Our guesthouse finally gets guests to house

Last week I had a lunch in a restaurant here in Cotignac and it occurred to me that it was the first time I'd eaten in a French restaurant since we arrived almost three months ago. There's something a bit funny about that. I mean, most foody folks – and I think that Quincy and I might qualify as foody folks – fetishize French cooking, and when they visit France they make a point to eat out. Somehow that just hasn't been our priority. When Quincy (who wasn't even with me at lunch) asked me about my meal afterwards, I used words like "murky" and "fishy" and "sludgy" to describe it. Her reaction suggested that she thought that I'd found the food disappointing, which isn't true at all. I meant those words in the most positive possible way. The food was fine, and it filled me up.

(Hmm, maybe that last sentence disqualifies me as foody folk after all.)

The impetus behind my restaurant meal was the fact that my parents were visiting for a week. The weekend before they arrived, our friend Carol came down from Geneva for a visit. And just before my parents left town, our friend Helen from Seattle arrived. Yep, now that spring has arrived, the onslaught of visitors has begun.

Please don't misunderstand my use of the word "onslaught" (especially if you're among the parade of people who're planning on visiting during the coming months). I assure you that I'm using the word in the most positive possible way.

Also, if you do visit us, I promise that we won't subject you to the same hardships that Carol endured. Carol's visit coincided with a brief stretch of unseasonably cold weather and we hadn't yet discovered how to successfully heat our guesthouse. We've since learned that the guesthouse "radiator" is merely decorative – kind of like having an ugly painting of a clown on your wall. (Or, more to the point: it's kind of like having an ugly sculpture of a radiator on your wall). We've also now located a portable space heater. And it's sunny and warm now too. After Carol, none of our subsequent guests have needed to sleep clothed in multiple layers of fleece jackets and woolen caps. Also, Maddox hasn't vomited on anybody since her visit either.

Of course, if you want something to read when you're here, I suggest you bring your own books. There's French literature on the bookshelves here, but we don't have much in the way of English-language books lying around. Rather than lugging tons of books over from Canada, Quincy and I opted for lighter, more electronic solutions. Quincy's got a Kindle. And I do a lot of reading on-line, a strategy that produces pleasingly haphazard entertainments. (A few days ago, for instance, and without any intention whatsoever to do so, I spent all evening reading about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.). Carol resorted to scrounging a Lemony Snicket book from Jasper's room, and my parents spent their week reading and re-reading Tintin comics.

In addition to Tintin and delicious sludgy restaurant food, I kept my parents intermittently entertained with walks around Cotignac. On one walk I picked a bunch of wild asparagus growing by the roadside and, despite my mom's contention that it'd be coated in dog urine, I served it up for dinner. We also played a lot of table tennis. My dad used to be a ping-pong demon during his undergraduate days – almost 60 years ago – and he seemed to enjoy the opportunity to once again throw down some topspin-heavy forehand smashes. My mom holds her own at the table too, and the mere act of palming a paddle again brought forth a flood of proud recollections her about sporty teenage years. You probably didn't know, for instance, that she had the highest bowling score among all the girls in her gym class.

("Oh that was just on that one day," said my mom when I read that previous sentence out loud to her, "and then that man died" – referring to the fact that news of FDR's death irritatingly overshadowed her moment of gym-class glory. She also suggested that I blog a bit about her high school badminton exploits; but, alas, I've failed to record the details.)

She flew back to the States today. My dad left a couple of days earlier, to attend a meeting in Switzerland. I accompanied him via train to Geneva where, after making sure that he boarded the right train to continue his onward journey to Montreux, I spent the night at Carol's place, before returning home the next day. (It was super warm and cozy in Carol's apartment, by the way, and chockablock with English-language books; I borrowed one for the long ride home). It was a lot of train travel in a short time. But I was happy to hang out with my dad and to make sure he actually made his connections. Although he's traveled in crazy ways in crazy places all his life, this was the first time he'd actually ridden the rails in Europe in over 40 years, so he was feeling a bit clueless and uncertain about the whole thing. My favorite part of the journey occurred when a French train conductor came around to check our tickets. He was wearing a cheap gray suit over a purple turtleneck, and an old-fashioned driving cap of the sort that I associate with golfers of the Ben Hogan era. I nudged my dad to tell him to get his ticket out. "There's the ticket puncher," I said. My dad looked. "He doesn't much look like a ticket puncher," he said, "He looks like the kind of guy who wants to sell you dirty pictures." For reasons that I can't quite explain, I found that hilarious in about six different ways.

Il ne chant pas

Maddox at age 4, just received his first report card. I kid you not. I think I may have said this before, but wow, the French do seem to take their early schooling very seriously. I wouldn’t be surprised if the kids in the petit class (Maddox is in the moyenne class) get report cards too! They actually judge to what extent they colour in the lines and are able to make a squiggle design just so. Anyway, it was of no surprise to either Mark or me that on most things Maddox didn’t even rate an “in progress”. You know, in minor things such as speaking. The teacher did admit that he will now repeat some words, and communicates with friends during play.

One of the phrases that caught my eye was this: “il semble s’ennuyer pendant les histories”. In other words, he seems bored during story time. Not a surprise, but while “ennuyer” simply means bored in French; in English, at least to me, it connotes something a little more tragic and soul-weary than just bored. It cracked me up to imagine Maddox suffering from ennui during storytime. Oh, and then there was the final line on the report card, "Il ne chant pas." Coming on the heels of the whole of the ennui deal, it just killed me.

Maddox’s class went on a field trip the other day. Literally. They went for a day-long walk, pique-nique lunches in their little sac à dos. I thought it was a really great idea – getting kids walking in the great outdoors for the whole day. Any parents who could attend were invited to come. Given that I am not working, of course I went. It sounded so sweet, you know, a walk in the provençal countryside with a bunch of cute kids. Riiight. What was I thinking? Of course what this meant is I spent the day trying to do the equivilant of herd kittens. French kittens. Non-english speaking French kittens. French kittens who speak super-fast in high fluting voices. Sheesh. I felt like I was an extra on a French-dubbed version the new Chipmunk movie – "the squeaqual" (a movie I made the mistake of going to with the kids in an effort to get more practice understanding French). Not exactly relaxing. I did learn some new phrases and got very proficient at shouting out imperatives: “Avance!” “Arrête!” “Allez!” “Restez avec nous!” Every once in awhile I would get a chance to look up and enjoy the scenery and the jewel-like sky. It was a gorgeous day, but exhausting!

Along similar lines, it had come to my attention that l’école maternelle was looking for more parent-helpers to assist with swimming outings. I was impressed that they were willing to undertake something so ambitious. I mean yikes! Taking a bunch of non-swimming kids into a pool? They do require enough parents for a 6-1 ratio in the pool, and these parent helpers need to have a basic certificate in swimming proficiency. Again, since I am not working it seems wrong not for me to help with stuff like this. So I signed up for the proficiency ‘test’ at a pool in the near-by town Sillans la Cascade. I had quizzed a couple of parents I knew who had done this test previously to make sure the test was not likely to be too complicated linguistically. They both assured me it was easy, as long as I could swim. And I figured when in doubt I could make sure I was never the first to do any particular task.

The written instructions I received ahead of time established that there were 3 basic proficiencies:
1) To be able to enter the pool (dive or jump)
2) To be able to swim (any form) 20 meters
3) To be able to retrieve an item off the bottom of the pool.

That all sounded quite easy. And for the most part it was. There were 2 aspects of it that were a wee bit more daunting than I anticipated. Firstly, the dive into the pool was to be from a racing stand. And I will tell you, for a woman who hasn’t dived(?) (dove?) (or as Mark helpfully suggested, diven?) into a pool for ages (maybe 20 years?), when I got up on that stand the water seemed a loooong way down. I was relieved to see the woman in front of me chose to jump in. I took the same chicken-way out. The only other heart stutter occurred when it was time to retrieve rings from the bottom of the pool. It turns out this task was to be done in the deep end. I had hoped they just wanted to see that one could swim under water and would do it at a reasonable depth like, I don’t know, 4 feet. Wrong. We did it in the way deep end. And for a girl with sensitive ears and a cold to boot, it seemed a long way down. But I did it. And I passed. I realize I may come to regret that.

Mark’s parents are visiting right now. The other night we watched a slideshow of lots of photos that spanned Mark’s dad’s career and travels. At some point there was a photo of two pandas humping. Mark pointed out matter-of-factly that they appeared to having sex. Maddox immediately asked what that was. Jasper (who knows exactly what having sex is because we have read a very detailed book about it to her) jumped in quickly to assure Maddox that he's really too young to know about it. (Mark’s parents, listening silently, surely agreed with her.) But, of course, Mark seized the opportunity for instruction, and gave him the very brief one- sentence version about the male penis and the female vagina and making a baby. Still, I guess it's a bit confusing for a four-year old. And so after a pause he asked, "what do they do with a penis?" (I'm sure Mark’s parents were silently appalled by Maddox’s persistence, as well as Mark’s). Mark answered, "the male puts his penis in the female's vagina." Maddox silently considered this for about 3 seconds and then said, "I want to do that."

So, while he may not graduate from French pre-school, Maddox definitely seems well on his way to growing up. After all, who cares about drawing perfect loop-de-loops when you can do that?

In which Mark uses words like muesli and Fanta and plaques d'immatriculation

It's that time of year. Branches are budding, bushes are blooming, fruit trees are flowering. And you know what that means: It means that I'm spending my days itching and sneezing and filling handkerchiefs with watery snot. That's what I do every spring back home in Vancouver too.

So, yeah, the more things change, the more ça même chose. Or at least, almost the même chose. Some things are a tiny bit different. The springtime pollen is different, for instance, emerging as it does from almond blossoms and walnut buds and whatever that great big tree in our back yard is that spills fuzzy red allergens all over the terracotta terrace where, increasingly, we're eating our mid-day meals.

Despite the airborne tides of pollen, it's probably a good thing that we've started to move our life-style out of doors, if only because it's a departure from our previous routine. Having been here already more than two months, the novelty of being in France itself has worn off, and it's easy to feel that we've settled into a comfortable sort of sabbatical rut. You know: Yet another trip to the weekly market to buy fruits and vegetables and cheeses. The specifics may change from week to week (last week we discovered a delicious gaperon, the week before it was a cantal vieux) but really, it's the same ol' same ol': Wandering from vendor to vendor in the shining morning light, uttering a few phrases in haphazard French, handing over the euros, and stocking up. (And even some details never change at all: every week I seek out a particular vendor who specializes in eggs and flan and un-aged curds, and I buy a fourpack of sheepsmilk brousse.) If not for the unnecessary French mots I'm forcing into these sentences, I might as well be writing about a trip to a Safeway supermarket. Yawn.

Anyway, in order to be a semi-responsible blogger, I'm trying to attend more vigilantly to those things – the little things – that actually are different or unexpected or somehow peculiarly Provençal. (Because the alternative, as you may have discovered, is that I don't write anything at all. Or worse: I fill up the blog with tedious faux-erudite ephemera.) And I'll try to notice things that are at least a tiny bit more interesting than the mundane fact that instead of eating a bowl of yogurt and granola for breakfast every day, as I do in Vancouver, I'm instead eating a bowl of fromage blanc and muesli (or, as they call it here in France: muesli). Still, I apologize in advance to those of you who are hoping for tales of embarrassment and humiliation. What's been happening these days is all pretty modest stuff.

Like the other day when, after putting it off and putting it off some more, I finally went to get new license plates for the car. Not for the new car. Nope. The new plates were actually for the other car: the 1980s-vintage beater that, despite performing without incident on fully 3/4 (exactly 3/4) of its outings with us, now just sits rusting in our damp and dusty garage. You see, France has adopted a new car registration system of some sort and all cars, even old and unreliable ones, are supposed to be getting new plaques d'immatriculation. Well, you can see why I kept putting this off. Even under familiar circumstances, this sort of task is typically just time-wasting and tedious – the boring journey to some wearying government office, the endless waiting in line, the hesitant inquiries about opaque procedures, the forms to fill out, the forgotten document that requires you to return home, find the damn document, and then start all over again with another boring journey and more waiting in line and more forms to fill out...yes, it's the sort of errand I'd put off even if the interaction was to be entirely in English. Add in the fact that I'd be navigating this tricky bit of bureaucracy in my awful French and, well, frankly I'm shocked that I didn't somehow finagle a way to get Quincy to do it instead.

But – and here's the vaguely anthropological twist – it turned out that it wasn't like that at all. No Byzantine bureaucratic maze; no tedium. A quick walk to the local gas station; a single piece of paper, 30 euros, and no more words of French than I'm using in this very sentence, and voilà: des nouveaux plaques d'immatriculation. You've probably had sneezing sessions that took longer. I know I have.

Our little musical-theatre outing last weekend was also just a bit different in the details than it would have been if we'd been doing it back home. In Vancouver, the performance (comically embellished re-imaginings of Aesops fables, which were actually much less awful and lot more fun than I just made them sound) would have taken place at some community centre or somewhere secular like that. Here, it was at a famous hilltop church. In Vancouver, the curtain call would probably have been followed immediately by kids' wheedling pleas for a post-performance trip to Dairy Queen. Here, we instead hung around outside under the pine trees, helping ourselves to Fanta and slices of cake and cashews that someone had put out on the picnic tables where the actors and the audience mingled with nuns and a bearded bishop. And, on our walk home through the woods, we stopped to explore a crumbling roofless building being reclaimed by trees.

And then there're my bicycle outings. Every time I go riding with Ollie, I'm reminded that we're living a different lifestyle here in France. Now, partially that's because when I'm home in Vancouver my time in the saddle is mostly limited to slow-motion cautious commutes with one or more children in tow, whereas here I'm regularly risking a bent rim or a broken chain and a shattered clavicle while following fearless Ollie down treacherous trails. But it's also because these rides inevitably take me into scenes that seem just amazingly, iconically, clicheédly, even embarrassingly Provençal. A monestary on the side of a mountain. A small stone chapel appearing suddenly in the middle of an oak-filled forest. A tiny red-roofed hilltop village where the wind blows hard and we ride under the narrow arches of ancient alleyways. Yet another dusty hillside track alongside yet another olive orchard. Last weekend Ollie led me along some centuries-old trail that wound it's way through the middle of a wine chateau, through the vineyards, up over a rocky hill, and then, like many of the trails here, suddenly crossed a stretch of private property, where there suddenly appeared a burly dog that lunged loudly at our furiously pedaling feet. Of course, as I know from sad experience, that last part isn't peculiarly Provençal at all.

"I want to live here forever!"

Well, it feels like it has been quite awhile since I have blogged. And we have been relatively busy, so I better GET busy!

This morning at breakfast Maddox said, apropos of nothing, “I want to live here forever” (of course, he pronounced it “forrreeever”). He wasn’t really able to articulate why. But, it sure beats “I don’t want to go to school,” and “How many more sleeps until we go back to Vancouver?” Ah, the capriciousness of a 4 year old!

A week ago our friend, Carol, who currently is living in Geneva, came for a weekend visit. She was our first guest here. Those of you who will be coming for a visit later should be glad to hear that we have worked out a number of the guest ‘glitches’ since she came. You know, minor details, like how to get heat into the guest house. While this probably won’t be a big deal when most of our visitors come, it was damn cold when Carol was here. I’m not going to go into the details of her visit because I believe she is working on her own blog entry to describe her visit to you. So, I will just leave you on tenterhooks for that one.

Le carnival was celebrated at l’ecole maternelle. The kids were to dress up as a character from a fable or fairy tale. I hadn’t realized there was a Spiderman fairytale. Actually, to be fair, there was only one spiderman in the crowd, which in this age set is pretty impressive. There were several Little Red Riding Hoods, a couple of Robin Hoods, some Spanish senoritas and quite a few princesses & animals. Maddox was a pirate. His costume was pretty lame (especially since he refused to put on his pirate shirt in favor of his fleece, and he tended to wear his eye patch pushed up on his head), but given that we only had one week to pull it together, I thought we did pretty well. We had been loaned a wonderful Robin Hood costume but for whatever reason he absolutely refused it. So then we agreed on the Pirate idea. We also started playing Pirate in the back yard to try to get him “into” it. So for several weekends he and Jasper ran around with handkerchiefs tied on their heads and cardboard swords and played in the backyard. It is a great garden for this sort of imaginative play – lots of nooks and crannies and hidey-holes.

We had the joy of experiencing some small town theatre, or ‘le Spectacle’. A local group put together an original show that involved interpretations of fables. They had a matinee for kids (free / by donation). It was held in a meeting room at la Notre Dame de Grace. It was pretty great. Though I didn’t ‘get’ a lot of it, I sure was charmed by the fact of it. I love theatre and there is something very sweet about small time theatre like this. I was thrown by the fact that one of the characters spoke in Italian (Come on, give me a break! I’m having enough trouble in French, here!). And also, while I was familiar with some of the fables, some of them were new to me (The Bat & the Two Weasels?) and some of the references to particular songs etc went right over my head. It made for a nice day though (we walked up the hill to the church, on the route of the penitents), and the kids loved it. We did get into quite a conversation with Jasper explaining penitents and the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

We have done quite a bit of socializing over the past week. We were invited to dinner at Maddox’s girlfriend’s house. That was fun. Mark and I got a lot of French practice. Even though Sofie’s (Hannah’s mother) English is far better than Mark's and my French put together, she was kind enough to keep the conversation in French. She knows we want / need practice. As usual though, we would morph out of French when we really couldn’t communicate something and then morph back in. I like Sofie quite a lot. And since Maddox and Hannah are still in love, I think we will be seeing more of them.

This last Sunday was a glorious and sunny day and we filled it with lots of socializing with the Brenkman’s (Nathatlie & Ollie & kids). Mark started the day by going on a bike ride with Ollie. And then the family came over for a long and luxurious Sunday lunch. It was warm and sunny so we spent the day outside drinking and eating and chatting and laughing. It went on for hours. It felt very European. I loved it. When we were fully sated, and then somewhat digested, we all piled into our cars and drove up a nearby “mountain” – Mt Bession and explored around on top. We stopped at a memorial for some Resistance fighters who were killed on Mt. Bession (which was apparently a popular spot for Resistance meetings etc – lots of places to hide).

While I don’t fully agree with Maddox on the notion of living here forever, I will say that I am very much enjoying our life here.

la vie quotidienne (by a very special guest blogger!)

We're honored today to bring to you a rare treat: A little something submitted to "our french files" by a very special guest blogger. He prefers to remain anonymous, so I can't tell you who he is. But I can advise you to check out the blog that he calls his own ("Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life"). And I'll tell you that he looks exactly like the distinguished gentleman there on the right. Enjoy...

In which Liam and Carol and I drive our station wagon to a giant store called “Le Costceau!”

So, I’m sure you’re all wondering why we don’t put up more pictures of what la vie quotidienne is like here in Phoenix, Arizona. I fear we’ll have to live with this photographic faux pas in absentia whilst we continue to adjust to the weird cultural customs around here. Meanwhile I’ll try to paint un image verbale of what a typical day is like in the village we are now calling notre maison. As the dawn breaks over our manicured lawn (likely being mowed by two fellows who have recently slipped illegally across the border), we prepare bowls of farine d'avoine et raisins secs. The local working class eats this sort of porridge for breakfast, and calls it “oat meal." No, I’m not kidding: “oat meal” quelle horreur! and yet, after you get used to it, it’s kinda cool. Locally, it is prepared from a package with a quaint picture of a Quaker man, with the words “1 minute!” emblazoned across the front. But Carol and I, avid followers of Le Test Kitchen, use a more laborious and traditional method in which thickly rolled oats are par-boiled, and then steamed, all for very precise times, and then served over lightly toasted almonds, walnuts, bluets fraîches, and wheat bran, but it’s all very boring, and I’m sure you don’t want to hear about it.

Next, we take Liam to what they call “elementary school.” Why it is called elementary school we have no idea, and we half expected to see periodic charts on all the walls, but no, there are simply imprints of letters of the Phoenician alphabet attached to corny little pictures of apples, bees, cows, ducks, etc. – which were manifestly not painted by Monet or Gaugin, I can assure you (instead bearing a very pedestrian signature style more appropriate to a Hallmark card than to the goal of training little sophisticates who will someday, if all goes well, drink coffee and eat croissants on 4th Avenue outside of Capers market while discussing Heidegger).

Now the first thing you’ll want to know about the so-called “elementary school” is that virtually everyone speaks English! I know, I know, très gauche! Well, OK, some of the kids speak Spanish with their parents, and one of Liam’s little classmates is from Turkey. And the Ottoman lad's mother’s name is, get this: Esme. Yep, Esme. As soon as I heard her name, of course, it brought to mind J.D. Salinger’s short story “For Esme, with love and squalor” (see my other blog on Salinger’s sad passing, in which I attempt to imitate mark schaller attempting to imitate Ernest Hemingway attempting to imitate J.D. Salinger, much to Carol’s embarrassment).

(I know you can’t wait for the sequel, but alas, we face another local custom – Liam’s “bed time” – the locals here believe you’re a “bad parent” if you let your little tots stay up till midnight sipping red wine and reading Proust by candlelight as my brothers and I did whilst living in a tent in Pakistan, but that, mes bons amis, is a tale for un autre jour...)

Spring is Here

"Sprrring is here, a-suh-puh-ring is here, Life is skittles and Life is Beer..."
(sorry, sometimes I can't help but to burst into song, ala Tom Lehrer).

This week for the first time, I feel like we have truly Arrived in the south of France. I know that seems a little slow in coming since we have been here for a full two months (two months!) already. Maybe it is because spring is here and we are spending more and more time in our gorgeous garden. I am starting to have the sort of moments I would have imagined a sabbatical in Provence would have included: Lunches alfresco in the shade-dappled sun; Afternoons reading lazily on a comfy chaise lounge listening to the birds twittering raucously in the trees; Evenings on those same chaise lounges chatting with Mark while sipping on local wine. So, life is seeming pretty damn good. And as the weather becomes more consistently sunny and warm I am sure we will be spending plus en plus time in the garden.

This week I went for a walk with Nathalie. She loves go for walks (promenade) and knows the trail system around town like the back of her hand. The weather was lovely and the air crystal clear in the way it can be around here. We could see for miles around and it was lovely. She is a great guide, knowing lots of history of the area (from medieval history all the way through the recent history of fires that swept through).

Le promenade was satisfying to me on a number of levels. First and foremost it was a beautiful day and felt great to be out in it and exploring the area. Secondly, I felt like I was handling it physically pretty well. And finally, the walk was satisfying for me in that we spoke in French most of the time. I am better able to hold up my end of a simple, relatively concrete conversation. We did slip into English when we ranged into more complex and abstract concepts (such as mental illness). Still, I felt pretty good about the French. I find it is a little too easy to live a cloistered non-french-speaking life here, so I feel good about finding opportunities to speak en français. In addition to just chilling out and enjoying Provence, my main goal for our time here is to improve my French.

Life seems to be improving for Maddox as well. It has been weeks since he has said anything about not wanting to go to school. It could be that he is feeling the spring in the air as well. As in, you know, l’amour? He has a girl friend. Her name is Hannah. I realize you folks have already read about this in Mark’s post (hogging all the good stuff!), but I will share my thoughts anyway.

Mark told you already about how yesterday, when I dropped Maddox off he saw Hannah by the front door and silently gave her a huge hug. But he missed out describing the soulful way they gazed into each others eyes and how afterward Maddox leaned his forehead on hers. So sweet. I had heard from Hannah’s mother that she talks about Maddox all the time, asking her how to say things in English, words like le dauphin (dolphin) and l'amour. Today, Maddox went on a field trip to an Olive grove. I asked him who his partner was for the walk.
He said, “You know -- my friend.”
“You mean Hannah?” (he nodded) “She likes you, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah! She likes me A LOT!”

Maddox is also beginning to discover the joy of the written word. Tiring of him going through pages and pages of my notebook, I suggested we get him one of his own. He was ecstatic. Seriously. Dancing-in-place excited. Who knew that 2 euros could buy so much goodwill?

This is what he has written on the outside of his notebook:

MADDOX
BOOK WRITE
KEEP OUT
DEEP

He fills his book with pictures and words here and there choosing pages at random. Pictures of houses and rainbows, and the words, “PRESENT” and “METAL” each on their own page and in no particular order. It is hard to fathom what is going through his mind. I just provide the spelling.

On the other hand, Jasper has discovered the joy of reading the written word. For hours on end. A couple of weeks ago she stayed up until 10pm reading James and the Giant Peach. Now at night, after we have read her a chapter from a book (she still enjoys us reading to her) I kiss her good night and try negotiate with her how many chapters she will read before going to sleep. For the most part she seems to turn off the light early enough to get adequate sleep.

It is raining today, but it has not dampened my spirits. I am still convinced that Spring is in the air.

In which scorpions and nun's farts are served as food, and Maddox falls in love

Yesterday was market day in Cotignac. So, while the kids were at school, Quincy and I wandered from stall to stall under a sunny sky, filling our shopping bags with sheepsmilk cheeses and olives and mushroom-and-hazelnut tapanades and lots of green beans, lemons and Spanish clementines. Also a whole roasted chicken and an enormously tasty ham that (if I accurately interpreted what the meat-man said) was cut from a baby pig. And if you're appalled that I'm not appalled by that, I'll remind you that although I do still consider myself a vegetarian, I'm a non-practicing vegetarian. And besides, this is France.

More than any of us, Jasper has been trying new foods here in France. It helps that she eats lunch at the school cantine practically every day. Some days she discovers new things that she loves; other days not so much. For instance, one day last week the menu included assiette de la mer. When she got home in the afternoon, I asked her how it was. She liked the sauce, she said, but not the scorpion that was in it.

Scorpion! I flashed back to when Jasper was just one year old and we lived for six months in Sri Lanka. Quincy was brushing her teeth before bed one night and very nearly stepped on a scorpion on the bathroom floor. I was already almost asleep, but I pushed aside the mosquito netting and climbed out of bed to deal dutifully with the arachnid intruder. It turned out to be scarier than I'd anticipated. The scorpion wasn't one of those slim little pinkie-sized things I remembered from my days in the Arizona desert. This Sri Lankan scorpion was a big as a banana, with monstrous claws and a thick black cord of a tail that arched menacingly toward me, making me acutely aware of the fact that I was entirely naked. It took a while, and was a bit of a struggle, but I eventually chased it out into the hallway and then cornered it on the stairs where I clubbed it to death with the end of a broom.

This is the image that jumped to mind when Jasper told me of her distaste for the scorpion she was served for lunch. "Scorpion?" I asked. "Well it looked like a scorpion," she said, "I didn't eat it all." Turns out, though, that it wasn't a scorpion. It was a prawn.

Maddox hasn't yet been sampling such a wide range of local foods. There's a cantine at his preschool but he hasn't been eating there. We figured he needed a bit more time to acclimate to the new school, new rules, and a new language that he still (purely on principle, I think) refuses to speak. The plan is for him to start eating at the cantine at the end of this week. In the meantime, he's been eating lunch at home.

Lately the kids have been bringing home lots of xeroxed reminders and announcements about the upcoming celebration of Carnival. It's a very big deal around here, with parties and parades, and all kids are expected to dress up as some legendary storybook character. We've lucked into a secondhand homemade Robin Hood costume that would be perfect for Maddox (among other things, there's an awesome leather vest and a green felt hat adorned with real feathers) except for the fact that he wants absolutely nothing to do with it. He's at that endearing / irritating age where he still regularly says hilarious things (such as the other day when, apropos of nothing, he said "I can feel my testicles growing"), but also increasingly refuses to listen to good advice. His stubborn rejection of Robin Hood is just one example. So too is his principled refusal to speak French.

Yesterday Maddox brought home a notice about a Carnival party at his preschool. Parents are asked to provide a snack of some sort, and the announcement listed several suggestions: "des crêpes, des beignets, des pets de nonne, etc." Pets de nonne? My trusty old French-English dictionary wasn't any immediate help there. So we got onto the computer for a little on-line translation: "Nun's farts." Nun's farts? Yes. Apparently, they're a popular pastry.

Also this week Maddox went with his preschool class on a field trip to a local olive orchard. He was very excited about it. When Quincy asked afterwards what he did in the olive orchard, Maddox said that he played. "Who'd you play with?" she asked. And he replied, "You know: my friend."

Ah yes, his friend. Her name is Hannah and, according to her mother, she talks about Maddox constantly. When Quincy dropped him off at school yesterday Hannah was already there; Maddox ran up to her and wrapped his arms around her in a long hard hug. When I returned him to school after lunch, the gate to the schoolyard was locked and so we waited outside the gate for a few minutes until a teacher appeared to unlock it. A bunch of other kids – the ones who stayed at school for lunch in the cantine – were running around inside the schoolyard. One of those kids was Hannah and she immediately ran over and grasped desperately at Maddox's hands through the iron gate. Meanwhile, Hannah's best friend (who speaks some English) ran up and, gesturing toward Hannah, told me this: "She is the amour of Maddox." Neither Hannah nor Maddox said anything. They just stood there, holding onto each other through the iron bars, like something you might see during non-conjugal visiting hours at a penitentiary. It was pretty charming.