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 demonsOn 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 MonserratThat 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 ...
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.
