In which we attempt to adjust to a Francophone world, and Mark – to his relief – does not get arrested

The last time I took a sabbatical, we went to Sri Lanka: Civil war, chaotic traffic, wandering boars and flying bats and mangy dogs and malarial mosquitoes and water that we had to boil before drinking. But being in Sri Lanka was surprising easy because, hey, at least lots of people there speak excellent English. Not so much here in rural France. It's definitely an adjustment – for some of us more than others.

Take me, for instance. Yes, I've been able to struggle through some interactions with my amateurish deployment of French. But I live with the constant threat of being linguistically lost. There are a few contexts in which I feel confident – like when I'm buying bread or pastries (really amazing pastries) at one of the three bakeries that are within a five-minute walk from our house. But I feel very differently about the prospect of, say, answering the telephone when it rings. I did answer it once and was somewhat relieved when there wasn't actually a real person at the other end of the line; just an automated recording of some sort, which I didn't understand at all and which refused, as automated recordings are wont to do, to acknowledge my feeble requests to speak more slowly and with a more childlike choice of vocabulary words. No, generally, I leave the phone-answering to Quincy.

Maddox too struggles with the language. His knowledge of French was essentially zero at the time of our arrival, and he didn't have much chance to splash around in the shallow end of the linguistic pool before we plunged him directly into the deep end of full-time daycare at l'école maternelle. We've been trying to coach him a bit at home – teaching him French phrases for "Hello," "Thank you," "I'm thirsty," and stuff like that, and he is doing a great job of counting all the way to neuf – but he's clearly not happy with the language. The director of l'école maternelle, Madame Blanc, reported to us that he resists saying anything at all in French. He refuses to answer "présent" at morning roll-call, or to repeat even the simplest words in French when prompted. Intriguingly, his refusals aren't limited to just the linguistic domain. Madame Blanc also reported that he refuses to write out the letters in his name (which he's been doing since he was, like, two), and that he's unable to use scissors (which is crap, because I know from experience that he likes nothing better than to take a pair of scissors and turn any sheet of paper – no matter how indispensable it might be – into a pile of tattered strips). I'm guessing that his apparent dumbness at daycare is strategic. If he was older and, say, in prison, I suspect he'd be refusing meals and flinging feces in a willfully misguided attempt to attract media attention to some sort of idiosyncratic sociopolitical cause. But, well, he's four; and we're not worried. At the end of the day, when we walk him home, he always claims to have had some fun.

It's been a lot easier on Jasper, since she arrived here with an excellent command of French already. Still, she was anxious when we walked her to l'école primaire the first day, and was actually fighting back tears as we introduced her to her teacher that morning (which is pretty notable given how famously stoic Jasper usually is). She told us later that she spent her morning recess alone inside, just trying to get acquainted with her new surroundings. But this period of nervous adjustment was short-lived. By her second day of school, she was already rattling off the names of all her friends (Josephine, Jelena, Marie-Justine, etc.), and excitedly studying times tables and practicing how to write in cursive.

This quick transition, and the discovery that she could so successfully make that transition, seems to have emboldened Jasper more broadly too. She now insists on walking home from school unaccompanied by a parent, and she's excited to start exploring Cotignac on her own as well.

This past weekend, for instance, she was very keen to make a solo trip to a particular patisserie to buy some custard-filled sacristains for dessert. It's the furthest of the three bakeries, and although it's still an easy walk, Cotignac ain't exactly laid out on grid. The streets are curvy narrow alleys, and it's easy to lose one's bearings. I drew Jasper a map, and I told her that I'd be following her from a distance, just in case. She objected to that, but I insisted, and I assured her that I'd stay out of sight so that she wouldn't feel like she was being chaperoned at all. So she took off with map in hand and a couple of Euros in her pocket. I left a minute or two later, to make sure she didn't end up miles away. Should we be concerned about our 8-year old girl walking by herself in a town she barely knows? Nah. It's a small village and kids here go around unaccompanied all the time. It's safe. In fact, given the way that I was furtively following her – hiding behind the pale trunks of leafless trees, periodically flattening myself against peeling stucco walls in order to stay out of sight – the only suspicious-looking person in the whole town was me. Jasper's outing was a complete success, but I can only imagine what might have transpired if my apparent stalking behavior had caught the eye of the gendarme (there is one, exactly one, policeman in the village). It's one thing to buy a loaf of bread in French; I reckon it would be a bit more of a linguistic challenge to try to convince local law enforcement that I'm not, in fact, a pervert.