Nothing is better than crumbling grandeur

We made a mistake on our way to Venice, and bought tickets for the water bus to get in from the airport instead of paying more for a private water taxi, which meant that we spent a long time waiting in the cold on the pier, and even longer on the somewhat creepy slow ride through the darkness, where small, abandoned-looking islands would loom up and slide past, illuminated by a construction light or two. So we didn't get to the city until around 10:30 at night. I was having intermittent sciatica attacks and could barely carry my handbag. Nellie was too tired to stand and Chris was carrying her on his back. It was very cold. Julian was announcing every three minutes that he had not had any dinner.

And yet. The four of us stumbled off the boat and into an alleyway, Chris and I peering at the map, wondering how we would find our hotel, and just like that, our traveler's misery evaporated -- the staggering beauty of Venice changed everything. The narrow streets were empty and spooky and indescribably interesting to look at and to walk in. There was a low murmur of voices in many languages, and the sound of lapping water, punctuated by cackling laughs and shouts. You can feel something like the pressure of history as you pass old palaces and cross bridge after bridge. 

We went out for a late pizza, and walked from dark alleys into a lighted up square, with plenty of happy tourists still out despite the cold, and Asleep at the Wheel's Route 66 playing from somewhere.

I had thought that a treeless place overrun with tourists would not be the place for me. But I was utterly and completely wrong. 

Le Gui

Those green balls up in the trees are mistletoe, or le gui. They are everywhere, great masses of parasitic plants considered pests by people whose business is trees. I could easily make airy remarks about its prevalence in the country where courtly love was invented -- so easily that I'll skip that and go straight to the pictures.



Here is a close-up view:

Le gui is one of the things Panoramix, the Druid, goes off to gather in the Astérix books, so it gave me a little bang of pleasure to find out that those big green balls I'd been looking at ever since the leaves fell in autumn were exactly that. I can picture him trudging down a muddy lane and climbing up with his serpe d'or to cut enough for his latest batch of potion. I know, I know, it's a cartoon. But it's as good as Bugs Bunny, and that's saying something.

The Heart of the Village

Well, maybe I should say mouth, or tongue, instead of heart. The place where you get all the news, the latest, the gossip: the hair salon, bien sûr. That's where I found out that there's an American couple who spends most of their time here in Villamblard, and I've never met them or even known they existed. And I found out that there's going to be a language exchange on Monday afternoons, where Anglophones and Francophones can come and practice with each other. I should be getting my hair done every week just so I can get a clue. 

Patrique, the talented stylist, is from Belgium, and we were laughing about how amazing it seemed to him that my family had ended up in this village of 880 people, and how equally amazing it was to me that he and his family had too. French is his second language, although of course, he's quite fluent. Our only misunderstanding was when I was complaining about the thinning of my hair, thanks to my age, and he said he didn't understand what I was talking about. He was being chivalrous, and I thought I had the wrong vocabulary word and kept trying new ones. 

You can see how much Julian was looking forward to his haircut.

It doesn't come across in pictures, but the children have been transformed thanks to Patrique. The same facial expressions take on new meaning with a different haircut -- what used to look sullen now looks elfishly wry. What used to look merely amused now looks positively overflowing with joie de vivre. Patrique talked about how the right hairstyle reveals personality, and he may be right about that. It's also true that the warm weather and daffodils have woken us all up from our winter doldrums. As I type I can hear Nellie and Julian racing their bikes around the house, yelling just to make a racket, yelling with the happiness of spring, and maybe also yelling with the pleasure of having just the right haircut.

Aligot!

I know, it doesn't look so good. (For that matter, neither do I.) The photograph in my regional cookbook, Recettes de nos Terroirs, has a spoon lifted up with a long, stretchy mass of potatoey cheesy goodness oozing back down into the pot. As you can see, my aligot did not ooze. It did not stretch. It  was barely stirrable.

It's true that I avoid arithmetic whenever possible, but I think to get the quantities correct I needed a scale, which is way more advanced kitchen equipment than our rental provides. So I guessed at everything, which just might possibly have affected the result. But after having it again the next night, heated in a saucepan with a little extra water, I think the lack of stretchiness was from not getting it hot enough, so the cheese was melting but not melting all the way. Like so many things, my aligot was better -- more garlicky and stretchier -- on the day after.

In any case, aligot is fantastic. It's a dish from the Auvergne, in the center of France, land of many terrific cheeses, including Cantal. If you like beer, I bet beer would be the perfect thing to go with. And make it soon, while it's still cold outside and it feels good to have something stretchy and warm and potatoey in your belly. 

800 g puréed potatoes

400 g cantal

1 clove garlic

75 g butter

20 cl crème fraîche

salt and pepper  

The trick, I think, is to keep the mashed potatoes really hot while you stir in the rest of the ingredients. I had it in a bowl over some hot water but next time I'll use low direct heat.

In some regions you can get aligot from street vendors in wintertime. That would be worth freezing for, no question.

Bon appétit.

Le Miracle de l'écriture

Nellie is one of those kids that was attracted to paper and pencils as a baby. She scribbled constantly, on any surface and with any writing implement she could find. But her handwriting was...well, you can see how it looked last September, just after she turned seven.


Back in August, when an English friend guided me through the shopping trip for school supplies, I noticed that there were all sorts of new writing materials  -- a slate with sponge and chalk, different colored ballpoints, cartridge pens -- so it was obvious the kids were going to be spending a lot more time on handwriting than they were used to.

Within a month, Nellie was writing like this

And now, in February, she's writing like this

Needless to say, entire forests have been sacrificed for the paper necessary to show off those capital letters. The house is inundated. But I admire all of it immensely. To me, French handwriting is emblematic of France, because it assumes that efficiency is not all that matters. It requires both a Cartesian precision and beauty, and every French child learns to do it. 

Julian's copybook is at school at the moment, so I'll add pictures of his transformation later. 

A Few Things That Are Not The Same

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.

La Soirée Irlandaise

....Nellie having a crêpe at the market in Bergerac.....

Orange flyers posted all over town announced Irish Night at the salle culturelle, so on Saturday night at 9, despite the elders among us really wanting nothing more than to go to bed, we walked into the village to see what was happening. Immediately Julian and Nellie were sucked into a vortex of children hurling themselves around the lobby and then outside. Inside, a group of musicians were onstage, tables filled half the room with candles on each one, and much of Villamblard was there, chatting and drinking beer and cider and Cokes. 

Remember the delight of running in a big pack of kids? I sat down with some British friends, feeling pretty delighted myself at the prospect of a cider, and watched the children zooming around the room, all with gigantic grins, playing some kind of game that makes no sense to adults and involves much crashing and falling and high hilarity. It was late, at least by my family's standards, so Julian and Nellie had that glittery wide-eyed look kids get when they're doing something exciting and out of the usual routine. 

The musicians began sawing and strumming away, just loud enough to keep me from being able to talk to the French couple at our table. The cider was very cold and appley and delicious, with just the right amount of alcohol. The one boy with some Irish blood began doing a jig in between the game of chase, kicking his feet up and momentarily bedazzling Julian, who had been doing the chasing. Toddlers were rocking to the music, mamans swayed with their babies.

Soon a young woman with a headset was calling for couples to dance, and before long, around twenty of us were stumbling through her directions and having a fine time. I was pleased to notice that my failures at following the dance steps were only due to my clumsiness, not to misunderstanding the French. The kind of Irish dancing we were doing was much like the Virgina square dances I was taught in gym class as a kid -- but it's much more fun as a grownup, much more fun with an excellent live band, much more fun with Chris and the laughing, stumbling villagers of Villamblard. 

We walked home under the velvety dark sky, looking at stars when we got past the streetlights, continuing our argument over the Little Dipper (Is! Is not!), and all of us were asleep within seconds.