Heart of Larkness

*Mid-February

Rasping cicadas...the discordant shrieking of a forest-full of birds...I sprawl listlessly, comatose in the heat; it's 85 degrees and 100% humidity at 9am; I am stranded in suburbs with small children...  There is a part of France with with a dark, brutal history: originally a penal colony, French Guiana is where they brought enslaved Africans, dumped and subsequently organized forced labor for thousands of criminals -- or just people they didn't like -- and killed off the native people by design and disease.

Welcome to spring break!  (Mid-winter break?)  One of Jean-François's daughters, along with her husband and two sons, recently began a three-year contract in Cayenne, adjacent to the Amazon rainforest.  And because I will do stupid shit in the name of love (See: letting a guy's yappy dog lick my face; recording a dozen tracks of myself campily singing the word "wasabi;" crossing frozen rivers the condition of whose ice is highly questionable), I bought an expensive plane ticket in order to pretty much be steamed alive.

We alternated several days visiting family with a couple ventures into the semi-wild.  Despite the words "abandon all hope ye who enter here" on loop in my head, we managed several hours of squishing through mud and gnarled roots to see the ruins of prison camps.  That, friends, is the, uh, main tourist attraction.  For you fellow history fans, we slept in an old holding pen within view of the island where Alfred Dreyfus was jailed(!).  To really get that You-Are-There experience, we camped with hammocks, basic provisions, and not enough drinking water.

By far the best part of the trip was the fruit.  Pineapple, melon, mango, guava, rambutan, bananas -- and a green papaya salad/condiment made with garlic, lime juice, and mild pepper.  We bought dried bananas, which were like little sticks of banana-bread-jerky.

It was also the end of Carnaval.  We caught the penultimate parade, a perfect mix of local social clubs and businesses and a few guest appearances by Brazilian marching bands.  A phalanx of all ages beat on oil-barrel-like drums, with lines of sparkly, beplumed dancers.  Sometimes the rhythms of two groups became unwittingly syncopated as the parade slowed and everyone condensed.  This was one of the rare occasions that I awoke from my overheated stupor and moved enthusiastically under the equatorial sun.

We found a wheelbarrow to overturn and weight with rocks to secure our food from monkeys; we made it all the way until after breakfast before having to yell at them, Jean-François pounding his chest like a gorilla

A nighttime jungle walk included snakes, toads, sloths, and the tiniest frog I've ever seen

We went on a boat to look for caimans (alligators, more or less) in the marsh

industrious leaf cutter ants

tropical Dickensian workhouse

(lower-right corner)

Lolling around and reading won out over hiking in the hot mosquitoey rain

Type, Sort, Kind

I am well aware that I have a "type," and what that type entails. As I summed it up to one boyfriend: "I like strong flavors."  Easygoing yet strong-willed, a motley collection of skills and interests, someone equally happy to host a dinner party as to hike all day in the snow and snack on cheese.

And so it was with a sense of familiarity that I watched my partner pick up a reciprocating saw and blithely attempt to carve a hole in the wall.  More specifically, this time it was the chimney, which we discovered has a layer of brick-like material behind the drywall.  Only momentarily daunted, Jean-François then procured a circular saw, stood on the dinner table for better leverage, and proceeded to plume-cloud the combination living-room-dining-room-kitchen with fine, chalk-like red dust -- basically a gritty pollen bomb, with some chunks of plaster here and there.

A lot of people talk about doing stuff, or dream about things that they convince themselves are beyond reach.  And some of us ( 👀 ) compulsively debate pros and cons and get mired in the complexity of options.  I am fascinated (and perplexed) by people who can both humbly admit their inexperience and forge on ahead with...whatever. 

But I also bring valuable things to the table.  Like insisting the electricity is shut off when messing with wiring; the savvy to remove industrial goo with lavish amounts of paint thinner; and knowing when to take off my glasses so details blend together, a little fuzzy like an Impressionist painting, the visual obliquity heightening sensibility.

ready and waiting for the moving van 

This is how Santa gets into the house!

Coming soon: interior window!

on the new route to school

I am also learning to embrace taking the bus to town, watching the dawn light, weirding out the teenagers headed to high school and the few winter tourists by crouching on the ground to take pictures of frosty plants

Chez Nous

Most of the houses here are enclosed by walls.  The island is basically an overgrown sandbar, so for centuries people built low stone barriers to protect their gardens and fruit trees.  The local limestone is not overly abundant; walls of 3-4 feet are sufficient to keep the wind from menacing most vegetables, and the ivory-colored stone reflects the overly robust blaze of the summer sun.

As properties more recently transformed from farmhouses to vacation homes, the walls changed to smoothed concrete and grew taller -- typically 6-8 feet high.  This creates, for me, an unpleasantly contradictory atmosphere: the houses crowd close together, yet are isolated.  There's not much waving-hello-to-your-neighbor or commenting on the flowers because everyone is holed up in their little compound.  (To be fair, everyone is chatty at the markets and cafes, and there's lots of public land and beach.)  The villages feel both hyper-dense and deserted.

Occasionally there's a house with a wire fence, and the effect is almost park like, breathing green and openness and life into the neighborhood.  Even rarer are houses at the village limit, abutting farm fields or forest.  Happily, we found the trifecta: a house at the end of the road, that faces the trees of a bird preserve on one side and fields on the other, with no walls.

After a great deal of paperwork and planning (mostly Jean-François) and packing and fretting (mostly me), we move in this weekend.  I will resist the temptation to immediately begin unpacking the clothes and kitchen things and 37 boxes of books, and instead make a little fire in the little fireplace(!) and clink glasses with my delightful companion.

the coastal trail to La Flotte, our new town

little runny birds who run-run-run in front of the waves

normal activities around the corner from the university

coral?

all the winter the coast can handle 

Hearing Voices

The perfect level of background chatter, in a café or train, is like water flowing in a small creek.  A busy bar or house party full of people pressed together is the crashing calamity of whitewater, a waterfall that drowns out.  A class of recent émigrés stumbling over a dictation pulses and crescendos like a pond of spring peepers, the volume inching upward, punctuated by random monosyllabic yelps.  Chatting with a new acquaintance is as though tuning in and out of reception and static as the weather report warns of rough seas...then foundering on unavoidable rocks.  A thoughtful person with precise enunciation is like sipping a generously poured cocktail.  A word of amorous affection -- an ice cube melting on your tongue.

Sometimes I dream in French, but even in the dream I feel something's not quite right, or I'm just making things up.  Occasionally, a word of French pops into my mind, unbidden, in the omnipresent stream of internal monologue, like, "Ok, now I'll stir the soup; the potatoes are looking bien cuit, so it's almost done."

Then there's the awkwardness of what to do with words like "croissant" and "Paris" when I'm speaking in English: just say them normal, or with a ridiculous accent ("KWA-saw," "pah-REE")?  Or what to do about "librairie" and "collège"?  Say them without the accent and they become "library" instead of the word for bookstore, and "college" as in university, rather than the word for junior high.

The silver lining of my nascent comprehension is that I don't have to overhear banal conversations.  Unconcerned with eavesdropping or unignorable cellphone calls, I can retreat deeply into reading in public, and later resurface with the bewildered thought, "Why is everybody speaking in French?"

end of semester celebratory class lunch

good horizontal lines

barge + Pantheon