Salissez mes chaussures, dit l'étranger

We're living in someone's holiday house in Cotignac, and there are lots of things here of the sort of that a family keeps in a second home. Random toys and tools, odd assortments of plates and bowls, a bunch of old bicycles rusting in the garage, that kind of thing. And bookshelves full of books: Gide and Camus and Saint-Exupéry, and translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Cent Ans de Solitude) and Philip K. Dick (Coulez Mes Larmes, Dit le Policier).

I amused myself last night by imagining how Camus might have blogged about our life here so far ("Aujourd'hui, Jasper a vomi. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas...").

Or Garcia Marquez, perhaps: "Many years later, when his own children were grown and he lay dying slowly and painlessly in an antiseptic room instead of succumbing to a tragically heroic fate as he had once wished, the fading sunlight slanting through the hospital window reminded Mark, for the first time in years, of that bright cold day in January when he first rode a rusted bicycle through the scrubby pine forests and olive orchards of Provence and, upon returning home in the late afternoon, he imagined, wrongly, that he would always associate his sabbatical in France with the sweet scent of wood smoke and rosemary."

Alongside the creaky bicycles, there's also a car that came with the house. It's a beater (an old Renault 5 with a shrill engine and floormats that are, mysteriously, always wet), but it's serviceable.

And it's not like we really need a car very much. Right in the center of the village, just a couple of blocks from our house, there are half a dozen shops that supply Cotignacians with basic necessities such as bread, cheese, wine, and entire skinned carcasses of rabbit, head and all. There's a bank with a bank machine (and that's handy because we're going through Euros as though they were rupees, or dollars). There's a hardware store where, among other things, we can get spare keys made. And these include not just the slim little streamlined keys we're accustomed to using in our modern doorlocks in North America, but also those elaborate cast-iron things with cloverleaf handles that look like the sort of oversized gimmicky prop brandished by grinning civic leaders in cheesy 1950s-style "key to the city" ceremonies. And there's a tiny, but surprisingly well-stocked supermarket of sorts – the one in which Jasper famously vomited on her shoes a couple of weeks ago – that sells pasta and milk and toilet paper and couscous and Nutella and little pots of thick tangy sheeps-milk yogurt that immediately became my fermented breakfast food of choice.

I don't have great confidence in our damp and belchy car, and I'm sure that it will, one day, leave us all stranded by the side of some picturesque rural road somewhere. But we did drive it to Brignoles (about 20 km away) last week to buy some things – like peanut butter – that can't be found in Cotignac.

The next day, Quincy went further afield to do some shopping in the larger metropolis of Toulon. Although, really, she didn't see much of Toulon. She spent her time in a mall, and at Ikea. She might as well have been in Burnaby. She returned home with a squishy plastic nightlight with an unpronounceably cute Swedish name, and a new cell phone. Which now brings the total number of telephones in the house to four – three of which actually work, two of which have French phone numbers, and none of which I intend to ever touch.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, we all had lunch in an olive garden. And, no, I don't mean one of those faux-Italian restaurant franchises of the sort that you can find dotting the suburban landscapes of North America (and, I assume, Toulon). I mean a real olive garden. We've met some people (Nathalie and Ollie – he's a plumber here in town – and their three kids) who live in an old farmhouse inside an olive orchard, and they invited us over for a lunch that went on for several hours. Beer and wine and bread and olive oil, muscat squash and rice and monkfish simmered in herbs and tomatoes, and salad, and three cheeses, and finally a cake – a galette du roi, with crowd-pleasing prizes baked into it, accompanied by crowns to wear on our heads.

Afterwards, while the kids were turning windblown branches into a sort of fort in the woods by a spring, I picked some twigs of wild rosemary that I found growing in the rocks nearby. I wandered into a hunters' shelter there by the spring, where I found a woodfire still smoldering. I tossed the rosemary into the embers and it smelled so good. I barely noticed all the fresh dogshit underfoot.