Our Year in France

On August 2, 2007, some nice person at Pearson International Airport took the above photo, a portrait of four people who had no idea what the hell they were getting into. All you have to do is look hard at our faces to see that we were a family who’d dreamed aloud about something and then made the mistake of actually doing it. I say that from the point of view of the man in that airport lounge: I remember what I was thinking. It was What the fuck are we doing?

I write these words from my back garden, one year later. It’s a year in calendar time, an all-but-useless measure of our lives since arriving here, a time that, measured in experience, emotional life, and cultural shifts needs a different unit, one I can’t imagine. Just my perspective from the green plastic table I sit at now (shielded from the 10 am heat by the rear wall of the house and the massive cloth umbrella above: it’s 33 already and promises to hit 37 today) and all the things that have happened in this garden space hint at the changes rung in our lives here and how hard it is to quantify them. One year ago, the space in front of me was colonized by artichokes, more artichokes than even the biggest thistle enthusiast could consume; now it’s a sprawling garden of over twenty fruits and vegetables. But a year ago as well, this was a strange, cryptic space, one we were decoding. What was the tree between the peach and the two apricots? (In May we finally figured out it was a cherry tree.) What kind of care would all these trees require? What could the earth do here, treated properly? Would we fail this generous green sward or unlock its joys? Although these appear to be questions about the garden in the house we’d rented, they were really the BIG questions, writ small, about the place we’d come to live. Would we find a way to be here temporarily and also feel like we belonged? Could we bring our way of seeing the world and still see this place as it actually is? Could we look out our windows and feel that we were home?

From the perspective of this morning—the bells of Saint Just ringing the Sunday matins beyond the fig trees, the birds dive-bombing the insects still feeding off the rotting plums, the voices of my children in the windows above me—the answer is yes. A qualified yes, since I have to answer these subjective questions through my own subjective filters, but the fact that I cannot imagine myself as I am today from the perspective of a year ago suggests we have succeeded in being here. For those of you who have been following this blog, you’ve seen the evidence of this in the way we’ve lived, but a lot of what I’m talking about has been internal, has been a kind of daily osmosis, and is a reality deeper than the one suggested by the fact that my butcher calls me by name or that we know the shortcut to the beach or that no part of the French bureaucracy surprises or troubles us anymore. It has to do with things as subtle as the fact that when I dream of the past now, sometimes I dream of France. Sometimes I even dream in French. It has to do with the fact that sometimes I’m not even aware I’m in France. Yesterday, standing chest-deep in the chill water of Gruissan Plage, looking at the many things I’ve become used to here, I made myself close my eyes and say You’re in the south of France, in the Mediterranean, in August and I tried to recapture the frisson those words would once have provoked in me. But I couldn’t. I was only ten kilometres from my front door.

And as for my children and my partner -- who are they as their French selves? Anne is a joyful Narbonnaise—well, she is joyful anyway, but here there is a new freedom for her, an ease, a sense of connection that comes with living in a small city. She has a tiny fiefdom and it suits her. And the boys. If you’ve been looking over our shoulders this year, you know what a revelation it’s been for these two young men. Ben, whom we worried would find it very hard to adjust, has been the proverbial fish in water: he was fully adjusted by day three and Max by day four, and they have pals coming out their shirtsleeves, not just guys (Ben is fairly set upon by girls here); they are exotic and interesting to the locals and have made themselves utterly at home. Ben even has the local accent now. I wonder, looking back on all this, if the signal memory of our time here might not be watching those boys and their dog walk up the street to get a baguette at Le Moulin … and then watching them return (because we wait, anxiously, on the balcony). That might be the best memory of so many good ones.

Of course, being a foursome with almost no outlets has had its challenges as well. You want togetherness? Try moving to a town where no one knows you. That’s togetherness. And it’s been very, very good for us, as a couple, as a family, and for the boys as brothers. They fight a lot, but check out those loving faces in the photos. They’re connected at the hip (Ben might use the word “chained”) and they adore each other. In the times when it’s been trying, it’s been quite trying. But that’s the cost of reducing your world to four people; there’s no one to turn to but each other.

In this (inevitably long) post, Anne and the boys are going to try to talk about all of this as well, but I want to talk, for one last time, about some of the things I’ve learned, that I might not have gotten to in these fifty posts. One of the more important things I’ve learned is that there is no “France.” On one level, this country is one of the last cultural monoliths in the Western world, a place where to say “it’s French” is to have the final word on the way something is practised. That means spoken, cooked, grown, built. I recall clearly the way a new friend—a man who was born in this town—sneered at the way I’d dressed a porcini mushroom. I say “sneer” because that’s the way it had appeared to me, but of course he didn’t sneer at me. I’d drizzled some olive oil and lemon juice on thin slices of fresh porcini, and to him, I’d ruined it. If, at home, this man had poured orange juice and salt into his coffee, I would have reacted in a culturally similar way, that is, I would have laughed and asked him what the heck he was doing. I would have tried to save him from his error. That’s all this man was doing, even though the mushroom was bloody delicious. It just wasn’t done that way here; it was unimaginable to do it that way. That is one experience of France.

And yet, this “France” … it didn’t exist until about three hundred years ago. It was just disconnected fiefdoms, territories, ecologies, belief systems. There wasn’t even the French language. There was French, Oc, and Oil, and all of their subtongues and dialects, numbering hundreds of pidgen variations. There was here, where Occitan was and is still spoken, ten different dialects within fifty kilometres. A friend tells us that “dog,” in Narbonnais, was “Gos,” (gooss) but it was “Cien” (kyanh) in Bezieran, and “Cano” in Carcassonais. So the notion of teasing out what France “is”—even three hundred years later and from our perspective—is a mug’s game. And yet, there are some conclusions to be drawn …

Apart from Paris, which is an international city, France is still a country of local customs and economies. The Narbonnais who travels to the Dordogne will encounter an entirely separate set of cultural norms. From the Revolution onwards some of the national stories link up (ie, every town in France has a memorial to the World War One dead), but the physical reality of these places almost always predates the Revolution. So there is local architecture, local specialities, often local idiom. We were in the Dordogne two weeks ago and apart from the fact that people spoke French, we might have been in a different country. But then again, look closer and it must be France. The cuisine, although consisting of different ingredients, is still definitively French. In fact, there are the same six salads on every menu, except where in Narbonne there is a salad with goat’s cheese, there it’s a Rocamadour salad (a local goat’s cheese). Here there is a smoked salmon salad, there it is a gesier (roasted duck gizzard) salad. The local specialities make their appearances in the rotating idiom of national French cookery.

This is the way things are done here, a consistency we don’t know of in North America because most of our towns and cities are melting pots. It’s made me realize, as a sort of strange corollory, how lucky we are to have been exposed to all the different cuisines we’ve been exposed to coming from an immigrant society. Because I can as happily eat Tom Yung Goong as I can eat a pastrami sandwich; I’m enticed equally by agadashi tofu, murgh jalfrezi, chicken curry on injeera, rapini in olive oil and garlic, burritos, sake or slivovice, guacamole, veal marsala (okay, I prefer it with chicken), moussaka, maguru sashimi and so on. Your average Frenchman will touch none of this. His palate, as refined as it is, is a traditional one, and almost everything outside of it either does not appeal or it downright disgusts. This is monoculture. And yet, when you do your subset of meats, vegetables, breads, pastries, not to mention alcohols, as perfectly as the French do, where is the upside in expanding your repetoire? Probably there is none. My palate is an expression of the immigrant’s dilemma, only worse: I want a taste of home here, and yet “home” is everywhere for me, in a culinary sense. I have never belonged as an eater in any culture: I am a genuine omnivore. The French are not, and they like it that way.

This chauvinism, which has its charms on a culinary and cultural level, presents problems on a political one. Like most European countries not yet comfortable with the realities of immigration, France can be scarily racist, especially in the south, where most of your immigrants with troubling skin colours come. It’s here where the far right has had its greatest successes, and here where the assimilation of especially North African populations has posed the greatest challenge to both the immigrants and their new neighbours. Anne, when she went for the check-up that was part of getting her carte d’identité was all but waved through the process. Being healthcare-savvy, she wondered aloud why she wasn’t being examined more thoroughly. She was told, in as many words, that she was white and, therefore, Bienvenue à France. By a doctor. Imagine being the Algerian in his waiting room?

And what about the language? Anne and the boys arrived here fluently bilingual, and I … well, I had a functioning French. So where am I a year later, after living among the French, reading French newspapers, writing French emails, taking French classes? The truth is I’m nowhere. My improvement has been measurable, my comfort level has increased, but where I thought being immersed in French would make me close to fluent, that hasn’t happened. In part that’s because I’m still living in English -- I read in English, write in English, watch movies in English, talk (mostly) in English with my family, but that’s not really it. I’ve discovered, much to my surprise, that my English-language skills are more an adeptness with a tool, rather than a talent. It turns out I’m not a language person after all. I’ve always had a strange suspicion this was true: I suck at Scrabble and crosswords, for instance. What trying to up my game in French has finally proven to me is that I’m a math-head, a rationalist. And language is social, abstract, and organic. I know: I’ve published four collections of poetry, what the hell am I talking about? And novels, which are complex machines with no math in them at all, it would seem. No, but these things have structure, and I’m good at structure. And they have geometries and resonances and symmetries and asymmetries, all of which light up my brain. Language is just the way of getting at them. In French, once I have some of the structures down, I can use them. But grammar is social, associative, intuitive; so are verb tenses and idiom. And, try as I might, although I can grasp meaning in what I hear or read, I still have a very hard time constructing it. So that’s been one of the surprises and disappointments of living here for me. I still have another year, and in the fall intend to intensify the classes, but learning a language out of books and cassettes isn’t the way to do it. The way to do it is the way I’m doing it by living here and, well, it just hasn’t happened the way I’d hoped it would.

But enough of the socio-polito-cultural! What has it been like for me? For us? I think I might speak for all the Redhill-Simards when I say this has been the most remarkable year of my life. And not just because we’re here, doing everything that we’re doing, but because we’re not—I’m not—there …. For the first time in my life I’m apart from everything that is familiar to me. The guy in the photograph at the top of this post was sort of terrified of that, but being away was part of the goal. And I’ve discovered that, although I miss people and places (and sushi), I turned out to be pretty good at it. Christ, to think that after forty-one years I turned out to be adaptable! How about that. The best part of being here has been the almost constant excitement of what is coming next. The travel, the ever-flowering small deepenings associated with being in a place, the expansion of all kinds of vocabularies. Having a garden has been no small part of it: finally tapping into that part of myself that has always been frustrated by the Canadian growing season and one inopportune growing space after another, having soil this willing, and light this generous has been an enormous awakening for me. Many times in the last two months we have sat down to meals where more than fifty per cent of what we were eating came from my garden. We have not bought jam since May, and most of the items that go into a salad have come from the back yard in the last six weeks. A three-course dinner we shared with Joanna and John three weeks ago, save the duck, the pie shell, and some olive oil and butter, came entirely from the garden, including potatoes, leeks, onions, zuccini, tomatoes, the cherries that went into the sauce for the ducks, and the apricots in the tarte. At this age, novelty usually comes in the form of pain, but that night three weeks ago, I felt an unknown power, feeding my entire table from things I’d grown. It was unlike any experience I’d ever had. Being apart has opened possibilities for the future.

But life has also been “real life” here. After the initial glow and overstimulation of being in France faded, there was the cost of living, colds and flus, loneliness (counteracted by being, at times, overvisited), bad sleep, occasional depression, writer’s block, bad restaurant meals, and even moments of regret. There have been times when I’ve refound that original bewildered thought: what the fuck are we doing here? Although these days it’s reformulated as what the hell are we going to do when we go home? For the spectre of returning to Toronto, no matter how much we miss it and everything it contains at times, is a truly terrifying one. I don’t fear rejoining all the subcultures of our lives there; in fact, I look forward to it. I worry about losing this feeling, the one I’ve never been able to describe in here, that I’ve given up trying to describe, but there it is, that thing that is inherent to this experience that, above all, I fear I’ll be walking down Muriel Avenue a year and a week from now to buy a carton of milk at Sun Valley and I’ll have the dread thought: Did any of that really happen? And I’ll have proof in this blog and the over 3000 pictures and movies we’ve made of our time here, but the feeling will be gone. I do dread that. But maybe when it’s gone, I’ll be able to name it. In the meantime, I continue to live in it. But what is it? An atmosphere? A sounding? An instinct about something? I don’t know, but it’s central to what it’s been like to live here, whatever it is. Maybe it’s in this short film:

The other three members of the Redhill-Simards have loved it here as well and I’ve tried too often to speak for them. But here they are now in their own words:


MAXIME:

I learned new bad words in French! I have friends that can only talk French, and hockey here didn’t have many games practically, it was only practises – back in Canada it was only games and almost no practices.

I’m happy here. Ecole Lakanal, my school, is really small: only 5 classes. It felt like the way Madame Fenuille taught us was different but I’m not sure how.

I did plenty of good things in my life here with my family, I can’t even choose my favourite. My favourite trip was I loved going to Villa Nova in Spain. It was amazing. I loved living on a farm. I thought that we’d have to work but the cows were very nice. One day me and Ben went to touch them. I touched a baby cow and it licked my hand and I almost fell over cause his tongue was so hard.

What I love about Narbonne: I really like that we have a dog here. The city is so old, 2000 years old. Isn’t that unbelievable? I like it in France a lot, and I like all the activities.

This year, I learned how to read, much quicker than back in Canada. And I learned lots of mathematics and how to write en lettres attachées.

Funny things: the way they drive – they are just crazy.

For the year ahead: I am hoping that it’ll be like this year and I’m going to have such a good time as this year: I hope that my friends will stay in my school, I want to read and write more, I am hoping that the teacher for CE1 isn’t too hard on us. I’ve changed this year: I got much bigger. My personality didn’t change. My French has gotten much better.

I miss Cormac and all my friends and family back home. I think going back to Toronto is going to be good.


BENJAMIN

I feel happy that we are here and that we are staying for another year. This year went really fast. I had a great year at school, made a lot of friends and my marks were really high. Especially when all the rest of the class’s marks went lower!

I’m very very happy that it’s vacation and that life is relaxed. The school year was much much harder than back in Canada. More work, just more. I found it hard.

Tomorrow I’m going to Picou for 5 nights and I’m a bit worried ‘cause you know how I get worried. When I come back to Narbonne, my best friend from Canada is coming… we’ll have a very fun time.

I really liked how we had Wednesdays off so we could play whatever sports we wanted (especially moto). Also with my parents, doing PAF – very exercising and you get to go in trees and do whatever you want.

For my birthday we are going to do quad. I will invite my best friend Lilian.

My favourite trip as a family: I really liked all of them. I have to admit. I can’t pick from Tenerife, Amsterdam, London, Paris. I really do love Paris. Spain, Barcelona, cool. Girona, the big party. Going to Béziers, partying with Amy, Alex and Isaac. Making good friends and having a good time was really what counted for me this year.

My favourite thing about Narbonne: I love going to Les Halles to buy fresh food and fresh fruits, walking around the old city is great. I also love my house with lots of space in it, the animals that are outside. I love our next-door neighbours (the ones on the right!) I love our little bluebell, putt-putt car.

And, my little Charlot. I am very happy to have him.

For the year ahead: I hope to have another very good year. Get a bit higher marks back at school. I think that the year I had this year is just about the perfect year and I’d like to have the same year. If it is possible.

As you may know, a year ago today we were getting in Bubbie’s minivan and going to the airport. I was scared and a bit stressed. And look at me today, I’m happy and life is perfect.

How I’ve changed: My French is better and I have a different accent. I’m growing of course, and I feel like I’m growing into a teenager. I feel a bit weird sometimes. I feel like my writing has gotten very good. I’ve learned that I’m very lucky to be here and that not many kids do this. Some of my friends have never been on a plane even. Sometimes I don’t realize that I’m lucky because I am doing the things.


ANNE

After a year, I’m not sure where to start. I guess I wonder most about how we’ve changed, as a foursome, as a couple, and as individuals than anything else. And I honestly think that we haven’t changed that much, but have been considerably enriched. So maybe the boys are a whole different species: taut, lean, taller, moving about their lives with busyness and assurance. But their little boy selves are still intact. A gecko continues to offer the greatest pleasure. They still love to cuddle (though slyly, at times). Me, well I still stumble about occasionally.

I was cycling down to the market this morning, wondering about what markers of change I could recognize. They are elusive, especially ones that I can name outright. We have adapted to life in another place, at a different pace, in another language, among strangers. But really, there are many faces in the crowd who know us, and have befriended us. I kiss my fruit vendor. I rarely walk through town without seeing someone I know. I have a much more tactile life here: walk by the hairdresser, the school, the bakery, the grocery store. The scale is something that we’ve learned to appreciate. A friend’s voice called out my name from a window as I walked past yesterday. We looked at each other and just laughed ourselves silly. Friends came to dinner, brought champagne and home-made punch, and laughed when part of dinner was ruined, saying: “But it’s just us you’re cooking for! It doesn’t matter!”

We are still very much ourselves. Despite best efforts to let go of our stresses and fears, they follow. Narbonne has had both a calming and an opening effect. We are more focussed here, less distracted. Different thoughts and perspectives mold us. The bigness of our home city sometimes means that there is a lot of static in our lives. Here the signals are loud and clear and the opportunities are many. Sometimes, I feel we are really part of life in France, which of course, we are. But on other days, when I am constantly queried where I’m from (Benjamin is the only one who has mastered the Languedoc accent) I feel a certain exhaustion. A tired “other” self who can never be from here.

The hardest part of living in France is missing the people who populated our daily lives and our emotional lives. Being away from you, those of you who read this blog, that’s really the lonely part of living here. I personally haven’t really missed Toronto though being away has revealed its qualities. I don’t spend much time comparing though. Having lived in many places growing up and since, no one place has been imprinted for me as home. Except Caribou River, I guess and that’s only been a summer constant. But really, home was my family. I feel that has replicated for us Redhill-Simards: we are each other’s home. And that’s been the greatest achievement of this year. Though I must also confess, difficult at times.

So I won’t bore with a list of joys and woes. But I will say that I feel this move was the greatest thing we’ve done as a family. It has brought us to new experience, to new relationships and to deeper understanding of each other and the world around us. The travelling has been a source of absolute fun and adventure – who knew that four Canadians could cover so much turf once off-shore? Making Narbonne and the Languedoc home has taught us a great deal about the secrets and wonders of caves and rivers, sea and sand, mountains and valleys, history and architecture, time and memory. I am ready and excited about the year ahead. Strangely, last weekend at the beach with my friend Amy and her son Isaac, I too walked into the Mediterranean and stood, hipdeep in salty water. I felt a deep sadness coming over me: only one year left. So, I sign off saying that I’m ready for that year and all it will offer, and I’m grateful. Thanks for sharing our life with us long-distance.


And so … back to me.

What else can I tell you? I’ve learned a lot of very small useful things. I don't know how you can use these things, but here they are:

• Basil likes to be picked.
• Farm eggs to store-bought eggs are like comparing oysters to shoes.
• No antihistamine on the planet can defeat French allergens.
• The French love pastries, but outside of the bakeries no one knows how to make them.
• Sidewalks in North America are being wasted on pedestrians (we park on our sidewalks here).
• Roast chicken is a perfect food.
• Driving styles in Europe are keyed to the basic national myth: in France, it’s liberty (let everyone do what they want), in Italy it’s the leftovers of fascism (take what you need, no one’s going to give it to you).
• The difference between a brilliant red wine and an immortal one is a single degree and about two hundred Euros.
• France is romantic, but Italy and Spain are erotic.
• Outside of the major cities, no one in France cares about the cinema.
• It’s possible to be lovers at the age of eighty.

I’ve also learned that there are four seasons in France and they are subtly different from our own. They are Fall, Winter, Pollen, and Naked Germans.

Which brings us to now.

It’s hot here and promises to get hotter. We seek water to swim in every day. Luckily, it’s close by, fresh, chlorinated, and sea water all, although at the beach you risk seeing Angela Merkel starkers. August can be a nightmare. It’s the thin end of summer, the hottest time, the pink tissues at the bottom of the Kleenex box. It’s also European vacation season, which means double driving times everywhere. I went to Prague last weekend to visit with a friend and almost didn’t make the airport. (Usually 45 minutes, it took almost two hours.) Non-locals, not used to the culture of the superhighways here, are sacrificing themselves at alarming rates. Turn on the radio and there’s another Italian or German who’s jumped the guardrail. I remember last summer, only a week after we arrived, seeing a car on fire, on its hood, on the shoulder and it inspires me to stay off the roads.

Which hasn’t stopped our usual round of mad travelling. As I mentioned above, we were in the Dordogne a couple of weeks ago, I was in Prague last weekend (thank you Ken!), and as the summer goes on, the boys are going to go to overnight camp, we’re going to take another couple of driving trips (including one to Aix en Provence) and in two weeks our friends Jean-Gilles & Janice, and their kids Julien & Camille are coming to visit. Then, in the fall, it’s back to school, we’re going to Helsinki to see Goodness open in Swedish in September; Belgium, Vimy, and Ireland in November, back to Rome (we hope) after Christmas, maybe Israel in February; we still want to rent a camping car and do the Loire and the Normandy coast, and there are wishlists galore with places like Istanbul, Venice, Seville, Bordeaux, Budapest, and even Berlin on them. Time will run out long before our lists do.

So: another year is ahead of us, but this is our last post about it all ... we’re ending the blog because it’s time to retreat into the background and really be here, which is less easy to do when you’re subtly aware that you’re collecting things for a diary. The other thing is that the blog is now 60,000 words. That’s about three quarters of a novel, and the truth is, it’s longer now than anything else I’ve been able to write since I got here. So although I thought the blog wouldn’t interfere with my writing, I suppose it has. So I’m going to find out what happens when I shut off this tap. I hope those of you who have counted on this window onto our lives can forgive us for pulling the curtains across it, but you know how to find us and how to reach us, and we’ll come up with interesting new ways to keep you all updated.

You may be interested to know that a lot of people have been following us this year, many of whom just came along out of interest, who don’t know us and whom we don’t know. To all you quiet folks at the back of the virtual room: thank you for reading. We had a total of just under 5000 visits to this blog in the year it’s been up …

So that’s it. I end this post with a strange feeling of sadness and joy. Sadness because this blog was one of our last regular links to the world we belong to and joy because our time here goes on. Thank you for following us this far. We send you our love and we continue to think of you and of home.

À tout à l’heure from Narbonne,

Michael, Anne, Benjamin & Maxime


(Click the below for a replay of our first year in France in pictures ...)

Year End Roundup

Days of wine and ... well, dung

Retournes chez-toi Benjamin! called the girls from behind the fence at La Kanal, the boys’ school. C’est juste nous filles!

This was the message at 2pm this afternoon when I took the kids in for a few hours on what is the second last day of school. But all of Ben’s male classmates had already decided the year was over, and he turned from the school gate with a look of horror on his face and begged me to take him home. Alack, I had to leave him, with five girls looking rather delighted, in order to spend an hour or so with this blog. Sorry Benji. Suck it up, pal, and get used to it.

School’s out, more or less. They go to July 8 here, but schoolwork was all but done by the end of June. Why they don’t decide to go on greve now, I can’t say; given their feckless way with striking at a moment’s notice, one would think with all the teaching done, the professors might have found a good reason to strike for seven days on July 1, but instead they’ve had the kids playing outside games all day. So be it -- we just hit the beach at 5. But summer starts in earnest tomorrow afternoon.

We have plans, but we’ve learned to keep things simple, given how busy our spring was. The kids are going to go to a couple week-long camps, and we have a trip to the Dordogne planned for the end of July. Some concerts, some daytrips, maybe even some fishing … we’ll see, but mostly I think we’re going to hang, ya know?

ANYONE WANNA BUY A ZUCCHINI?



Meanwhile, it’s not time off in the garden. Since the last writing, we have been overwhelmed with what the garden is producing. I have picked at least three zucchinis this week about the size and weight of Maxime and we are trying to "use them up" in the suitable phrase of a friend who understands that when you have this much zucchini, you do not eat it, you find a use for it. Anne has made zucchini bread and zucchini-chocolate muffins, the recipe for which would be perfect if it didn’t call for all that zucchini. (The truth is, like carrot cake, sweets made with a moist vegetable like zucchini are both bulky and moist, making these cakes, if you can get the image of a giant gourd lurking amongst your chocolate, quite toothsome.)


But we don’t have zucchini trouble compared to our apricot nightmare. I’m thinking back to the end of April when I thinned the apricots from the trees. I must have plucked, with great remorse, about 500 apricots from those two trees. Well, would that I had plucked 1500. We have two trees and despite my request in writing to the trees that they work out a sensible schedule for ripening they have all ripened at once. So: we have at least 3000 apricots and not enough time or ideas to deal with them. We have made 12 pints of jam (400 apricots), frozen about 6kg of fruit (about 300), given away another 6kg or so, and still they plummet richly and comically from the branches, as perplexed as we are as to the meaning of their existences. I am actually afraid to look at the window and wonder how much more waste I have created by not standing under the tree with an open mouth. The two trees are about 200 metres from my desk; I am looking at them now. My life has turned into that I Love Lucy episode where she’s wrapping chocolates on an assembly line and has to start eating them just to keep up. (She finally fails.)

The plums are next; I think we have a grace period of about two weeks now before we have to spend all day and night eating them.

When a zucchini this big asks to play cards with you, what choice have you got?

A FRAGRANT HOLIDAY

A Vilanova moment ...

We have earned our punishment though: we had a dreamy week in Spain with Gil, Grant, Esta, and Doug and their four kids, so that was six adults and six kids in all, with a pool, a verdant countryside location, and a great deal of food. Also cows. They didn’t mention the cows in the ads on the web for this place, which was probably a sound move on their part, as an ad that read “Gorgeous 500-year-old stone farmhouse with pool surrounded on all side by cows, pigs, and their copious, stinking manure” might not have attracted our business. It was a bit of a surprise. Behind and beside the truly beautiful farmhouse was, in fact, two large cinderblock cow paddocks with no fewer than 300 packed and rather unhappy steer. The milk cows wandered free, cropping the green around our house on all sides, even coming right up to the pool with their disinterested faces and giant eyes, and all 200 of these animals were equipped with cowbells. So imagine, if you will, a symphony of atonal clonking day and night to go with the nose-rippling pong and we still had a brilliant week together, which says a lot about the quality of the company, the food, and the activities. I believe the one insomniac among us found it 14% less charming than we did.

I imagine the Deacon-Gordon boys and Gemma (Esta & Doug’s little girl) are just about now unwrinkling their fingers, to judge by the amount of time they all spent in the pool. And some of the adults are just healing from wrist injuries incurred by playing ping-pong and/or dealing cards. There are some psychic scars as well, not all as a result of cribbage, but more on that later.

One of many legume-rich suppers. Pass the Bean-O!

Reading en pleine aire

I crush your head

The goils trying on dresses in Berga.

One item on a scavenger hunt for the kids:
A picture of yourselves seeing a UFO in the sky

Many of the days we spent at the house itself, deeply breathing the ammoniac air (when the wind shifted, you could smell the grass, the trees, and the river, although, it must be said, the amount of legumes consumed by certain persons guaranteed that when the wind shifted, the fragrances stayed more or less the same). We swam, read books, did crossword puzzles (which at least one of us found very exciting), and ate outside these tremendous group-prepared meals. Other days, we struck out for adventure. We all drove down to Barcelona and walked the sunny Ramblas and went to the aquarium where Doug, marine biologist, ruined everything by giving away the ending. We also found a hidden little tapas place where we had a genuine Spanish tapas meal and drank a lot of sangria.

The Spalding-Fudges on the Ramblas

The boys confront their demons

On another day, the Deacon-Gordon-Redhill-Simards went down to Montserrat and took the funicular up to the monastery and church there, and had a long walk along the mountain crest. The valleys of Catalonia to the west and south spread below us in varying shades of green and tan, a stunning sight, one you usually only have from an airplane. Monserrat is the site of the black virgin, a much-venerated statue that inspires people a) to line up for two hours to genuflect in front of her, and b) to stand on the marble disk in front of the church and raise their arms to the sky as if they’ve just won the World Cup. I felt like telling everyone there that the black virgin was black because some medieval fool had left her too long in the toaster, but I don’t know how to say that in Catalan.

Les Redhill-Simards at Monserrat

That day, Esta, Doug, and Gemma went to visit Cataques and Figueres, Dali’s birthplace, and unlike us, they had luck getting in the museum, which they pronounced brilliant. So we’ll try again!

We also visited nearby Berga twice, once for the market, and once for an important saint’s day, the name of which I forget (anyone?) but I will not forget Berga because it was there, for two or three seconds, that each of the six adults believed they had lost a child. This is the psychic scar part. We were trying to decide on a restaurant and most of us had crossed a small roadway to go look at the menu when we heard a sound that was unmistakeably that of a car striking a body, complete with skid and people loudly gasping. I was on the side of the restaurant, and when I turned to see Anne striding from the other side into traffic with a look of white horror on her face, I was certain Max was gone. (I knew Ben was beside me.) All that was left was the indelible, life-destroying moment of witness, and for those three seconds I was certain that that was what awaited me. The others went through a similar moment, and it took a breathless minute of counting heads to realize everyone was accounted for. As it turned out, a child had been hurt—a young boy had run into traffic and hit the side of a passing car and been badly, but not gravely, hurt. We all stuck around to make sure the shocked parents got the help they needed, but inwardly, we were all sick with the image we were certain was going to greet us in the road. And then we were sick with the realization that despite the fact that a child had been hurt we sincerely preferred it to be someone else’s child. Of course we did. But that animal instinct bubbles up in an otherwise meaningless evening and there it is to reproach you: you would trade the children of ten strangers to preserve your own. There were some anxious tears among us afterwards and the clutching of precious cargo, all of which are capable of being as distracted as that poor Catalan boy was. But there he was, alive as ever, sucking on his father’s glass of red wine. And we ate hot dogs and drank beer. Because life allowed us to.

The week went in a blur and it was over too soon. I drove down to Barcelona with our Canadian friends and then drove Gil and Grant’s rental car back to Narbonne. Our new camera didn’t arrive in time (it has since: a nice Panasonic Lumix … bye-bye Canon) so everything you see here is courtesy of the Deacon-Gordons and the Spalding-Fudges. We had such a fantastic week that all we can say is: next year in the Ring of Kerry???

Best friends saying so long ...

SUMMER IS HERE

And then it was the last week of school, the Kermesse -- a big end-of-year party -- and time to start thinking about making more jam. On July 1, our two Canadian boys went to school for probably the only time in their lives. July 4, for that matter too. Gradually, somewhat disbelievingly, Narbonne and the towns all around us, are shifting into their summer gear. The streetside ice-cream chests have been rolled out. The program for Narbonne’s summer festival is out (I have already seen a genius piano prodigy play in the synodic chambers in the Palais d’Archeveques -- two hours of music, all played from memory, with his eyes closed -- sort of the equivalent of doing all the parts in King Lear and Hamlet together, fast). There’s a lot going on in the south of France this summer -- a veritable embarassment of riches. If not for all the goddamned fruit in our backyard, we could get out and see some of it.

Actually, “getting out” is a meaningful problem for France this year. This country, which is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, anticipates a major decline in tourism this year owning to fuel costs. Even among the locals, we know people are scaling back on their plans. A litre of diesel right now costs the equivalent of $2.40; a litre of the good stuff is closer to $3. A year ago, it was $1.70. We continue as planned, because we can’t say “maybe next year it’ll be easier,” but we feel the crunch. There have already been serious protests from fishermen and women, as well as wine-makers, a small group of which actually rioted two weeks ago in a town ten kilometres from us. The organization that represents vintners from our region says that 98% of them are on the verge of bankrupcy. Take away the presumed exaggeration here and you still have a very high number, even if it’s only 60%. People are angry and scared and the story is about traditions being lost as well as livelihoods. Sarkozy, both as president of France and the EU for now, says it’s on his agenda, but so is the environment, so it’ll be interesting to see what he does.

AUGUST 3

Just under a month from now, we’ll mark one year in France. It will be a strange and wonderful milestone -- here at the eleven-month mark it sometimes seems to us that we have not been here as long as we felt we had in, say, December. Our relationship to the place, to our lives here, the ways we have changed -- all of it makes true perspective hard to grasp. The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s been the most remarkable year of my life and probably I speak for the other three members of the Redhill-Simards. I’ll talk about that, and so will Anne and Max and Ben, in a kind of summing-up in our next and final post to our blog, on or about August 3. See you then.

And what a May it was ...

April showers bring May flowers … but what do you do when it rains all of May as well?

From the above headline, you can see what kind of May we had in Narbonne (the headline reads: “Most rotten May in 58 years”). For a part of France reputed to get 300 days of sunshine a year, after the March and May we had, it should be clear sailing for the rest of the year. (Ye gods of weather: I’m joking. Of course I don’t want to invite your wrath … pleeeease be nice to us in June, July, and August?) Add to the weather the fact that we had guests for three weeks out of the four and you can see what a challenging month it was.

Which is not to say that we and our guests—soaking, moldy, coughing, and sometimes grumpy (us, of course, not the guests)—didn’t make the utmost of it. When the sun came out, we all but exploded from the house and drove off for picnics and sightseeing. Granted, we usually came home in a roaring downpour, but it was worth it.

BUT FIRST ...

Anne and fellow Canadians Eitan and Denny among the vines

... we shared our last couple of meals with Eitan and Denny in May. These folks, introduced to us by a mutual Torontonian friend, came to France in October and left at the end of May. We were grateful to have them nearby, these sometimes-prisoners on their windy hilltop aerie, and shared many memorable meals with them. Eitan and I came awfully close to making a truffle roadtrip together to Perigord, but illness got in the way, and I regret it.

Come back to the Languedoc-Rousillon Eitan Cornfield, Eitan Cornfield will be the name of my future truffle memoire.

We had a great lunch with the two of them at L’Hospitalet at the beginning of the month, dinner at their place mid-month (my god, duck a l’orange!) and then a final send-off dinner at home near the end of the month, the latter two feasts with Renald and Doreen. More gracious minds, at least in English, will be hard to find here with them now gone. We wish them great new adventures in Montreal and have but one question: why the hell didn’t you stay for the summer?


DOWN UNDER IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE


Rewind to the beginning of May and our Australians from the April post. Nick and Sarah, after a short 35-hour hop from their home in Brisbane, came for a wet, but fun week in Narbonne. Nick, a well-known author and three-time Queensland Yahzee champion graciously pretended to lose to Maxime a number of times (see him pretending to be upset that Maxime whupped his ass, repeatedly, below), and Sarah … well, Sarah ate cheese. I know this doesn’t sound like much of an accomplishment, but once you learn how profoundly lactose intolerant Sarah is, you’ll understand. Cow-milk cheese bad, goat’s-milk cheese good. When we took Sarah to our favourite fromagerie in Les Halles and showed her the thirty cheeses she could eat, I thought she was going to vault the counter and push the owners out of the way. So it was a massive joy to see Sarah eating cheese. For breakfast on baguette. For lunch as dessert. And for dinner. Just a big wheel of brebis with a glass of water.

Nick, on the other hand, can eat anything, and often will. We ate a lot, too, just to be polite, and then we all walked it off with long hikes at Bages and at Chateau Peyrpetreuse, where the wind threatened to carry the boys off. We spent the end of that windy day at Colliore, a place I never tire of despite its being a tourist magnet, and Ben and Max collected rocks while Anne showed our guests that lovely town. Which had milk-free gelato, so guess who did what. On our way out of town, I made everyone stop so I could finally visit Antonio Machado’s grave, whose lost poems Jim Harrison has come twice to northern Catalonia to find. While Nick and I stood over the great poet’s memorial, we tried to think of a poem we should say, but could only come up with something having to do with Nantucket.

Two green authors

One dead one. (Not from Nantucket)

Nick & Sarah

This was also the last week before the cherries became truly, memorably delicious, but that didn’t stop us from eating some underripe ones. The birds were at it too, so Nick and I acted like men and swung a couple of nets over the tree to protect the fruit from the birds. It worked: by the end of the month, we’d collected at least ten kilos from the tree and had put them to work in the form of cherry cobblers, cherry pies, and at least two magrets de canard à cerise. The second one of these, in which I stewed cherries in balsamic vinegar and chicken broth, and then violently boiled it down with some Banyuls, was pretty damn memorable. Memorable, too, was the three or four nights Anne and I sat her parents at the kitchen table pitting cherries in two-kilo bunches and putting them in bags to be frozen for future fancies.

Real men do net cherries

ALP, WE'RE TOO BUSY

We had a couple free days when Sarah and Nick left to continue their Continental-European adventure, so of course we got in our car and drove five hours to the Alps. Because we don’t like to sit still, we Redhill-Simards. It’s fair to say I didn’t want to go on this particular trip after Italy and Australians, and it was an invitation to go to Bernard and Francoise’s place in Colmar Villars, in the lower Alps, which meant finding brain power I sorely lacked to talk French for three days solid. And yet, somehow, this little mad interlude in a month of madness turned out to be a perfect weekend, no small thanks to Bernard and Françoise’s warmth.

Happy boys in the mountains ...

Just an aside here to say: planning to spend a couple of years in the south of France and having it work out in as consistently lovely a fashion as it has is enough, but to have a landlord like Bernard, who just might be one of most kindhearted people we’ve ever met, is really above and beyond the call of karmic duty. I know he can’t read this, but if we ever told him how lucky we are to have fished him out of the universe of landlords he’d just shrug it off anyway.

And, his lovely partner has a 500-yr-old stone house halfway up a mountainside, to boot. We ate, drank, gabbed and also trekked, ie, 25km in two days with our rather game sons in tow, up and down a couple of mountainsides. Rather incredible experience, especially the second walk, which saw us hiking along the serpentine edge of a rushing river, then up to a waterfall for lunch, followed by six more km along the sheer, stone-scattered face of a mountain canted at a 70º angle, only a path worked into the rock keeping us from sliding 600 metres to our deaths. I ain’t joking: see the pics. And yet, apart from one or two extremely scary little bits, we felt safe. You tend to believe in surroundings this gorgeous that nothing can go wrong, and the fact is, nothing did. Except we ran out of red wine.

Not joking about the danger.

Scenes from two days in the mountains ... sun, cool air, lots of exercise and GOOD FOOD

A LITTLE BOY FROM OTTAWA ...

Next stop on the tour of love was a much- anticipated visit from Nanny, Grandpapa, and Cousin Jacob. Jacob had never been overseas before, so this was a big jump for him, and he seemed to adapt wonderfully. And of course his young cousins were over the moon to see him, even if he’d somehow grown four inches in ten months. The three boys ran around, played soccer, went to the beach for dips in VERY COLD water, watched movies, ate awesomely, and bickered. A little. It was great to have Jacob in the house. Nanny and Grandpapa had gotten through a pretty stressful spring, with Renald’s knee-replacement surgery, and although the knee threatened to be mean to Renald on a couple of the days, overall it was a great two weeks with him able to be up and about.

An intellectual moment at St. Guillaume le Desert

Mmm, Nanny's chicken-asparagus lasagna!

The last supper ... two days before Denny & Eitan go "home"

We spent a great, hot day at the Pont du Diable, where the beach was mysteriously busy with English highschool students. The water was DAMNED COLD, and some of us managed to get into the water for two or three minutes.

Charlot: not a waterdog

Perfect ice cream moment

But this visit wasn’t about sightseeing so much as it was about being together, and that we did. Lots of nice meals, including some much-needed Nanny-cookery, and those nights spent pitting cherries resulted in a big batch of delicious homemade cherry jam (of which, one month later, we have almost none left). There was also a great deal of cards, which, with no bias at all, I have to say the team of Renald-Redhill was more or less unbeatable. I frankly don’t know why those women even bother, but I have to salute their pluck.

A pictorial guide to making cherry jam in four steps:

And there you go: jam! That was easy. (Don't believe what they tell you
about lemons having enough pectin to set jam. The buggers don't. Use pectin, dammit.)

At the end of ten days in Narbonne, Anne and the boys went up to Paris with Nanny, Grandpapa, and Jakie for a three-day adventure in Paris. Yours truly locked the door and worked as Narbonne once again treated its patient citizenry to three straight days of astonishingly violent rain. At one point, the morning after everyone left, the skies were so dark at 9am that it would have taken a flashlight to find the car. Hey, you don’t see that every day.

Anne may well insert some details of the Paris trip, but as a second-hand witness to it, all I can say is that it paid off for me in a rather large package of pastrami from the Rue de Rosiers and some bagels, so I assume it went very well indeed. That won’t stop me from putting some pics up though!








THE GREEN REPORT

It’s been a while since I’ve updated you greenthumbs on the garden, and because our digital camera has cacked (thanks Canon -- I just discovered the problem with the camera is the object of a class-action suit against you -- glad I spent $500 on this bloody thing) I can’t show you pics of the yard, which is really something else. While our Ontario visitors were here, I dug up about 2kg of new potatoes from the potato patch, which gave me the real-life sensation of one of my only recurring dreams, that of finding a trail of coins on the ground. The potatoes, which as you well know, grow in the rootball under the plant, are irregularly spaced, and if you want to harvest from a live plant without actually uprooting it, you have to dig into the mound the potatoes are planted on and find the little treasures yourself. So you root around and clear some dirt, and there's a glowing yellow ball, and then, look, there's another beside it, and one underneath them ... Man, they were wonderful: delicate, sweet, and so fresh. In a couple more weeks, I’ll take up the maincrop (which will probably be the same size) and we’ll have a second feed on them.

I just put in the last crop for now: watermelon. They call it pasteque here, and it’s a smaller, greener melon, but it’s basically the same fruit. The melons join cucumber, zuccini, snap peas, peppers, green beans, the potatoes, artichokes (done for the season), cocktail tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, and something called "russe," which is supposed to be like oxheart tomato, but whose blossoms are all falling off, leeks, onions, radish, carrot, three types of lettuce, basil, and something we call a “Cape Gooseberry” if we call it anything at all -- most people have eaten it, but don’t know what it is. It’s the orange berrylike fruit that comes in a papery Chinese-lantern-type skin. There's often one on your plate as a dessert garnish in shmancy restaurants. It’s called Physalis peruviana, although they just call it physalis here. It’s related to tomato and tomatilla, but it’s used much more as fruit. I love them, and since they’re available to grow here, I thought what the heck.

So that’s the vegetable patch. The fruit trees are in full fruit now, although the cherries are done and nothing else is quite ready. We have some big peaches and apricots, but they’re still hard, and the summer figs are enormous, but hollow-feeling and hard, and I’ve been told they’re not that good to eat. We have to wait for the ones that will form in August and be ready to eat in October. I'm discovering how strange and ancient fig trees are. For one thing, many people believe that fig trees fruit without flowering, but the strange fact is that the fig fruit itself is the flower; it's an "involuted" flower, which is to say the flowers grow inside the fruit. The little hole at the bottom of the fig is actually the entrance to the flower, which is pollinated by tiny wasps specialized to figs. These wasps go inside the fig to lay their eggs and often die inside the fruit. The acidic fruit dissolves the wasp's body, but the prevalence of maggots (larvae) inside figs is a result of the wasps' life-cycle. Bet you were wondering why they were so crunchy, huh? Also, fig trees produce a milk-white latex that, in ancient Egypt, was used to make coffins for mummies! Mmmm, crunchy mummies. And local folk cure has it that the sap that comes off the stem of a unripe fig cut from a tree is good for soothing burns.

More on all of that anon, but for the meantime, he’s some sexy shots of cherries just dying to be popped into your mouth. Don’t worry, we did it for you.




And that was May. We’re well in to June now, and it’s been lovely and quiet and often very warm. I made it out to Lyon for a few days last week to do some research on something I’m writing, and I found our May weather lying in wait for me in Lyon, but I escaped and drove down the Rhone, which is half wine, half nuclear power plants. Depressing, in fact, in places. But there was a lot to see, and some really lovely unexpected towns, like Vienne, which was packed with Roman history and was gorgeous to boot (less so under lowering skies) and Valence as well, where Napoleon lived as a sixteen-year-old army lieutenant. And I ended up at Aix en Provence, a town I hadn't yet seen, and I fully understand now why people love it. Outside of Paris, it’s probably the most beautiful city in the country.

Next week, we’re joined by friends from Canada, with their excited children in tow, and the twelve (!!) of us head down to Spain to spend a week in a stone farmhouse. (Check it out!) Hopefully we’ll have the camera fixed by then! But until then, some random May images. So long until July ...

A typical Charlot moment. Shows at 1, 3, 5, and 7pm.

A very dark, brooding flower we saw both at Peyrpetreuse and in the Alps.
Fragile, growing alone or in small groups, black-cowled with bright yellow faces hidden underneath. Stunning plant, no one knew what it was called.

Finally, we found frogs in France. In St. Chinian ...


The very last picture our $499 Canon SD800 digital camera took before cacking.
On the road below Lyon. Maybe it had something to do
with my choice of subject matter?

PS: want to know when the blog is up? Write to me and I'll put you on our blog group alert ...