Some goodbyes

Last night we had the big farewell party at the house and sixty of the people we love the best showed up. It was easy to welcome them and hard to say goodbye at the end of the evening. Strangely, the most painful aspect of the party was overhearing people's plans for various things in September and October -- booklaunches, dinners, getaways, workplans -- and realizing like an idiot that of course life was going to go on here without us. I can't see how it can, and yet it will. Those sweet early fall dinners in someone's backyard with the glowing fish lanterns hanging overhead; the martini-soaked booklaunches in the fall that will mark the beginning of the beginning or beginning of the end of someone's fortunes (at least for this year); the heads bowed over coffees in some café downtown, paper spread over the table; kids being ferried back and forth to various houses but not ours; swim meets, hockey championships, dance competitions. Here we are off on the adventure of a lifetime, but a not-so-little part of me feels a strange twist of grief thinking of everything we won't be a part of over the next year. You know how it is: you can love people from afar, but you can't really know them. It's the dailiness of their lives that moves you so, that allows you to feel your own trivial quotidian matters because it has the context of those you love inside it. So I stood back at one point last night and stared into the living room watching them all and feeling sad and lucky all at once. To choose to leave this, to have the opportunity to do what we're going to do and have the faith that the little hole we're leaving will still have our shape when we come back. How lovely ...

T minus seven days

The house is moved: half of our belongings have made the cross-town trek to my mum's house, where they'll be stored until we come home. The house feels like a shade of its former self: half-empty bookshelves, all the art off the walls (we've finally made use of all the B-list art: nice lithos of flowers, laminated photos of jazz greats, less-interesting paintings: stand-ins for our own decor). Anne got up at 1 am last night and paced aimlessly about the main floor, chasing a thought here and there. It gets harder the fewer things there are to do: waiting isn't exactly a task you can do and have it done with. So stray thoughts fill your head and those thoughts turn into work. I sat last night with an old friend over supper and tried to really put myself in the mindset of a man who's standing on a street in the south of France, standing outside of his house, looking down his street, plotting a route into town to buy, say, eggs and butter and a baguette ... and I couldn't do it. I don't know the smells, the sounds of the birds in that air, the feel of the road under my feet. In many ways, I feel like I'm not living anywhere right now.

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This is the fortune that came out of a cookie I opened Tuesday at lunch. I stared at it and told it it had to cough up the Official France Fortune. This is what came out of it:

Who's talking?

We're going to avoid the omniscient narrator in this blog (it involves referring to ourselves in the third person, and given that none of us is a professional athlete, it would be unseemly). SO: anything written in this grey-black font has been written by Michael. Anything in this burgundy font is Anne (believe me, she'll have plenty of burgundy to draw on for her posts) and if the kids decide to contribute, blue will be Ben and mauve will be Max. We'll see if we can drag them off Club Penguin long enough to write down a thought or two.

Ten-day countdown

Welcome to the Redhill-Simard Narbonne blog, On The Via Domitia. Over the next year (or more ...) we'll be posting the stories, experiences, and adventures the four of us are having in our new home in Narbonne, France. To see where we're living and learn some of the history of Narbonne, check this Wikipedia page out. But even better, get a ground's-eye view of life in the south of France with two young boys by looking over our collective shoulder starting this August.

If you don't know already know us, this is who we are:















Mum and dad are Michael Redhill and Anne Simard. Michael is a writer and the publisher and one of the editors of a wonderful literary journal called Brick. Anne is a health-care analyst and Francophile who hails from Quebec and can eat fois gras six times a day. They met in Toronto in 1995 and one of the very first conversations they had was how cool it would be to live in France. Err, you know, theoretically. Be careful what you talk about on a first date.

Benjamin (top) and Maxime (bottom) are eight and six and are health-food freaks. They'd laugh at this if they heard it. The two of them are hockey fiends, adventurers, and laugh-riots. They're not so sure about living in France, though, and who, at the ages of eight and six, would be? They're leaving their school, their friends, their hobbies. Their world. But we know they're going to love Narbonne. They're French-speakers, as is their mum (their dad has a learning curve ahead of him) and they're going to be the most exotic thing Narbonne has seen since the Aude River silted up in the fourteenth century.

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Right now, we're still in Toronto, packing our house up, having tearful goodbyes with various friends and family. Also: lying awake at night alternating between My god, what fun this is going to be and What on earth were we thinking.

Check back with us a couple times a week starting mid-August and find out ...