Picnic in Provence (20 page)

E
very Sunday at the Reillanne market, I buy my raspberry jam, tomatoes, and salad (and the occasional excellent rum-flavored
chouquette
) from Martine and Didier Caron at the small stand next to the church. When I’m feeling flush, I also take a gram of their home-grown saffron, a tangle of deep orange threads in a glass jar the size of a pot of expensive eye cream. Saffron grows plentifully in Provence, and like chickpeas and spelt, it is a local ingredient I have quickly incorporated into my everyday cuisine. Okay, not my
everyday
cuisine—I’d be bankrupt if I did that.

Saffron first entered my kitchen through our friend Marie, a teacher, poet, film buff, and classicist who lives in the
other
South of France, across the mountains at the foot of the Pyrenees. It was Marie who taught me to add a cube of sugar and a pinch of saffron to my ratatouille in case the vegetables lacked sun. The description is a good one—saffron’s reddish-golden glow is very much my idea of sunshine in a bottle. Good saffron is sweet and spicy at the same time; Didier and Martine’s smells faintly of dried peaches and cedarwood.

Although I’ve been using it for years, saffron is one of the few products in my French kitchen whose origins remain mysterious to me. Over my decade in France, I’ve become intimately acquainted with the hairy knobs of a celery root; I now buy my beets with greens and my chickens with heads. Though I have no problem identifying saffron in a jar, I have no idea what it looks like when it pops out of the ground.

France has made me a bit shy about asking people for things, so it took me over a year to work up the courage to inquire if I could come and see the saffron harvest. I gave Didier my cell phone number and hoped he would call.

Meanwhile, another call came in this week. From Warner Brothers. They are looking for a technical director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and Gwendal’s name came up. After a year of relative peace and quiet in our Provençal backwater, we were all aflutter. I don’t have much experience in the business world, but when someone starts throwing around job titles with whole continents attached, I sit up and take notice. It would be a prestigious next step, from the start-up world of digital cinema to the cushy establishment of a Hollywood studio. It was flattering, and no doubt well paid. And like almost all important jobs with American companies in Europe, it was based in London.

I could see Gwendal’s excitement, and also his confusion. Because no one ever gives them any positive reinforcement, the French are very bad at judging what level they play at in the outside world, their true value on the open market. This was a gold star, a rubber stamp with the word
Approved
. I immediately went into supportive-spouse mode. Without thinking, the American in me grabbed instinctively at the next rung on the ladder.

“No problem,” I said, mentally throwing our whole life up into the air like a handful of confetti. “If that’s what you want, we will find a way to make it work.” I silently rearranged my life:
I’ll just have to go back to my nineteenth-century-literature roots. I’ll spend my days in the British Library writing a potboiler set in a Victorian insane asylum.
I wondered if Gwendal would be paid enough for us to rent a nice flat in central London and what it would be like to take Alexandre to school on a red double-decker bus and eat lemon curd on pre-fab squares of whole-wheat toast on rainy afternoons.

We spent the next few evenings updating Gwendal’s résumé—putting all the right American-style active verbs in place. He was focused on the task, but he also wondered why he’d never heard of or met the last guy who’d done this job. Was it a new position, or was it some kind of golden broom closet where they stuck talented middle managers, never to be heard from again?

He talked to his team in Paris. Most of them were ten years his junior and could hardly contain their excitement. “
Écoute,
it’s perfect. It makes perfect sense. You do this, and then you move to LA, and, and—I didn’t want to say it, man. But you gotta get the hell out of Céreste.”

My parents were pleased, impressed. It was so logical, such a nice acknowledgment of his rise in the industry. The compass that had been turning without direction for two years suddenly seemed to be pointing, well, up.

Despite the general enthusiasm, there were small but persistent forces tugging in the other direction. Sitting like Jiminy Cricket on everyone’s shoulder was the spirit of Steve Jobs, who died this past week, at the age of fifty-six. Gwendal kept replaying a YouTube video of the graduation address Jobs gave at Stanford: “If this were the last day of your life, would you want to be doing what you are about to do right now?”

MY AFTERNOON WALK
along the path to the babysitter gives me a few moments each day alone with my thoughts. Walking through the
vieux village
in the early fall, you can tell which houses have children in them: smooth brown chestnuts are piled carefully on the front steps. They are the local kiddie currency this time of year, hoarded like pennies. This morning, Alexandre showed his collection to Jean. “You put that in your
poche,
” said the old man, patting the pocket of Alexandre’s sweatshirt. “It keeps away the rheumatism.”

How?
I was about to ask, but then I stopped myself. Better to keep these city-girl interrogations to myself. That’s what the Internet is for.

They say Provence is a cold country warmed by the sun. Seasons bump into one another, a botanical pileup. Along the side of the main road, the still-green stems of the irises poke out from beneath a layer of brittle brown leaves. Small branches from the plane trees litter the path, waiting to be gathered for winter kindling.

Ever since Gwendal got the call, I’ve been walking around with a tiny knot in the pit of my stomach. Could I leave France, my new life, my career, my cheese monger? I’ve gotten spoiled; I like it when Gwendal makes crepes on Sunday afternoon. Could he do that and still supervise satellite transmissions to Dubai?

My instinct is to be supportive, but if I’m honest with myself, London was often a lonely place for me. I understood the books, not the people. I am too straightforward, too sincere. Irony whipped past me like a cricket ball; I’m pretty sure they were aiming for my head.

But this wasn’t just any job, I told myself, this was Warner Brothers. It was as if Bugs Bunny himself had picked up the phone and said,
Wass up, Gwendal?

If I have a knot in my gut, I also have an American in my gut. A reflex, a mental knee-jerk leftover from my twenties in New York—the era of big plans and sour cherry martinis. “Onward and upward”—that’s the phrase, isn’t it? For the American in me, moving on always meant moving up. Staring up into the hills, I feel, perhaps for the first time, how far I am from that young woman. Her priorities are no longer my own. The checklist in my twenty-two-year-old head—status, money, unending acquisition—has been utterly transformed by my years in France. This may be the hardest thing in the world for an American to admit: There is such a thing as
enough.
Gwendal and I have a perfectly lovely quality of life, a lot of debt, a little savings, all based on a fraction of what my friends in the States bring home every month. It isn’t exactly a golden parachute, but we are doing okay. I love my job, and that’s a privilege in itself, but a career in France is not what makes a person whole, or valuable. Success has a different meaning here; it’s more about the quality of my fig tart than the size of my paycheck. I literally can’t remember the last time someone asked me what I do for a living.

What I really enjoy about being in Céreste is the length of the days, the way time rolls out smoothly in front of us, like the gentle rise of the fields. Don’t get me wrong—I’m still greedy, but now I am greedy for time. I crave it like big bowls of
soupe d’épeautre
padding my rib cage and warming my organs. I am getting used to having Gwendal home for lunch, tickling Alexandre after his bath, the occasional power nap that turns into an afternoon tryst.

Alexandre and I walk home from the nanny, the stroller bumping along the uneven path. Alexandre drags a stick across the ground, squinting into the sun. As we turn past the village fig tree, past the clean sheets flapping on the medieval ramparts and the narrow streets free of cars, I realize what we would be giving up. All my life I’ve resisted living in the moment, shoved aside the present in favor of the next big thing. For the first time, I am confronted with a situation where everything—
everything
—I want is right here. Right now.

TO MY SURPRISE
, Didier did call, on Tuesday afternoon after lunch. The saffron harvest is quick, two or three weeks in September or October before the first frost. We decided to make it a family outing. Didier’s directions to La Ferme de la Charité were a little sketchy, something about two tall cypress trees and a sign with a black goat. Alexandre fell asleep as we drove through the backcountry of Forcalquier, past battalions of knotted pines standing at attention, their trunks notched with short spikes like the rungs on a ladder. We got lost a few times on the back roads around Les Tourrettes. The signs, when there were signs, began to indicate
hameaux,
hamlets, rather than villages or towns.

Didier met us at the bottom of the drive, waved us over to park next to a rusting tractor in front of the house. He’s so tall and thin he looks sketched by a cartoonist—all lean lines with a beard that comes to a furry point in the middle of his chest.

Martine came out of the kitchen onto the porch, wiping her hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. She is tan and rugged, her body hidden under a pile of shapeless woolly sweaters. Her arms were red up to the elbows, her apron dripping. It looked like she’d been chopping up bodies in the back room, but I’d been in Provence just long enough to realize that she was probably just sticky from pitting cherries. I took a quick peek behind her into the kitchen. A batch of jam boiled furiously on the stove; the KitchenAid was covered with a light dusting of flour—all the signs of a kitchen at work. The yellow tiles were the color of a good saffron risotto.

When we arrived, the wooden picnic table on the porch was already covered with crates of delicate purple crocuses, the remains of yesterday’s haul. So this is where my saffron comes from; the spice is actually the stigma (the pollen trap) of the flower. “There are three threads per flower,” said Didier. “Occasionally you come across a flower with six stigma, a lucky one, like a four-leaf clover.” Saffron is one of the world’s most expensive spices. When I asked why, he nodded toward the baskets of spent flowers on the table.
“Le main d’oeuvre”
—the labor, he said. “There’s no way to mechanize it. It all has to be done by hand.”

To give you an idea: Didier and Martine harvested 90 grams of saffron last year from 17,000 flowers. To make a kilogram (2.2 pounds) takes roughly 225,000 flowers, all plucked and sorted by hand. A kilo of saffron sells for about 30,000 euros. Yesterday’s pickings—more saffron than I had ever seen at once—lined a white ceramic dish on the table. A slight breeze swept over us. Nature has a cruel sense of humor. One good gust of wind, and several thousand euros would end up scattered all over the front lawn. Martine must have been thinking the same thing, because she carefully lifted the dish and brought it inside.

I stood there with a ready smile, trying not to look too useless. Didier pointed the way toward the field below the house. In these situations, I find it’s best to tell people up front that I’m a New Yorker; it gives me the liberty to ask one or two really dumb questions. As we walked out into the field, Martine issued a warning. “Just be sure not to step on the flowers,” she said, looking at the soles of my conspicuously white sneakers.

I walked gingerly around some pellet-size droppings. “Do you spread the rabbit dung, or do they just come themselves?”

“Les moutons,”
said Martine. “Those are sheep droppings.”

Ah. Provence is a country where a girl had better know her dung.

“Where are the sheep?” I asked, looking around.

“In the freezer,” answered Didier. “They make less noise.”

In less than an hour, we had emptied the field of the open blooms. Other flowers, their purple tips just poking out of the ground this afternoon, would be ready tomorrow.
“Ça va, les reins?”
Martine seemed concerned about my kidneys (the French are very protective of digestive organs), squished up as they were by my jackknifed position as I bent forward to grab the final flowers. Gwendal stood at the edge of the field taking photos. He never tires of sending them to my family and friends in the States: Elizabeth discovers manual labor, comic relief, or simply proof that I not only owned sneakers but occasionally found some reason to wear them.

There was a stiff wind, the beginning of a fall chill, as we headed up to the porch. We sat down at the table and began gently removing the precious threads with the press of a fingernail. My thumb was soon stained with a bright orange smudge—the vegetal equivalent of the Midas touch. The new harvest would be spread out on a cookie sheet and dried at a low heat for about a half hour. Then Martine would leave it overnight in the oven to dry out before weighing and preparing bottles of ½ or 1 gram each.

After a few minutes of silent plucking—Didier and Martine would finish later—Didier walked us around the farm. We looked out over the field that until very recently had held hundreds of tomato plants to provide company for our summer mozzarella. We had to forcibly remove Alexandre from the seat of the tractor—he would happily have slept there. The geese scattered at the approach of an energetic toddler. We passed the goats, a majestic black bull, and a nine-hundred-pound pig I wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. He eyed us with suspicion, one long, belligerent tooth hanging out of the left side of his mouth.

“He’d chew your leg off, given the chance,” mused Didier.