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.
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