1. A common road sign is the exclamation point above, which I always read as, "Be surprised!" or "Can you believe this?" or "WOW!" I guess it's a good thing Chris is usually driving.
2. Pillowcases are still rectangles, but not as wide and quite a bit longer.
3. Dogs run around loose on the streets, but I have never seen any road kill of any sort.
4. When you walk into a shop, you always exchange greetings with the shopkeeper before doing any shopping.
5. Stoplights rarely hang over the road but are usually at chest-level, not quite to the corner of the intersection you're approaching.
6. The trees. I've posted about pollarded trees before but I can't stop thinking about them.
7. Both sets of wheels on shopping carts revolve, so that they are practically impossible to steer. At first I thought the French had some special technique for moving them in the right direction, but by now it's clear that they're crashing into things as much as I am.
8. No litter. At all.
9. Each evening, the shutters are closed on the windows of houses, and opened again in the morning.
10. Children and animals are welcome in bars.
Little things like these are what makes living in another country so thrilling. It's not that the things themselves are so thrilling, obviously; it's that the small details of your life that you pay no attention to are suddenly not the same. Every day there's a series of small upsets that gives you a startle of unrecognition that's strangely pleasurable.
And then, after a few months, especially on one of those days when learning the language seems unmanageably difficult and I'm thinking whose big idea was it to learn French anyway?-- on those days, the unfamiliarity of something like the shape of a pillowcase can make me homesick for Charlottesville and my old bed that requires no thinking, no noticing, no translation of any sort.
Then some more months go by, and I have a fresh startle, which is to notice that the shape of the pillowcase is now the way pillowcases are shaped. No longer odd, no longer anything but ordinary.
I wonder what it is like for the children, whose notions of pillowcases are not as entrenched as mine. I think they miss their beds too. But mostly, the details of life in France are becoming, for them, what life is composed of. At night I'm awake in my bed, reading, and I hear them, sleeping in their beds, sometimes making the little shrieks and pleadings of nightmares, but often muttering amiably, as though they're in a bar, with dogs underfoot, dreaming a dream of everyday life.
