortable with the people who came to that first party, it’s only been more recently that they have felt like closer friends. The kind of people to whom you tell the truth when they ask you how your week has been. The kind of people who really understand when your kids are having a rough day. The kind of people I’m really going to miss like crazy when we leave.

Last Tuesday, our friend Jessica turned 40. Since I am the elder stateswoman of our little clique here in Aups, I invited nearly everybody we know in common over to celebrate her. The crowd of our shared friends, was about half French, half, British; half kids and half adults. Her Mom, who owns the terrific house we have lived in all year, came as well, and we got to ask her a million and one questions – about Jess, and about the house itself. She told us, for example, that the bronze bust that has been watching over us all year is a cast of the first president of Sri Lanka, and the crown he has been wearing is the prize for several dozen years' worth of costume parties she held in another small French town nearby. We learned who painted which portraits, and where she managed to find them all. Not surprisingly, Jessica’s mom turned out to be a beautiful, warm, and compelling woman.

The rest of us were a motley crew of parents who speak English and French with varying degrees of skill. Jessica, for the record, is the most fluent in both, the point around which the rest of us could balance. But the most important thing that we all had in common was that we all really really love Jessica. She’s the first friend we made here – in fact she felt like a friend before we arrived. She sent us photos of her donkeys and her kids, and reassured us about how we might deal with registering for all the important aspects of temporary residency here. She’s the kind of person who has strong affections, strong opinions, and embracing enthusiasms. She doesn’t suffer fools, but neither does she hold anybody at arm’s length unnecessarily. Jessica rocks.

I never counted how many people were here to celebrate (a fact that had some bearing on my failure during the evening to provide the appropriate numbers of spoons, bowls, plates, and slices of cake) but all the chairs in the house seemed to get filled a few times over during the course of dinner. I think we had a few dozen, roughly half each kids and grownups.

It was the kind of party I most enjoy, which means that I let things spiral nicely out of control. I spent part of the day cooking two kinds of soup but nothing else particularly fancy. Everybody brought some treat or other, and it turned out that there was enough to go around. I baked a yellow cake and tried a new frosting recipe. The texture was all wrong, and dripped off the sides of the cake into a puddle on the plate. But it was the kind of party where you could just stick your finger in the pooled failed icing and take a big old lick. Several of the children in attendance did just that, as did the guest of honor herself.

I also enjoyed the evening because it was the kind of party where the kids go completely wild. After about a half hour of balls flying everywhere, of little girls rummaging through the dress up basket, and all of the kids running in and out of our house, our neighbors’ house, and the shared courtyard, one little boy came running inside, blood streaming from the top of his head down onto his white shirt.

He had tripped and somehow gashed his head. But surprisingly enough, he was neither crying nor particularly upset about the fact that his head had been gouged open. His parents, showing a calm equanimity that seems characteristically French, first did this sort of parental neurological exam, asking him to follow their finger with his eyes back and forth. I wasn't sure if they were kidding, but he must have passed, because they asked for a little antibiotic cream to daub on him, then sent him back out to do more crazed running around. As long as the kids don’t get too upset, I always think that these wild rumpuses do them good.

(Our girls, as is their wont, slipped in and out of the core of the action. They seem to choose this place on the sideline of a wild rumpus, despite my deep wish that they would sometimes simply let themselves play with greater abandon.)

When it finally came time to serve dinner, everybody wanted Bill’s Harira, a Moroccan soup he first tasted on his trip with Sean. I had a vague idea of setting up the kitchen table as a buffet, but when the kids all installed themselves there instead, I let the chips (and the quiches, and the salad, and the bread) fall where they may. I even took the bold American move of putting cheese out before dinner, which seemed to the French kids was like I was serving ice-cream sundaes as appetizers. Everybody pulled up a chair, or found a place to stand and eat.

Count this among the accomplishments of the year: I may have found my own personal style of entertaining. I call it ramshackle chaotic mishmash, with good food, and even better company.

As a family, we hadn't been having the greatest day ever. But just as soon as everybody walked in the door, in a big friendly clump, we were returned to ourselves by the comforting and reassuring presence of friends. Not just acquaintances anymore, but real friends.

This has been the best bittersweet surprise of our time here. We expected to learn about France, about the language, about the landscape, and about ourselves. We expected to become attached to the Var, and I certainly fell in love with this remarkable house the second I saw it. But I don’t know if we anticipated the real joys of new friendships. Or the way that we will feel sad, and miss these friends, when it's time to go.

Fiesole

2010-04-18T18:46:00.002+02:00

San Miniato

2010-04-18T18:38:00.002+02:00

That Which Endures

2010-04-17T17:17:00.004+02:00

High on a hillside overlooking the entire city of Florence stands the church of San Miniato al Monte. Legend has it that in the third century after Christ, the devout man who would become Saint Minias was living as a hermit on this hillside, near a pagan temple. When he was beheaded by the Romans for his Christian beliefs, he was said to have picked up his own head and carried it back to the hill. Christians built a shrine to him there in the ninth century, and then began building a Church there in 1013.

That's a thousand years ago. Which sounds big when you think about it that way, but smaller when you think of it thus: 1,000 is 25 times my life span. If you add up the life experiences of the kids in my kindergarten class, now that we're all grown up, we've lived a collective thousand years: every one of them since the man walked on the moon.

But still, relative to the age of everything else I know, San Miniato is old. The Church is significantly bigger now, having been added to during the eleventh, twelfth, and sixteenth centuries. Large portions of the interior were built of re-purposed Roman and Byzantine materials, and many of the geometric designs inside the church look Greek or Arabic rather than Italian. Cultures and forces and histories have swept in and out of this church, and still it stands.

We loved San Miniato, and its view of the entire city of Florence, just as much as we loved San Marco. Some monks were singing as we walked in the ocean-green doors, and the sound drew us down towards the crypt at the heart of the church. The monks were standing in a semi-circle around the tomb that is said to hold the remains of Saint Minias himself. (This claim is contested, as most claims regarding relics tend to be.) Their notes ballooned outwards from the crypt, filling the huge space and bouncing back on themselves. Then, when the monks were done singing, they just shut off the electric lights and walked out with that awkward and official way priests sometimes do when they are finished with religious rituals. I guess any ritual, even a sacred one, can eventually feel awfully rote. The music was like silk, but their taking leave of the crypt looked like they were just leaving the office for the day.

After we listened, we read the ground below us. The floor tiles of San Miniato are entirely engraved with names and words, all in Latin. There is nowhere you can walk without stepping on the words of the past. Like San Marco, this church is all geometry and fresco. It was dark and beautiful inside, and made me want to stay there and be silent all day.

But when you travel with kids, there is no such thing as silence, (only loud whispering, if you're lucky) and no such thing as staying anywhere very long. I felt an insistent breath in my ear, felt few impatient tugs on my sleeve, and then walked out into the sunshine. We followed a path off to the side of the Church, which led into a warren of crypts and gravestones. Elaborate half-size houses marked the avenues, each decorated with a family name and a particular style. Between and among the rows of houses, there were huge marble stones on the ground, marked with the names and dates of people long since dead. There were stone and concrete busts everywhere, as though the dead had been frozen by the people who loved them, only to moulder slowly into mossy-soft versions of themselves at a slightly slower rate.

Lots of the gravestones looked recently tended, with fresh flowers, or at least not-so-beat-up fabric ones. But others were cracking into shards, under the weight of weather and time. Some of the little houses had glass windows, but the glass had been cracked open and never fixed. It was a lot like the rest of Italy -- not overly tended, and full of a design mishmash: lots of serene lines and colors, spattered here and there with gaudy excess. For a graveyard, it was an awfully lively place.

The girls found the children first. A stone would have a cameo picture of a baby attached, and be marked with the dates to match: 5-4-35 to 10-6-36. Here was a teenager, grinning wildly and holding an ice cream cone. Or a ten-year-old, or a toddler. One gravestone had a bronzed bust of a six year old girl. The stone spoke of the joy she had brought her parents in life, and the pain they suffered once she was gone. The little girl had died in the 1930's. Her parents are almost certainly gone themselves now, but the little statue and the Italian words I could just barely make out brought my fresh tears.

And then, further into the stones, we saw two life-size marble statues. One was a young man in an officer's jacket. The other, facing him, was a young woman in a long flowing dress. At first I imagined that these were statues placed by somebody's children to commemorate a long and loving marriage. Looking at them standing there, staring at one another with such longing and affection, I fell in love with them myself. While I have never really thought of life-size marble statues of dead people as anything but weird, these two people standing on Saint Minias's hillside were the very picture of an enduring love.

But then I got up close and read the dates. The man had died at 25, in 1944. The woman was born in 1922, and died early in 1945. I realized with a shock that these long-ago lovers had never been parents, had barely been adults.

Bill came up by my side. "They both died in the War."

For some reason, I had thought that about the soldier, but it hadn't occurred to me that his young bride would have been a casualty as well. If his military uniform was Italian, that made it even more complicated. Hard to know whether he was on the side of the right and the good. He might even have had a hard time with this one, himself.

I don't know why we love graveyards so much. Perhaps because they are quiet. Perhaps because we like the stones. Perhaps because we love the stories that emerge. It seems like a creepy place to take our kids, and that only got worse once they started searching the stones for stories of more and more dead children.

But despite all the children, or perhaps because of their photographs, this graveyard was particularly lively, the memories it held were full of clear, obvious joy. There were the marble statues, so in love they were nearly dancing. There were the smiling babies and the happy Nonnas and plenty of flowers -- fake and real. If you've gotta be dead, this would be an awfully sociable place to end up.

But perhaps we also like graveyards because they remind us -- without any shadow of a doubt, that we ourselves are alive now. And that we will not always be, which makes our living all the more remarkable.

We took the bus back down the hill, and walked back towards our house. The streets were crowded with tourists, with businesspeople, with buskers and gypsies and west African guys selling Fendi knockoffs. They were all alive, barely conscious of the miracle of their own existence, thronging the living streets below the city of the dead. How many of us ever remember how shocking and strange and wonderful this all is? Even the awful parts, the disasters, the tears, the wars?

While none of us would walk that day carrying our own heads up a hill, the very fact that we are all living struck me as its own kind of miracle. And then we did what any sane living person does in Florence. We stopped in at Festival di Gelato. We chose the freshest and strongest flavors we could find, and savored them, bite by bite. Peach. Coffee. Hazelnut. Lemon.

All of this reminds me of perhaps the best reason of all for us to take this year away:

Life is short. Eat your gelato first.