Abigail Turns Eight

La Bastide

Relying on the Kindness of Strangers

My now dim recollection is that back home, we felt omnipotent in the business of our daily lives. This is almost certainly a total delusion brought on by my current feelings of helplessness, but go with me here.

Back home in Brooklyn, we could order in any restaurant, and knew which ones to avoid. We could read all of the signs in all of the stores, and I frequently knew what time it was. We knew which homeless guys were harmless and which to avoid at all costs. We could type on a computer for 30 minutes or so, and then boxes of predictable groceries that I knew how to heat up in our microwave would be delivered to our kitchen 24 hours later. I didn't have to worry that they might bring me horse meat or strange kinds of mushrooms if I made a mistake.

When strangers came to our neighborhood, we could decide to be helpful or to brush on past on our Very Important Mission to Get to Connecticut Muffin. I had my peeps at the drycleaner (shout out to Simon), at the carwash on 23rd street, (Yay crazy Israeli guy) and always my girl Jessica Rose who could color and cut and dish with the best of them. As every first grader learns, Park Slope is not just a sensibly laid out grid of streets and avenues with places to spend your money, but a network of people.  There, I had earned my place. I gave help, they provided help, we helped each other, unless we were too busy getting more coffee. The total interdependence of community.

Here, all four of our family are fully dependent on the kindness of strangers, as we have hitchhiked a ride on someone else’s community. Like Blanche DuBois, alone in a strange town, we have had to use our charm to get by. Bill, the only one with reliable access to language, is therefore the only one to be able to employ his wits. The rest of us just have to trust in the goodness of other people, then hope we're adequately adorable, which is easier if you are under 35 years of age. I just make like Blanche and try to keep the lights dim.

OK, full disclosure: our MasterCards and our French bank account have probably helped, too. In 2009, wherever you go in the developed world, all you really need is a magnetized 2" by 3" piece of plastic and people become awfully helpful. Blanche would have been a lot better off with one of those babies rather than with her trunkful of rags.

But the MasterCard ad works the opposite way here in French civil society: yes, sometimes a MasterCard can solve a problem; but for everything else, we rely on people.  It's good therapy in being human, having to rely on other people. One of my particularly brilliant writerly friends, Monica, just posted on Facebook that her newborn baby is helping her to transform from a "human doing" to a "human being." Something about moving to a place where you have no purchase, no reason to belong, makes you just as helpless as a newborn. Now instead of being impressed with myself for helping people all day long, I need to learn to be grateful while letting myself be helped.

In the last few days we have had many different adventures with strangers, during which my faith in humanity was amply and fully reinforced. First, I had to drive to Draguignan (home of everything dreary, errand-like and workaday) for a doctor's appointment. This is the way I can spend a morning now that I actually have the time to do things like check in on my own health.

The nice doctor I met with in Draguignan instantly shifted out of French and into English at my first blank stare. (He was born in Greece, emigrated to Belgium, and was educated in Germany, and spoke in an almost perfect American accent.  All that and a doctor too; I wondered briefly if he had superpowers.) He asked me pertinent questions, probed where necessary, (literally and figuratively) and reassured me in full, and in English, that all is well.

Then Bill went back to his very favorite place, the town pharmacy, to prepare for his planned big hiking trips. According to Gerard, our guide to all things outdoorsy, Bill would need an epi-pen to protect himself in the event of a snakebite. Old Bill would have blown off this suggestion and gone up to the hills in his flip flops and some old cutoffs. But New and Improved Careful Bill was not taking chances.

He asked after the epi-pen, which got him a lengthy disquisition on the symptoms of anaphalactic shock, the physiology of allergic reaction, and the different sorts of snakes in the region. Turns out that according to the pharmacist, Bill was not in fact having a life-threatening allergic reaction at that moment. And also that the epi-pen would not be necessary for a standard-issue human being on a standard-issue hike. I'd like you to imagine that level of conversation unfolding with the disaffected teenager you are likely to meet stocking band-aids at your local CVS.

At the risk of inflaming an otherwise apolitical blog, I have to say that every single interaction the members of our family have had with physicians, pharmacists and insurance companies here in France has fully reassured us about the quality of even fully socialized medicine. (Much less Obama’s extremely middle-of-the road suggestion to widen access to the sorts of benefits available to federal employees, like say, himself and your own neighborhood postal worker.)

Here, a doctor’s visit costs 22 Euros (about $35.00) without a social security card, and is free for everybody else who is a citizen of the European Union. EVERYBODY. You get an appointment right away, and are seen by a qualified and efficient doctor. When you need one, you get a specialist. There were lots of older (and even elderly) people in the doctor’s office, and nobody seemed particularly eager to put them down like old horses. (As I learned at the Carrefour supermarket, the horses themselves are not so lucky.)

More importantly, people are not making the awful choice between paying massive percentages of their salary for medical care and health insurance and going without. It’s just there: a community.

We heard on French NPR today that Nicolas Sarkozy was in Pittsburg at the G-20 yesterday trying his darndest to get Americans to understand what they are missing in their insistence on holding capitalism as the highest possible value. It reminded me of my friend Monica's comment about humans doing rather than being human, but taken to a cultural and political level.

It was the top story here, and got extended press. Apparently the French are done being all irrationally angry at us about the second Gulf war, and would now like to share a few of the things they have learned. Sarkozy, never one to shy away from the drama, was nearly on the verge of tears trying to explain the lessons of enlightened socialist societies. I wasn't sure whether to feel sorry for him or sorry for Americans when I looked at today's American newspapers and realized that this top story in France was buried deep in the back pages that only get used to line bird cages and wrap fish. Because it was buried so deep in the Times, I'm quite sure that this is the kind of story that would never make it out of Metropolitan papers and into the small town dailies. The article I found wasn't so much about Sarkozy himself as the hero (that was the story here) but rather about a more fundamental question: what is the proper measure of a nation's strength: its GDP, or the quality and strength of its communities? 

He (and the French people) invite us to ask not how much political and economic freedom we have, but how much "bonheur" (happiness) is enjoyed by the members of our communities? And by communities, he means all the people who live in that community, and not just the ones lucky enough to have a Master-Card currently and recently topped up with yet another home equity loan.

To quote today's Times: "Instead of centering assessments on the goods and services an economy produces, policy makers would do better to focus on the material well-being of typical people by measuring income and consumption, along with the availability of health care and education."

If you're curious, here is the NYT article on his Pittsburg Rant.

OK, back to the apolitical. My sincere apologies to anyone out there who is allergic to socialism. I'll need to pick up an epi-pen for when you visit, because everything here that is wonderful is also bound up in high taxes, an affection for bureaucracy, and relatively reasonable restrictions on personal freedom.

When we were last at the pharmacy, we not only got great assistance, but I also got a recommendation for where to finally get a haircut. When you have (bad) hair like mine, the prospect of making it worse sometimes induces a sort of anxious avoidance. I knew that my roots had grown out to a ridiculous sort of four inch-wide anti-skunk stripe over the top of my head, but I was even more fearful of saying the wrong thing and ending up with frosted tips or a reverse Mohawk or a military buzz cut. But when I saw a pharmacist with a particularly excellent dye job, I gave Bill the difficult task of chatting her up, and flirting with her to get the name of her salon.

She was duly flattered to have the tall American asking her how she got so damn beautiful, and gave me the card for Pascale Coiffure. Today after the doctor’s visit, I used my trusty iphone to find her shop, and got an appointment on the spot.

It’s one thing to rely on strangers who speak your language, which is essentially what you do everytime you go to a new hair salon. It’s yet another thing when you don’t know the words for “blonde but not so blonde that it looks white or super-trashy, but not so subtle that I feel cheated when I walk out of your shop” or “short but not like puffy on top or too layered, with little wisps by the ears but none at the nape.”

Pascale turned out to be extremely kind, and we weren't strangers for long.  She and I communicated through the language of those weird books of hair photographs and franglais(“comme ça, mais not comme ça exactement here on the haut of la tête.”) I was relieved when whatever I said caused her to bring out the highlighting foils and a purpley-blue sort of mush that looks just like what Jessica Rose paints on my head back home.

We chatted, and she filled in words I didn’t get. She was French, rarely leaves the Var, but was born and lived in California until she was seven. (Apparently I am only to have lengthy conversations in French with people in the beauty business who were not actually born here.) She could follow my English when my French broke down. We got on famously, laughing knowingly about the provençal accent when a man came in and asked if he could get his hair cut “demang,” rather than demain. We talked about French homonyms (verre for glass, vert for green, and vers for something else I couldn’t quite follow.  All are pronounced "vare" but with a little attitude in the r.)  And I ended up with a perfectly serviceable cut.

For tomorrow’s entry, look forward to yet another interview with Mr. Bill Lienhard, who will fill us in on the entire process of finding, buying, registering and insuring a cute little blue car without losing his chemise in the process.

To do so, he had to do his share of relying on the kindness of strangers, but (cue ominous dramatic music) but soon realized that some strangers are stranger than others...

Is She Really Writing a Whole Entry About Just the Second Floor?

As of yesterday, it is Fall, and just the tiniest sliver of moon rose last night in the western sky. Abigail’s comment, following a sharp dramatic intake of breath:“It looks just like a movie!” I realized with a tinge of chagrin that she meant the moon from which the little boy sits fishing at the start of Dreamworks productions. An earlier generation knew to be thrilled by each new appearance of the MGM Lion (born, as we now know, in the zoo of Dublin, Ireland.) My children’s generation can’t see a rising moon without being drawn into Spielberg's world.

We all find our enchantments where we can. For me, there's no place like home.

I spent most of the day padding back and forth around the tile and stone second floor of Bastide de la Loge. To say that I am idle these days might suggest a degree of activity somewhat beyond what actually takes place. Instead, I was like an old cat: I found a patch of sunlight and just lounged in it. I left you yesterday on the first floor, and we hadn’t yet mounted the stairs. Today I’ll continue our slow strip tease (still strictly rated R-E for explicit scenes of real-estate.) Those of you who have bought your tickets to come and visit, you can start picking out your bedrooms as you read. If you haven't yet, start trolling the low fares on Expedia and get your keester over to see us. We miss you.

We begin at the end of the house, after the salon with the big long table and about a quadrillion old novels, children's school art projects, and then the Wall of Movies. The films here are mostly for the VCR, almost entirely in English, both original and bootlegged versions. Here someone with amazing taste has collected all the absolute greats, lite version: Rushmore, Prizzi’s Honor, The Apartment, When Harry Met Sally, When We Were Kings. Only The Princess Bride seems to be missing, but I haven't looked hard enough to be sure. Above that room are two sets of stairs. One heads further towards the north, straight up to a library built over the side of the hill.

The library has an enormous square desk and is filled with books that provide an excellent education in The Good Life, British expat version. There is a deep and wide section on gardening: The Concise British Flora in Color, Suttons Encyclopedia of Vegetables and Guide Des Arbres at Abustes. There are four shelves just on cooking: Modern Cookery for Private Families, With Bold Knife and Fork, of course Julia Child's masterpieces, and then the Guide du Fromage. One section fills us in on the history and culture of France: Everyman’s France, The Golden Rivera, and Les Folles Du Music-Hall. Another section is just stacked up maps and books on travel: Venice, Tuscany, Spain, South America, Patagonia. Huge coffee-table size books stand ready to educate any willing reader on interior decorating in Provence and Morocco. There is an enormously large section on art, with extra-large shelves. Another section speaks only of film.

There are five shelves of Children’s books, heavy on the Roald Dahl and Eloise series. Old fashion (As opposed to old-fashioned) magazines. Then novels galore -- again, not the heavy and impressive high-school-curriculum classics, but stuff you would love to read by a beach for the next hundred and fifty years. There is a robust grouping of vinyl records, tending away from the things I like, and more towards Verdi and obscure 70's pop groups. There are also dozens of novels and nonfiction referring to the sailing life, then logbooks, filled with pictures and postcards, from a yacht sailing the Mediterranean in the early 1960’s. The man in the photographs looks exactly like the author of a published memoir, of which several score copies occupy a bottom shelf. I have yet to determine whether the author is the owner’s late father or late husband; it seems impertient to ask. The collection has a depth and specificity that speaks directly to the soul of the house’s owner (as most collections of books are wont to do, whether or not the owner knows how loudly the books – or lack therof – speak of his or her character and proclivities.)

No history. No politics. No theory. No pesky high-toned ideas whatsoever; just high style. There is no pointless collection of books from an abandoned PhD, like the security-blanket ones I keep that clutter up our house back home. Just things that you might read in order better to understand, to improve and to enjoy your garden, your kitchen, your children, your sailing vessel, your immediate surroundings and the more fabulous corners of the wide world. If you need a key to the contents and the form of life embodied in the house, you would only start reading the books in this room.

Why do I love this library so much? Well, in part because of the peculiar way in which it is dated. So much of what is here has since evaporated as culturally significant, and remains so only within the clutch of memory. While the world has moved on and gone digital, this trove of slowly molding paper brings the reader straight back into the years just before I joined the human race and into the time I was busy paying attention to other matters, like The Brady Bunch, David Cassidy, 4-H projects, cute boys and pre-calculus.

There is something deeply mysterious about exploring things from the decade before you were born. Or maybe it is just so for me, born five days into the (generally superlame) 1970’s. I missed the 1960’s, time when Every Single Cool Thing Happened, by just five days. So when I get to a place that is resonant of all the storied things that happened back then it brings out a certain romantic and wistful longing. Back at my grandparents' houses I would pore over the yearbooks with pictures of my mother’s P.E. classes, black and white snapshots of my Aunt’s trip to Japan, photos of a pool party with all the women in long Pucci-inspired print dresses, or old color prints of my Dad’s Corvette. Here at Bastide de la Loge, I am visiting someone else’s romantic family history – someone else’s grandmother’s wild times way back when.

On with the tour. Next we’ll walk back down the library steps, then immediately up to the floor of bedrooms and bathrooms un and deux. Off to the left of the stairs is a bathroom with a big green bathtub. It has lots of Victorian-era futsy stuff, including a pink china plate reminding anyone who reads it to “Prepare to Meet Thy Maker.” Apparently that is how one should think about the whole nightly tooth-brushing, flossing and going pee ritual. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord finds me adequately groomed.

The rest of floor two consists of two big bedrooms flanking what is possibly the world’s most awesome bathroom. Abigail is sleeping in the first bedroom, with its big circular mirror, a table holding her American Girls representing various times in history, and a desk already strewn with her art supplies and tiny bits of cut up paper. It is hung with a remarkably dark and arresting painting of a woman, naked to the waist, with a red bow in her hair. In many ways, the room is too old for her, but since it is the one closest to me, she won't get lost making her way to find me in the dark during those nights when she can't let herself go back to sleep.

And then you walk through yet another not-quite 90 degree doorway into the room I would most like to take back home with me, if it weren’t so darn enormous. It’s about triple the size of my old office at work, and serves as a bathroom/sitting room/ dressing room with a big old tub between two western-facing windows, a heavy square tub, and a bidet (poetically described by Bill as “the ass bath,”) and a big tiled shower with white filigreed carved wood on each side. There is an enormous walk-in closet, as well as tons of built in shelves. Sorry folks, I’ve already claimed this bathroom for myself for the time being, although when you visit I’ll let you take a quick peek.

The art is what makes it so special. There are gracefully posed women and their beautiful breasts everywhere on the walls of the room. A woman and a bowl of goldfish. A woman lying on her back, dreaming. A woman burying her face in the shoulder of someone who looks a lot like John Lennon, but with square glasses instead of round. A Joseph-Cornell inspired box with a young girl in the background and sacred objects placed in the foreground. Hanging on the wall behind the sink there is a mirror the size of a foursquare court, ringed with iron vines lit up by lightbulbs. It's as though one of those backstage mirrors with all the lights grew to six times its original size and then sprouted metal greenery. Big painted Moroccan-themed doors on the plain old shelves where I stacked up my t-shirts and socks. It is a room that makes me feel that I should be a lot grander than I really am. Perhaps I'll just keep practicing.

And then, just past the bathroom, our bedroom. Big bed with square pillows and yellow sheets. Stone mantel over the fireplace. Huge armoire on the wall, and a University-library sized oak table at the foot of the bed. Our storied decorator has used a crazy-quilt theme in selecting the art here, and it includes a puffy quilted sculpture of a man sailing a boat. A twelve-pointed metal star covers the light in the ceiling. But my favorite element is the puffy soft loveseat, covered in a heavy orange Moroccan blanket. Yesterday, when Grace was having a particularly wicked bout of homesickness, she stayed home from school and she and I sat on the loveseat most of the afternoon, reading Harry Potter back and forth to each other.

One more step through the oddly-angled door and I'm back in the hallway overlooking the entryway with all the art. At the top of the stairs is a lady's writing desk. I say lady even though I never really use that word to describe real women. But this desk is all lady all the time. It is here that I have stacked my own books full of your addresses, your phone numbers, your emails, my tethers back to home. There is a telephone where you can call me, and I can look out over the mountains while you tell me about your trip to Connecticut Muffin, your walk in Prospect Park, your afternoon in the blueberry patch, your trials and irritations at work. Without these sacred texts an their scribbled letters and numbers to connect me to earth, I might float away like an errant hot-air-balloon. And as much as I am enjoying this time away from the world I know, I very much like to keep at least one line firmly attached to the ground.

House of Wonders

Reader warning: for the next few days, this blog will be Rated R-E for explicit descriptions of real estate. Envy-prone New Yorkers in lame little cramped apartments are strongly cautioned.

When I was a little girl, I would play for hours with the dollhouse my grandfather made for my sister and me: a replica of my family’s big white and green-shuttered old farmhouse. I would set the furniture, the food, the family members and the never-out-of-season Christmas Tree in place, move everything around, and then set it back in place again, over and over. Often our crazed orange barncat would climb in and terrorize the interior decoration, sometimes chewing awhile on the mother or the baby of the family. But no worries. His depredations just gave me another pleasant and welcome opportunity to sort and put everything back in place.

Since way back when, my dreams have been about houses. In scary dreams, there is a fire and I can’t get outside. Or I dream that someone is coming to get me, and while I’m hunting for a place to hide in closets or even drawers, I recognize in a panic that not one of the locks works. In more benign dreams, I might visit places I knew long ago, and rediscover each knob and cabinet and door in great detail. The most exciting ones are fantastical dreams of enormous rooms with ceilings sixty feet high, sometimes with a giant freshwater pool with a fountain in the middle.

Other people dream of flying or finding rubies, or maybe getting it on with their high school swimming coach. My dreams are nearly all houses. It’s not just fancy real estate porn, mind you (although there is a certain amount of lusting over that giant indoor pool.) Rather, my dreams reveal my deepest craving: that white-linen, chocolate-chip cookie, deep bathtub, puffy comforter, soft-sofa, stone gate feeling of being fully at home.

In the darkest days of my life, I would dream that entire new wings were hidden in a house I was living in at the time. I might open a door in my crummy graduate-student rental, and there would be room upon room of new beautiful spaces, full of old velvet and mahogany furniture. “How did I not open this door before?” I would inevitably think, as my wishes felt fulfilled by new open space and great old dressers and sofas. When I woke up, back in my old familiar room, with my old familiar problems swimming back to the surface, I would try to hang on for as long as I could to that sense of the possible lurking just inside the real. If I could only find that door again. Then I would be OK.

Last spring, I had a whole lot of these looking-for-home dreams, and they would inevitably take me back to my grandparents’ farmhouse, Locust Hill. Upstairs and way back on the south side of the house, I would find a door, and open it again and again to find room upon room of old carpets and big wooden antiques. Each new room felt eerily familiar and birthday-present new at the very same time.

These house dreams skate the thinnest possible line between the metaphorical and the literal. Their symbolism is so immediately apparent as to be almost embarrassing: can’t I be the tiniest bit more mysterious in my dreams? Why does everything Launa always have to be so damn transparent? The truth is simple and straightforward as an old foursquare colonial: houses are important to me in a way that my family is, that writing and thinking and teaching and sunlight are. That love is.

I write all this so you might start to understand what if felt like for me to walk into Bastide de la Loge yesterday afternoon. Remember everything I wrote last week about feeling disenchanted and then re-invigorated by the touch of the real? Well, this new house has plunged me fully and giddily back into pure enchantment. All of the wish-fulfillment extra wings of houses I ever discovered in my dreams have been put together by some sort of genius dream-architect. And then yesterday I was given (if only for the next eight months of off-season rates) its heavy iron key.

When we were planning this trip, neither Bill nor I had ever been to Provence. We rented both houses based only on their internet marketing and our budgeted price point. When we found Les Baumes, we thought it was the most luxurious and impressive property we would ever in our lives inhabit. We bit the bullet and paid (relatively) big bucks, Bill strategizing that a great first impression would win me over, as reluctant as I was to move overseas at all. Bastide de la Loge, in contrast, looked pretty nice online, but just somewhat less impressive. In our minds, we were going from our fancy Hamptons rental back to a much more realistic sort of place in which to spend the longer spread of our time. We liked its location right near the school. We liked the fact that it was big enough to have guests visit us. The phrases “washing machine” and “American-style refrigerator” might also have played into our decision.

A few weeks ago, when we first met Jessica, she walked us through the house’s courtyard, with its deep blue stone saltwater pool, stone lions and turtles and tables, and enormous potted plants and glass bottles everywhere. A dozen and a half big blue-grey shuttered windows were stacked three-high along an enormous western-facing yellow wall. The courtyard was about four times as grand as I had thought, given the photographs online, and it made me inordinately happy just to be inside its walls. I guessed that other beautiful things lay inside, but as the High Priestess of the Church of Delayed Gratification, I just so enjoyed the idea of waiting to see the rest.

Before we could get here, the day back at our cozy Hobbit Hole at Les Baumes was one long shameful and sad little episode of packing and tidying up / yelling at the kids (and on Abigail’s birthday, no less) / final dead-millipede rounds / eating through the last bits of leftover lasagne and yellow cake with chocolate frosting. The rain wouldn’t stop falling, and everything I stuffed into bags felt distressingly damp. Tumble dryers are either illegal or blasphemous in France, apparently. I am afraid to ask which. We left from Sillans to Aups for the final time, snapping a picture of the sign with the slash through the town’s name that told us we were at its edge and moving into new territory.

It was terribly sad to walk away from Les Baumes. It’s the first place I have lived since I was a child that had a name rather than a number as its address. I would miss the view over the valley to the cliffs. I would miss our waterfall, and the sweet little bedrooms and (yes) even standing at the edge of the yard and gazing up at the sun while hanging all our clothes on the line to dry. There might never be a full moon like the one we watched rise in the east and set in the west. But after dragging the whole family and every scrap of our garbage out the door and into the car, in the pouring rain, I was perhaps not at my very best. There were a number of tantrums, and I will leave it to you to guess just who had them and when.

When we arrived with our battered Fed Ex boxes, bursting luggage, and Casino shopping bags full of old groceries and new birthday presents, Jessica and Gerard had just finished cleaning up the house from their final summer renters. The doors and windows were thrown open wide, and I walked into the cool, dark interior of the house.

Grace named it right away: the House of Wonders. She disappeared, swallowed up into its many rooms, and instantly took to opening every drawer and finding hidden keys, old candles, fancy cut glass, piles of ancient stationery, and yellow-and blue stoneware platters stacked twenty high. As Bill listened to Jessica tell him about the quirks of the plumbing and how to work the keys and the washing machine, I just wandered from room to room, taking it all in.

Every surface of every wall – up and down the entryway staircase, along the halls and inside each of the bedrooms – was hung with eclectic and stunningly quirky original artwork, stacked almost floor to ceiling wherever there was an open place for a hook. Most pieces were askew a little more than slightly. Aside from the frames on the artwork itself, there isn’t a right angle to be found in the place.

Off to the right, the kitchen was stuffed with enough pots, pans, stoneware tians, colanders, platters, spice jars, honey pots, wooden spoons, teapots, English cookbooks, Moroccan pottery, coffee cups and old baskets to stock a kitchenware store. The kitchen walls were lined with green and yellow tiles, and there were two wall ovens, four gas burners, and two electric. A big stone sink sat right in the window between the enormous wooden kitchen table and an even more enormous stone one just outside, under a metal trellis hung with a green canopy and wild climbing vines.

I thought to myself, of course, it’s the food, stupid. And this time, I’m going to be the one making it. My survival-mode days of heating up Fresh Direct to keep my family alive are officially over. This is the kind of kitchen that can turn an average Josephine like me into the Barefoot Goshdarn Contessa. I felt as though I had stepped off the little scooter I had been pushing around for years and had hopped into the Formula 1 racing car of kitchen-dom. It’s like when our midlife crisis Dad band, through an unlikely series of mishaps and coincidences, wound up rehearsing one night in the studio space of a real band, backed by a wall of 200 and 300 watt Marshall tube amps. Boy did we rock that night, and I think it had a permanent impact on how we sounded and how we felt about the whole project. Sometimes equipment matters.

On the other side of the hallway is a dining room with dark red walls and Moroccan art. (Jessica’s mother, the remarkable personality who apparently reveled in the project of decorating the house, lived in Morocco when she wasn’t in London or the South of France.) The table is (natch) very old and grandly scaled, with embossed leather on its top. (Isn’t your table embossed leather? Really, no? Whyever not??) Beyond the dining room is a great big room with an enormous stone mantle, low coffee tables and big plump sofas covered in big shaggy blankets, (and, joy of joys for the other three members of my family: an enormous TV hooked up to a satellite providing them with hundreds of shows. In English. This for the children who had no television at all about five months ago.)

I stopped there, just for a minute. I wanted to savor the sense of there being more to discover. I bet Lewis and Clark felt sort of that way, say in Ohio, way back before it became the ultimate swing state. They had already seen so much, and there would clearly be more. They couldn’t have predicted the Grand Canyon, or the Rockies, or even the alternately scary and soothing feeling they would have in facing the great plains. I knew there were bedrooms upstairs, probably with more art and big square pillows and enormous stoneware lamps with crazy chintz patterned lampshades. I was thinking there would be a bathtub, maybe two. I have deeply domestic tastes, my friends, so to me a really good bathtub might as well be the Great Salt Lake.

But I hadn’t banked on two full floors of more bedrooms. The place kept swirling upward and onward forever. More tiles, more rugs and pillows and extremely beautiful, quirky, and arresting original art everywhere. The house just kept expanding in front of me, filling itself up with strange old puppets and a treasure trove of books, and an enormous crazy-quilt of women’s hats hung over the master bed.

I was suddenly and deeply in love. With a house no less, with being here. I had that sense of home, but also the thrill of discovery I had when I used to poke around the back bedrooms of Locust Hill or my grandmother June’s attic, full of my mother’s old toys and papers and photographs from decades of my grandparents' lives, before any of us were born.

When I first got to Les Baumes, the air whispered to me through its open nighttime windows -- you’re here -- welcoming me to time, to reflection and attention and sensation. Here, the walls and the windows and the hundreds of secret drawers and corners are calling to me: now you’re here, Launa. And you’re home.

New Digs, No Web. Can't Post. Will Soon.

The Only Way is Up

Some days those three wheels of our family shopping cart face in the same direction, and just one of us needs a little boost to roll awkwardly along with the rest.

Then, some other days, we nearly draw and quarter ourselves pulling to the four cardinal directions.

It was raining, so there was nothing to do outside. We did our final drives back and forth to school, heated up the leftovers for lunch, mooned around and picked up dead and dying millipedes. I sat in the a two foot square space still indoors but with with internet access where I could do whatever it is that I do all day long, while Bill spent hours researching used cars and putting in endless numbers of details into a sort of European Blue Book website to determine what each one was worth. It's bad enough trying to understand car language without translating it into French, sometimes in and out of British English (lots of expats selling their over-fine automobiles at the end of the summer season), and then translating prices in and out of giant-size pounds, middle weight euros, and our piddly little pint-size dollars. I was impressed with his car savvy, his French skills, and his dedication and bravery.

Our measly ration of internet kept shutting itself off whenever the wind shifted or somebody somewhere (who could that possibly be?) tried to log on to Facebook. This internet service hates Facebook even more than a middle school dean. Bill and I would surreptitiously log on while the other was in mid-something-or-other and bump one another off, only sort of by mistake.

We then realized, far too late to do anything constructive about the problem, that Bill's bass lesson began at precisely the time Grace and Abigail needed to be picked up from school. His lesson was to take place a half hour away from said school. Had it not been raining buckets and thundering in long, rolling sonic booms across the hills, I could have entertained them in Aups for a few hours while he took the car to Lorgues. But as it was, we could not solve the logic problem that was our sad and small life: If Mr. B needs to be in Town L at 4:30 P.M. and Mrs. L must be in town A to receive Misses A and G at 16:30 military time, and there is only one Car R to transport them from the HH in Town S-l-C and back, whose plan gets foiled and ends up feeling foolish and sad?

You guessed it, it was Mr. B. We missed his first (and only) appointment in about two months through poor planning and rotten rainy weather. He grumbled only slightly, tried to pin it on me only half-heartedly, and I tried to cheer him up with some leftover birthday cake (Cake update: the lopsided and strangely shaped confection was nearly gone before 10:00 a.m. E.S.T., the hour when Abigail actually emerged on September 19, 2001, the whole ten-and-a-half-pound screaming bundle of her. Happy Birthday to our Little Force of Nature.)

On our way to pick up the girls from school, the rain cleared for awhile and clouds started racing high and fast across the sky. Open blue spaces appeared in the clouds, and the sun moved in and out of them. As we drove along the drag racetrack between Sillans and Aups, high over the far hills appeared a rainbow like nothing I have ever seen. Rather than being high and semicircular, this one was low, hugging the hills, and was fat and wooly and puffy and almost flat. It was hard to see behind the dense green trees edging the road, but every once in awhile we would speed past an open patch and get a glimpse.

We mortals like to believe that signs in the sky like well-timed emerging sunshine and oddly pudgy rainbows mean things that we should attend to. A vestige of our cavemen-in-the-hills-of-Aups days, this peculiar tendency to look up to see into the future works only so well. You might think that the clearing sky and a big fat wooly caterpillar of a rainbow promised smooth sailing for the little displaced family in their speeding Renault wagon. But no, you're a better reader than that (see paragraph two, above, kids.) We might have all been in the same car, but we might as well have been speeding in rockets to different planets.

The kids were, when we picked them up, of course HUNGRY. Here in France, we only eat at meals, and even though I brought them their kid-sized chocolate treats, none of us can actually get used to the sensation of eating because we really need to, not just because we're sort of bored or distracted and Oh, Look, there's another place selling food! Please do not be impressed by our self-restraint: trust me, we would eat if there were anything to be eaten between 2:00 in the afternoon and 7:00 in the evening. We would probably even buy things with lots of corn syrup in them, too. But no such luck here in corn-starved, thin and healthy France.

The kids had also just been through two grueling three hour sessions of blah blah blah and wanted to go back home to decompress. Bill and I had been through a full day of feeling crowded and cramped back home, and sorely wanted a piece of sky. Bill had missed his Bass lesson. Abigail was longing after Brooklyn “where everyone is so joyful,” as she remembered it, and Grace couldn’t stop talking about how badly we need a guinea pig here in France to sub in for Samson. It wasn't long before someone's pathetic longings would turn into actual tears -- particularly if we put John Denver on the ipod. "Leaving on a Jet Plane" can set off any of the four of us at any moment.

So genius that I am, I tried for a plan to bring us all back together. We would drive over our favorite mountain just north of Aups, to the super-cute and pretty-colored town where it was so sunny and bright and where I had first had that rhubarb sorbet. It would be full of little things to look at, and we could have an early dinner, I would get more rhubarb, and wouldn't that really be so much fun, everyone? Keyword "mountain" pulled in Bill's vote instantaneously, while the vague promise of food staved off the girls' complaints long enough for me to turn the car hard north (my cardinal direction) towards Moustiers Ste. Marie. Mama would save the day.

The Verdun valley, so recently been rained on, showed its colors more brilliantly than usual. The orange earth glowed both darker and brighter. The rain had washed all the dust off the green trees, and the blue water of the lake was positively electric.

We wound around the corners, past the gorge. Abigail asked if she could jump off the bridge, and we briefly pondered whether she would be killed instantly, or merely maimed and then drowned in the cold water if she actually tried. The open-air restaurant on the lakeshore where we had eaten just a week before was fully closed. There were no boats out in the lake, only one or two lonely people sitting on the shore, wishing that they hadn't been so cheap and had just paid the in-season rates when planning their vacations.

There were still tourists milling about the little picture-perfect (but now chilly) town, but they were upper-middle-aged and sharply-dressed French couples, rather than in throngs from all over the world. All the Fayence stores were open, Fayence being both an outmoded technology for making fine china and Mousteire-St-Marie’s claim to fame. They have Fayence, and also the enormous gold star strung between two high mountain peaks just over the gorge and the river running through the center of town. We parked and wandered into town, looking for something to cheer us up, to distract us from our entirely minor losses of the day, and to fill up our bellies.

But no, despite the fact that the Early Birds were circling each establishment like vultures, there would be no dinner served at 5:30 P.M. And not at 6:00 or even 6:30, either. Dinner will be served, here in France, at 7:00 PM and not before. (Clever readers who saw this coming in paragraph nine can give themselves extra credit.) There is almost no amount of window-shopping in fine china shops that can distract two children and two red-blooded American adults with rumbly tummies for that long.

All at once, the four wheels of our cart tried to set off in different directions. Grace needed an immediate advance on her allowance so that she could buy yet another beaded keychain. Abigail needed to dawdle around the water fountain, and Bill set off to find the W.C. I thought that perhaps I would just pop into the store with the provençal-printed bathing suits (more out of prurient curiosity than any other reason; I won’t personally be wearing a bikini in this lifetime, no matter how long I spend in France.) The streets were a warren of little shops, galleries, and lots of closed snack shops. They were twisted and narrow so that you could only see promising signs, not actual establishments. We would look down a street and see a sign that indicated a store that might have calories or decent trinkets. We would walk down the street, hopes up high, and inevitably: fermé.

Sometimes the right of weight wins in our family. Bill took charge, and decided to pull us all along on a hike. I had on hopeless shoes for such an adventure, but the chapel high in the crook of the cliff seemed to be calling us. And somebody had to break the stalemate to get us to the magic hour of 19:00 when we would be allowed to fill our little bellies.

A few false starts to find the trailhead, and then we were climbing up pebbly stone steps into the sky. We walked past the first few stations of the cross (rendered, of course, in Fayence pottery) and then the miracle occurred. No, not a ray of sunshine or even a fuzzy rainbow. Jesus did not step out of the sky to help us sort out our petty human problems. Instead, our miracle was a little sign on a tree reading “Zone de Silence.” We suddenly had earned a free pass from whining, complaining or asking for non-existent snacks for the duration of the hike: a parent’s dream.

And, of course from the girls’ perspective, this also meant a moratorium on all those pointless things adults can’t seem to stop themselves from saying: “Hey, would you look at that amazing view?” and “Look out, you’re too close to the edge” and “Would you please stop walking on the edges of my shoes!!” Peace and quiet with our own little thoughts.

Here in France, away from our friends and fellow New Yorkers, without jobs and extracurricular activities and band practice, the four of us spend a lot of time together. A lot. Which was really the whole point of this adventure from my perspective. If you haven’t noticed, I am only glancingly interested in France itself. I love the natural environment, the food, and the freedom from work, but I could likely have found that in New Mexico, New Zealand, or New Brunswick. Instead, what has fascinated me are the inner workings our own little unit as we have set ourselves adrift here in a strange new world.

That said, as much as we love love love our little family, there are moments when we all need a nice break from so much family togetherness. We need it, and we have a hard time letting ourselves make it happen. This long stony pilgramage up to the Chapel of Notre Dame turned out to be just about the perfect ending to our day. The sign took away our need to constantly talk to, around, and at one another. Then the path took away our need to tussle over constant decisions without adequate information. With up as our own option, we would not have to fight it out over north, south, east and west.

While there is not a religious conversion in the Chapel at the end of this post, it does occur to me as I am writing that perhaps this consistently shared heavenward direction is what helps that nice American military family to get along so much better than we seem to be able to manage ourselves. Ah, well.

Here on the path, we could march along at our own pace, sometimes holding hands when we wanted a companion, and sometimes walking along alone. I could stop and look out over the hills to the lake when my shoes started to bother me. Grace could stare down at the interlacing patterns on the orange tile roofs. Bill could imagine himself into the world of J.R. Tolkien, climbing the stone steps to Mordor. Abigail could dawdle and scour the ground for fossils and sparkles and little treasures.

At the very top of the mountain, the path ended at the chapel. By the time I got there, Bill had gone into the dark stone church, lit only through six tiny stained-glass portals high on the valuted walls, while Abigail and Grace hung back and waited for me, too anxious to walk inside. There was an enormous statue of Jesus on the cross hanging on the wall midway down. At first I thought she was afraid that it might be wax (Grace hates wax statues more than anything aside from vomiting.) But as it turned out later, she found this terrifying because she was fresh from last week’s hearing of the tale of his crucifixion, in extreme gall-and-vinegar detail, from her new religious American friend next door. They took my hand and we walked inside together.

At the front of the chapel stood a gilded altar full of cabinets and cubbies and dozens of candles burning at the feet of Notre Dame, the original Supermom. Little signs on the side of the church thanked her for her protection at various points in history, mainly clustered around the two world wars. Inside was peaceful and quiet and just the tiniest bit gothically creepy. We stood together, still in grateful silence, as our eyes adjusted to the dark. Our little family, back on the path, all together and all alone.