Abuelo y sus nietos*

*Jean-François is thoroughly French but most of his ancestors were Spanish (re: last name Lopez).  His grandsons call him "abuelo."

While my maternal skills will likely forever go untested (I just turned 42!), I have been yanked forged ahead into grandma territory.  Spoiler alert: this role is the same character as Aunt Claire, but poorly dubbed in French.  Two of Jean-François's grandsons, ages 3.5 and 4.5, spent a week with us.  We swam, we built sand "chateaus," we harvested the remaining onions from the garden, and we went for thinly-veiled long walks to drain them of excessive energy -- often foolishly followed by eating ice cream.

They're good kids, but are the age when every thought is verbalized.  They love nothing more than chattering with each other and dissolving into laughter repeating nonsense syllables.  Thus, I seethe with exasperation and annoyance, pathetically trying to score points with sarcastic answers to the torrent of banal questions like, "What did you buy at the grocery store?" Me: "Food."  Like a fairytale villain, within my outwardly youthful/middle-aged body dwells the soul of a withered old crone, plotting to cast a spell of everlasting silence.

We had a reasonably good understanding both literally and figuratively.  Unlike last year, Jeremie didn't correct my mispronunciation when reading stories aloud.  And they understood my tone, if not the exact phrasing, when I admonished, "You no it can do, you will be made worse if you done!" And, "You must stop, yous, to talk, only you sleep!"  It was nice to be able to swear occasionally in English and go completely unnoticed.

Jean-François and I morphed, at times, in response to our duties in loco parentis.  I got to see his dad-type-behavior, his interest in teaching and sharing experiences and fun, his affection and discipline and and tenderness for seemingly indestructible balls of energy that are obviously fragile, vulnerable little creatures.  We had each other's backs and tag-teamed the less fun parts (see: butt wiping) to give each other breaks.  We found respite sharing a stiff drink, eating chocolate while the kids napped, talking about politics, and remaining sexual beings as a sort of bulwark against the degradation of personhood effected by small-child demands.

I know, it was only one week.  Anyone with children will want to (slap me?) roll their eyes at my prissily dipping my toe into .00001% of their life.  But I'm not a parent, I'm just a (sort of) grandma.

We did a little yoga every afternoon, the highlight of which (for the guys) was being shirtless.

I have inherited my mom's facial expressions, and perhaps also sentiments; grim relief?

building a "cabin"

Lighted

It's the heart of summer but there's a change in the wind; it's been blowing rather forcefully, out of the west for weeks.  The rustling leaves quake and murmur and stage-whisper outside the window.  As the sun creeps along the planks of the deck, I've become familiar with the various angles of light at different hours.

The bathroom has the only east-facing window, and on sunny mornings is almost theatrically lit, like heaven is blessing the souls of our towels.  The only west-facing window is in our bedroom, and looks over the deck into the trees.  In winter you can read by the orangey glow that reaches through the bare branches.  There's a window over the kitchen sink and a big glass sliding door in the living room that face south.  The somewhat unfortunate drab grays of the kitchen are thus partially brightened, and a couch is situated to maximize cat-type lounging.  

My office has an interior window that communicates with the kitchen, sharing the passing sunlight.  Beneath this window I slouch at my desk, chair low, elbows high, because my face tries to get as close as possible to the papers, a sort of attempt at reducing the distance between the extraction and extrusion of words from paper through brain and onto other paper.  My office also has a north-facing window, a sort of cardinal point, and passage to places remote.  My desk sits comfortably between the two.

our local version of Manhattanhenge, where the sun sets perfectly aligned with the bike path

cloudy light at the salt marshes 

growing wild in the yard

high tide evening light

La Houle*

*the swell

As part of continuing learning French, I'm reading an instructional book about surfing.  It's aimed at adolescents, so not overly academic or literary, and I actually enjoy the experience as I can understand without having to look up words.  Jean-François and I also try to speak French together most of the time, and so my "news" of the day quickly reinforces a rather nautically-themed vocabulary.

I'm also learning, somewhat more reluctantly, auto insurance and tax domicile-related terminology, as we just bought a new (used) car.  I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but it turns out there's nearly as much paperwork for me here as for my visa.  Maybe France produced so many prominent Existentialists because its floridly absurd bureaucracy scars the populace with its incomprehensibility...

In other news, our garden is doing its best despite the soil being 100% sand.  We pulled out the fifty of so shallots, which are delicious but quite small, like garlic cloves.  Five beets, the size of clementines, were also tasty.  What were labeled as zucchini appear to be cucumber, but that's fine either way.  The pumpkin blossoms look great but don't seem interested in becoming pumpkins.  This fall we'll add a ton of compost and manure, and really be ready to grow. 

perhaps the frenchiest of alliums

Jumpy and Junior Citroen

I'm just happy you're here

Iberiana

I wouldn't say we're van-life-ing wrong, it just feels neither here nor there -- I'm either longing for the simplicity and independence of my tent (where it's normal to be unwashed and exhausted), or else I'm fantasizing about the air conditioning and running water that would otherwise be integral to sleeping "indoors."  A big factor is certainly the heat, as mid-May was already high 80s, and the combination of sun-baked upholstery and daily dune climbs withered me like an off-brand chunk of dried mango.  Before our little fridge frizzled out, I could clutch a chilled liter of water to my chest to (try to) sleep.

But the van is great for casting a wide net, getting to out-of-the-way places, and peeing mid-morning in a country that abhors public bathrooms.  The chameleon-like ability of the van is to come and go on a whim, to park in a city center and be your very own lackluster hostel for the night.

We're just finishing a tour of southwestern Portugal and Andalusia, Spain.  In Portugal, we left the van next to a wakeboarding school/brah-paradise, and hiked ten days on the Rota Vicentina, a.k.a. Fisherman's Trail.  This series of paths connects villages and beaches on the cliffstrewn coast.  Big dunes covered with flowering plants, tiny carved out coves, long sand beaches, cafes just opening for the season, and occasional surfers dotting the waves unspooled before us.  Brave storks and storklets(?) perched in nests in obscenely precarious places, undeterred by strong winds or asshole seagulls dive bombing the fledglings.

After flirting with heatstroke and recuperating at a yoga-yurt sort of campground, we took the forecast for 100F as a sign to stop.  Back in the van, we crossed the border into the Gary, Indiana, of Spain: an enormous industrial zone complete with cancerous-smelling air, just next to where Columbus departed on his voyage to America(!).

There are many, many beautiful places in Spain: Sevilla is lovely, with big parks and well-preserved historical quarters; little Moorish villages perch in the mountains of the Alpujarra; Granada is stuffed with great art and music and food and life.  But we also came to Andalusia to visit where Jean-François's great-grandparents came from before emigrating to Algeria and leaving for France.  What I call our "cultural heritage" stops all shared elements of economic hardship and ecological exploitation.  In Berja, we found the remnants of a prosperous mining town, now with a humdrum, scruffy mien.  Little Albuñol is nearly choked out by the expanse of intensive-agriculture greenhouses squatting throughout the valley.  In fact, this region has been expanded by silting up the river, creating a huge, unnatural plain extending from the feet of the mountains.  The 40,000 hectares of greenhouses of El Edijo, the "sea of plastic," is the most visible man-made structure from space.  Depressingly, they even extend into the national park; the Internet tells me they are part of the dystopian introductory shots of the newer "Blade Runner."

To end on a cheerier note, tapas is originally from Andalusia.  We have had gallons of gazpacho and platefuls of thinly-sliced salty ham.  This is also the home of sangria, and -- hey, it's 5 o'clock.

The one time I was not hot, in the wind as the sun set.

The Rota Vicentina from north to south gets progressively cliffier as you go.

stork neighbors

Where the river meets the sea, and consequently is a salty place to try to wash your shirt.

best camping kitchen 

close-up of Alcazar of Sevilla; not pictured, Jean-François having his beard trimmed by a -- Barber of Seville...

The Caminito Del Rey, within a big gorge

most decoratively plated carrot cake

traditional Moorish mountain village houses

Pampaniera

The Answer Is More Cheese

Shockingly, in the last year I have sat at a cafe with a coffee and croissant here just once.  I wish I could claim it's part of my deeply committed dietary discipline, or even an avoidance of cliché.  But actually, it's tough to find a really good croissant in La Rochelle.  I've concluded the best way to avoid pastry heartbreak and misfortune is ordering the cleverly disguised day-olds that are rehabilitated with almond paste and re-crisped.  Then, one day in the chic-est cafe on the harbor, I saw a croque monsieur croissant.

The croque monsieur is a ridiculously/adorably-named sandwich (translation: "Mr. Crunchy-Bite") that proclaims frenchiness with every decadent ounce of its being.  It's like they heard about a grilled cheese and were grudgingly like, "Ok, that does sound pretty good -- but we need to dress it up a bit."  Usually on awkwardly large bread, it features ham, cheese, and creamy béchamel sauce.  The bread might be dipped in egg, but the cheese and sauce in the sandwich are not enough: it is topped with more cheese, cooked brown and crispy.

Take all that and replace the bread with two halves of croissant.  Monsieur made for an excellent second breakfast, its richness complemented by my delightfully bitter little espresso.  Cue the pleasant buzz of a busy cafe, the wind and waves of the harbor across the street, the sun slanting across the table.

-Why second breakfast?  Two friends from class were coming over to make fresh pasta and turn it into spaghetti carbonara.  Bike-related logistics made for a very late start.  But we enthusiastically mixed the dough, let it rest, smooshed it out, rolled it with the magical hand-crank machine, and sent it through a final time to be cut.  Skinny little strands spilled out from the roller, which we (increasingly tipsily) separated.  Bacon sautéed and egg yolks thickened-but-not-scrambled, it was delicious and/or we were starving.

THESE POPPIES!

there are also acres and acres of ferns

post-carbonara

not at all tangled 

Plage Gros Jonc, which is a double entendre in French for "big cane"

Moving Pictures

I'm reviewing my notes for the final exam for French Cinema: 1980s - Today.  The idea of our elective classes is to gain a richer understanding of French society. To comprehend the particular character and touchstone elements that make French people and things (so (very)) French.

Of course, you can't just jump right to the '80s; we spend a lot of time on what came before, and how greater social changes shape modern cinema.  Certain themes are timeless, like a children's animation featuring a political dissident crow in a top hat trapped in prison, saved from a pride of savage lions by the music of a blind organ grinder.  Some characters, on the other hand, sprout from a particular era's malaise, like a '70s anti-hero who badgers an underage prostitute into joining him for long drives through ramshackle suburbs, endless and manic grandiose speeches, and one of the most sloppily executed murders ever.  It's not just another crime drama, and the director's bold deviation from, I guess, any sympathetic characters is exemplary of the nihilism of the times.

Probably my favorite film was the 2016 stop-motion "Ma vie de Courgette" ("My Life As Zucchini").  It's the redemptive story of a young orphan learning to process grief and find happiness in the present.  In the first ten minutes, our main character (nicknamed Zucchini by his late alcoholic mother) has nowhere to go but a surprisingly homey and well-run orphanage.  After a tough start, he begins to make friends with the others, including a new cute girl.  Courgette and Camille bond during a weekend ski trip, where he makes a toy boat for her out of his mother's beer can (his most treasured momento).  The kids have a snowball fight, dance to German techno in their chalet, and cleverly expose Camille's would-be legal guardian as a fraud and jerk.  

There's no sugarcoating of the bleak circumstances that led to each kid's orphanhood, but there's a genuine, organic development of kid alliances.  Everyday banalities like cafeteria lunch and being tucked in at night mark the slow but sure passage of time and the innate evolution therein.

We've also studied how the French government subsidizes the film industry and urges people to go to the theater.  They support theaters, or at least projectors, in almost every small town; fund all kinds of discount tickets; and limit movies broadcast on TV.  This might be the most French part of cinema -- reinforcing egality and fraternity by "liberating" people from their couches and incentivizing them to go out and bask in the warm glow of their culture.

a still from "Fantasmagorie," probably the first film animation, 1908 

Garden update: we dug a trench to put up a fence against the rabbits.

I got a rug and a desk, and am searching for just the right milk-crate seat

The lilacs just started!

Pain Complet*

*translation: whole-grain bread

Hey, I came to France a year ago mid-March.  And this is now actually my second-longest romantic relationship.  Oh what crazy things come to pass with relatively stable housing.  (-And with men who speak French.  Is it a coincidence?)

Today we hauled off all the remodeling detritus and declared the work officially done.  I still need to find a desk and chair for my...office? I don't really do any work, so what should I call it?  A friend had a She-Shed, filled with arts and crafts supplies, where we'd decoupage and paint and she'd smoke weed so as not to disturb her adorable son asleep in the house.  Here, I have a sort of siding (white-painted cladding) on the walls, and the car is parked outside the window, conferring a somewhat garage-like feel on the room.  I don't yet know if the vibe of my old Alaska dorm decor will fit this more conventional space (ie: free brochure maps, pastel-shaded pages of adult coloring books, postcards ranging from Beaux-Arts illustrations of the night sky to animals with glitter to Route 66-type kitsch to mediocre food photography).

Most significantly, I have someone encouraging me to write.  Who himself likes to write, and talk about what we read, and how we formulate our ideas and our sentences.  Sitting, biting your nails a little, leafing through the thesaurus, talking to yourself, and looking at how the sunlight changes and moves; trying to both look at something and imagine at the same time, to describe it precisely but also in your own way.  Whether or not it is work, it is good to have a place to work it out.

not pictured: bike path into the woods 

Jean-François's office is the perfect writing shack

Something possessed the previous owners to paint the wall behind the bed midnight blue; we have eliminated all trace of this tomfoolery.

my office is a cluttered blank canvas 

We also spent many hours repainting the BROWN walls and *ceiling* of the bathroom.  Jean-François's godson is a master carpenter and all-around swell guy, and added the window in my office, opened a wall between the bathroom and the separate toilet room just next door, walled over the former toilet room door, built cabinets, and kept us in good humor while everything and everyone was covered in plaster dust.