Picnic in Provence (11 page)

The next morning, I sat with Alexandre on the edge of the fountain in the place des Marronniers. He waved as Gwendal inched the car down La Grand Rue, a radical misnomer for this narrow path to the main road. My eyes stung. I missed them before they were even gone. Having them here was torture; not having them here was worse.

I put Alexandre down for his morning nap and stripped the sheets off the bed in Char’s room. I wandered around the house, fingering the ugly curtains left by the previous owners.
These have got to go.
This wasn’t my house, it wasn’t her house. For the moment, it didn’t quite feel like anyone’s house.

I knew she’d get home, unpack, and then we would talk about all this—make our way past it. Maybe I could make her more aware of how I was feeling—ask her to take care to treat me like an adult in my own home. I hoped it would make me a better guest when I went back to the States, rather than my classic reversion to a child who comes and goes as she pleases and leaves her underwear on the bedroom floor. That’s the difference between my mother and Napoleon. Napoleon never made up with anyone.

I started clearing out the plastic containers in the back of the fridge. When Alexandre woke up for lunch, I reheated some lentils in the toy-size copper pot my mom had bought for me in Paris a few years before. He didn’t seem to feel my mood. The spoon made a few detours between the bowl and his mouth. There was a brown paste of lentils and green flecks of parsley all over his face and down his bib. He smiled. So did I. Then I realized: he was eating leftovers. But they were
my
leftovers, and somehow that made all the difference in the world.

I
’ve nicknamed our new wood-burning stove Bertha, and if I wouldn’t burn myself in the process, I would hug her.

Summer fled suddenly. One day we were sitting in the garden watching the swifts circle low above our heads, drinking beer, and grilling sardines. Then it rained for two days straight. When the sun came out, the trees had lost half their leaves and the temperature had dropped thirty degrees. Every morning while I give Alexandre breakfast, I hear Jean shuffle out in his bathrobe and slippers to check the thermometer in his garden:
“Moins trois ce matin.”
It gives him his topic of conversation for the day.

In our poetic assessment of the house, we had overlooked several things—not least among them, heat. There were only two outdated radiators in the whole house, nothing upstairs in the bedrooms or the bathrooms. At least there
were
bathrooms. The village didn’t have running water until the mid-1950s, and Mireille told us stories from her childhood about the
pipi
freezing in the chamber pots at night. In July it seemed funny. In November, not so much.

The thick walls that provided a welcome retreat from the summer sun were now glacial. The charming nooks and crannies were just more corners to heat. Central heating was not an option; there was no central gas line in the village, and we couldn’t install an oil burner because the truck to deliver the petrol couldn’t make the turn onto our narrow street. We were left with the choice of either electric radiators (super-expensive to run) or wood. Upstairs, we settled on radiators (there’s a limit to the number of chores I’m willing to do to warm up the toilet seat), but for the living room, we decided on Bertha, a squat cream-colored wood-burning stove with a glass window so we could watch the fire. The day she was installed I felt a little like Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Now I understand why everyone had been talking about firewood in the middle of July. When you order your firewood in July, the nice men from the company come and stack it neatly in the cellar. If you order your wood in November, they come with a pickup truck and dump the whole lot unceremoniously by the front door. Ten cubic meters of tree. The pile was as high as Gwendal’s head and blocked the entire width of the street. Getting it into the cellar would take till sunset.

The neighbors must have heard the rumble, the rusty crank of the truck, and the thundering crash of the wood hitting the pavement, because no sooner had Gwendal picked up the first log then Denis appeared in the doorway, already wearing work gloves, a support belt for his back, and his old SERNAM vest, from when he used to move freight in Marseille.

“Where do you want it?” he asked as he chucked three thick logs under his arm.

Jean and his wife, Paulette, came out next, then Arnaud. Jean is a retired
contremaître
. He and his teams worked all over France, fitting airtight windows for nuclear submarines. He was particularly proud to have installed the shock-proof windows on the first TGV, France’s famous high-speed train. Standing at the foot of our woodpile, he directed operations, instructing the men in the proper Lincoln Log technique to make a tight, stable stack. When it fell over, the uneven ground,
bien sûr,
and not the method was to blame. Alexandre was still a little unsteady on the steep incline of our street, so Paulette held his hand while I grabbed slender logs to stack outside the kitchen door for kindling.

People who grew up in small towns might be used to this kind of helping hand. When I was growing up in Teaneck, New Jersey, our neighbors the Maddens were an older couple, distant figures. The only significant interaction I can remember was the time my best friend Sarah and I decided to make purple scrambled eggs and leave them in the middle of the path to their garage. My mother forced me to apologize in person. Mrs. Madden may be the only person who ever looked at me and honestly thought to herself:
Bad seed.

My last neighbor in New York, through no fault of his own, watched all my comings and goings through the keyhole. He was only a little older than I and, as far as I know, left the apartment only on Tuesdays, when his mother came and took him out for dinner. I think he may have had a hoarding disorder. The one time I got a glimpse of his place, I saw what looked like a ski slope of brightly colored rags piled all the way to the ceiling.

Our nearest and dearest neighbor in Paris was Marie-Claude, who used to bellow her hellos from the open window of the apartment building across the street. She was a huge woman. Each morning, she would heave first one breast, then the other, onto the windowsill and stay there all day long, watching the traffic back up behind the garbage trucks. We later found out she had an Egyptian husband, as reedy as she was rotund. A mental picture was unavoidable. She liked the fact that I was American. She must have heard me speaking English on the phone. One day she approached me while I was writing at a local café. “My mother,” she bellowed—the fact that she was standing right in front of me and not across the street had no effect on her volume—“had American pots during the war.”

Two hours later, the woodpile was done and the street swept clean. I made a mental note to triple the number of chocolate chip cookies I’d be making for Christmas.

Marguerite kept looking out the window. Apparently, Denis was supposed to have spent the morning fixing the dishwasher.

PS: There’s another reason why locals order their firewood in July. Wood ordered in July has time to dry out. Wood ordered in November is wet and green and smokes like a lounge singer. It took us a half hour and an entire crumpled
Monde Diplomatique
to get our first real spark. It was the dumbest kind of newbie mistake. We deserved a wedgie.

THE OTHER SOLUTION
to the heating problem was to work from the inside out.

There is something about the first frost that brings out the caveman—one might even say the vampire—in me. I want to wear fur and suck the meat off lamb bones, and on comes my annual craving for
boudin noir,
otherwise known as blood sausage. You know you’ve been in France for nearly a decade when the idea of eating congealed blood sounds not only normal, but positively delightful.

When I was pregnant, my body craved iron in silly amounts. I could have eaten a skyscraper. It’s a shame that it’s not on the French pregnancy diet—forbidden along with charcuterie, liver, and steak tartare.

It’s true that
boudin noir
is not the sort of thing I’d buy at any old supermarket. Ideally, you want a butcher who prepares his own. I bought mine from the mustached man with the little truck in Apt market, the same one I’d spotted during our first picnic in Provence. Since our first visit, I’d returned many times to buy his delicious, very lean,
saucisses fraîches
and his handmade
andouillettes,
which I sauté with onions, Dijon mustard, and a bit of cream.

I serve my
boudin
with roasted apples—this time, some Golden Delicious we picked up from a farm stand by the side of the road. I tossed the apple slices with olive oil, sprinkled the whole lot with sea salt, and added a cinnamon stick and a star anise to ground the dish with cozy autumn spices.
Boudin
is already cooked through when you buy it, but twenty minutes or so in a hot oven gives it time to blister, even burst. I’m an adventurous eater, but the idea of boiled (or cold)
boudin
makes me think about moving back to New Jersey. No, not really.

I admit, when you first take it out of the oven, there are some visual hurdles. There’s always a brief moment—particularly when I serve this dish to guests—that I think,
But that looks like large Labrador shit on a plate
. True enough. But once you get past the aesthetics, you have one of the richest savory tastes I can imagine. Good
boudin
has a velveteen consistency that marries perfectly with the slight tartness of the roasted apples. Add mashed potatoes (with skin and lumps), a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and wake me in the spring.

THIS WINTER HIBERNATION
period also presented us with the decorative realities of the house.

When people think of a house in Provence, they think of a villa, a vineyard, a pool—and a couple of hundred thousand dollars in renovations done by a genial but not entirely reliable builder. We don’t have a couple of hundred thousand dollars. As it is, we are up to our earlobes in mortgages. As for the not entirely reliable builders—you’re looking at ’em.

When we first arrived in Céreste, I was asked to write an article for the Home section of an English newspaper. The editor loved the René Char connection, but the paper’s readers were accustomed to multimillion-pound restorations of Jacobean manors and innovative storage solutions for Devon cottages. Our wagon-wheel chandeliers and two-tone orange tiles were clearly not what they had in mind. I sent pictures, shoving myself as far into the corner as I could to make the rooms look bigger, the ceilings higher.

A few weeks later, the piece appeared as a double-page spread. The top half was a picture of a vast stone farmhouse, maybe even an entire hamlet, perched on a low hill among the lavender fields. It was a magnificent photo—of someone else’s house. It must have been one of the paper’s stock images of Provence. When a colleague of Gwendal’s at the head office in London saw the article, he fired off a short e-mail:
Now we understand why you moved down there.
It seemed pointless to disabuse him.

Our first priority were the tiles. It was simply impossible to decorate around them. Shiny, dark orange, and arranged in a zigzag pattern, they sucked the light out of a room like a black hole. The house was covered with them top to bottom, including the steps, halls, even the moldings. They made a particularly pleasing contrast to the green-flowered wall tiles and pink bidet in the upstairs bathroom.

Picking out new tiles (lovely light-colored stone with plenty of natural variation) was something I knew how to do. Laying tile was another slice of
saucisson
altogether. Angela and Rod suggested we talk to Alain and Evelyne, a Belgian couple who lived just up the street on the place des Marronniers. They were retired but sometimes did remodeling projects for fun. Just asking was humbling. We were quickly woken up to our urban uselessness, our flabby graduate-school muscles. This was something we would have to get used to in Provence—people twice our age easily doing physical tasks that six months ago would have sent us running for the chiropractor.

Alain and Evelyne were worn out from painting shutters on a villa up the hill toward Montjustin, but they agreed to lend Gwendal their tools and supervise him for a day, teaching him how to tile the floor himself. Gwendal started taking measurements and cutting tiles to size in the courtyard. With grouting on his fleece, dust in his hair, and glue on his knuckles, it was a whole new vision of my husband. Kind of a turn-on, actually.

Denis, Jean, and Alain stopped by at regular intervals to check his progress. “We all saw you,” Denis said to Gwendal, “with your computer and your telephone.
Maintenant, c’est bon
. Now you do something really
créatif
. Creative. Something with your hands.” Gwendal’s masculinity quotient went through the roof that day, a rite of passage on par with nailing the Torah portion at your bar mitzvah. PhD, shmee-hD—this was more praise than I’d ever heard one French person bestow on another.

Alexandre and I went off on a trip to the States. When we returned, the whole first floor of the house was done. If Gwendal was the proud creator of this decorative marvel, I was the grateful recipient. For weeks after I got back, every time Denis saw us in the street, he clapped Gwendal on the back and winked in my direction.

“T’as tiré le bon numéro, toi.”
You hit the jackpot.

MY NATURAL CURVES
don’t lend themselves to layers—more than one sweater, and I end up looking like a long-haired version of the Michelin Man. I haven’t quite mastered the Provençal style of dressing—it’s always several degrees below freezing in the morning; at noon, if you find yourself a spot in the sun, you can strip down to a T-shirt. Most mornings, I meet Jean’s wife, Paulette, fetching wine or ham or firewood from their cellar. She keeps sticking her hand underneath my single sweater.
“Il faut te couvrir.”
You need to cover up.

These are the shortest days of the year and also the quietest. No stir of insects, only the occasional whistle of birds heading south. You can smell the wood smoke, see the flash of flames in the hills: farmers burning their piles of leaves.

We have not seen much of Mireille and Jacques since we arrived in Céreste. Her mother is not well. As the cold sets in, we see less and less of the village in general. With the time change, the light begins to fade at 3:00; by 4:00, everyone is inside, shutters closed tight for the night.

IT’S THE THIRD
Thursday in November. As I roll down to the babysitter with Alexandre, the morning frost on the fields looks like a dusting of powdered sugar. By the time I make my way back along the path to the
vieux village,
the sun has come out and you can see the black crows hopping from branch to branch among the naked plane trees.

Thanksgiving snuck up on me this year. I doubt anyone in our tiny Provençal village even knows it’s a holiday; there might have been something on the news this morning about Obama pardoning a turkey—the French can’t resist a joke about a nation that executes people but pardons turkeys. I will go on with business as usual: buy some salmon and
dorade
from the fishmonger at our Thursday market, work for a few hours in my local café. I’m organizing my winter pantry: cocoa powder and lots of whole-wheat pasta. They are predicting snow this weekend.

One thing that happens when no one around me is frantically cooking, polishing silver, or planning the 5:00 a.m. Black Friday shopping marathon is that—alone in my kitchen—I have a little time to think about what Thanksgiving really means. I’m a perfectionist, which means I am often ungrateful. I expect too much—of myself, and of everything and everyone around me. I often forget to give thanks for the many gifts life has given me: a son who smiles all the time, a man who can tile a floor
and
recite poetry, a family who love me even when I bite back, friends who can finish my sentences, neighbors who reach out with a helping hand, a job that engages my head and my heart, and a new, glorious landscape to explore.