FRENCH LETTERS

Nothing’s changed.  And when I say nothing, I mean rien du tout.  It’s very late when we walk into the house, nearly midnight.  The clock has stopped, but when?  At 4:13, yes, I see, but what day?  What month?  What year?  We’ve been gone for 20 months, and time could have stopped at any moment since then.

We walked out of this house in August of 2007, and no one’s turned the page on our kitchen calendar since then.  Although we nominally had tenants for the first year we were away they spent only a few weeks here, and lived very lightly upon the land.

Things I left for them to use, salt, a welcoming bottle of bubbly tied with a gay ribbon, condiments, teas, spices, oils, vinegars,

and even some chocolate sprinkles for their morning toast, are still here, seemingly untouched. 

Actually, the fact that they left it all just as they found it turned out to be a benefit at our first lunchtime in the house.  The battery in the car had given up the ghost, and the market being out of foot reach, I nonchalantly opened the cupboards and made a meal from ancient foodstuffs that I’d thought they might use.  It’s amazing how the passage of nearly two years hadn’t affected the cans of beans, green chilis, olives, and dried potato flakes that the cupboard yielded up.  Even the spice cabinet didn’t fail me, the pungent Rancho Gordo Mexican oregano and a tightly sealed tin of pimenton disproving the adage that all spices turn to dust and need to be tossed once a year.  Our first “home cooked” meal, composed of foods I abandoned to their fate so long ago that I’d forgotten them completely.

It turns out that I had forgotten almost every single thing in this house, recognizing it now on sight with an “oh wow, that’s mine?” sensation.

The music I was singing before we left is still open on the piano.  Can I even still sing Un certo non so che?

The dishes, the linens, all as we left them.  But what is this, the North Pole?  Why do we have so many blankets?  No sooner do I wonder that than we begin rooting through boxes searching for fleece and flannel.  We brought summer clothes back from France, but here it’s grey, cool, and rainy.  We shiver and cough and  sit by the fire.

There are 43 messages on the answering machine, each marked with the time of the call, but not the date or year.  Those calls urging us to vote for Obama are identifiably last year’s, a moment of history preserved.  But the stranger who called twice asking me to send her some of my vinegar mother, made slightly famous by this article  in Food and Wine?  What would she think if I return her call a year or two late?

Only the garden betrays the passage of time.   When I left the rhubarb plant was so young and timid that I didn’t dare to harvest much of it.  Now, in only the middle of May, there’s enough fruit for a dozen pies.

There’s very little noticeable change on the rest of the island, either.  My favorite checker at the grocery store has retired.  Our neighbor has some new grey hair.  Aside from that, it’s like we never left. 

And because everything is exactly as we left it, it’s as if we dreamed our life in France.  If things had changed here, we’d be thinking “that’s natural, we’ve been away a long time, things do move on.”  But as I empty well-aged bottles of olive oil and toss dusty tea bags, find my bathrobe hanging on the back of the bathroom door where I inadvertantly left it, and wash my hair with a vintage 2007 Aveda shampoo, I have to wonder.  Is there really a house in France that we called home just ten short days ago?

Wait, I know.  I still have a deeply-ingrained habit of checking the bed for scorpions before I hop in.  I must have learned that somewhere.

We’ve been traveling across a small corner of America, clocking 1600 miles, 2575 kilometers, idling away 48 hours, riding two slow trains, peering out countless dirty windows, creeping closer to that place we once called home.

We boarded the train in Green River.  Take my advice and don’t go there without a compelling reason.  That’s the town, behind the sign.

And here’s the train station.

Nobody’s there.  It’s all boarded up.  There’s an asbestos danger warning sign on the door.  At a nearby gas station the guy answers my disbelief with ”yup, that’s the station, but don’t worry, if you have a ticket the train will stop for you, people get on that train every day.”  I’ll bet they do, escaping from Green River.

But what train?  The departure time  comes and goes, no sign of a train.  Fortunately for us there’s one other person at the station, waiting to pick up her arriving boyfriend.  Even more fortunately for us, she has a cell phone and so does he, and thus we learn that the train will be 2 hours and 45 minutes late.  If she hadn’t been there we’d have been standing on the edge of the desert with our legs crossed, afraid to even go searching for a bathroom in case we might miss the day’s only train.

Waiting in the twilight, kept company by swooping bats, we are very glad to see the train coming.  We cram ourselves into our tiny sleeping compartment and surrender to train time.  Once aboard an American train, time no longer really matters.  You’re going to be late and that’s all there is to it.  If you can’t cope with that, you fly.  We toss and turn, rock and roll, in our little berths, dreaming about France and the TGV that always runs on time and travels so fast you can’t even see the scenery you’re passing.

We awaken in Nevada.  I decide that even though the dirt on the windows and the blur of our progress will mark the pictures, I’ll show you our train trip unretouched and in the raw.

Nevada is huge and empty.  We cross it for hours.

We talk a lot about the pioneers, how they crossed all this in wagons, or walked.  Coming from Europe, this moonscape must have bowled them over, just as it now does us.

People do live out here, but it has the look of a precarious existence.

Inside the train something extraordinary happens.  The conductor picks up a passenger’s guitar and begins to play and sing.  He’s very good, with a clear pure baritone and some original songs that deserve to be hits.  We keep him playing for a long time, until the crew changes at Reno,

where two volunteers from the California Railroad Museum come aboard to narrate the journey along the historic railway into Sacramento.  One of them picks up the guitar, and holy smokes, he’s even better than the conductor was, finger picking and singing the blues like nobody’s business. We agree that this could never happen on a French train, and thus we conclude that yes, Virginia, there really is an America and we are in it up to our ears. 

We finally reach California and travel along the Truckee River through

the cute little town of Truckee, which I used to visit often in a former life.  It looks impossibly exotic to me now, rustic beyond recollection.

We cross the Sierras at Donner Summit, past Donner Lake, where many pioneers perished as they struggled to reach the coast.

There’s still a lot of snow up here in mid-May,

but it warms up quiclky as we drop down toward the Sacramento delta.

Arriving in Sacramento, where we have a 9 hour layover before boarding our next train, we pay homage to the past at the train museum,

and to the present at an Internet cafe where we appear to be the only people over 25, before having dinner with an old friend whom we haven’t seen since our wedding, almost 14 years ago.  Finally, after midnight, we crawl aboard the train that will take us north and fall asleep almost before we start moving.  I don’t even wake up during the two hours we’re stopped somewhere behind a broken-down freight train, and so in the morning I’m surprised and delighted not to have missed

the beautiful Mt. Shasta, normally passed in the night by northbound trains.

Crossing into Oregon I’m reminded again of the early settlers, the unimaginable hardships that they faced,

my thoughts underscored by the snowstorm that descends upon us as we cross the Cascade summit.

Spring awaits us below, and as we get closer to leaving Oregon we begin to imagine what we might find at “home,” just one more state away.

We come into Washington as the sun is setting.  Our very long journey is almost at an end.  Are we ready?

I’d hate to deceive my French readers, although I’d love to pretend that this was an absolutely typical American wedding.  I’m not saying that grannies with parasols are the quintessence of every American wedding, but there they were yesterday, saving their spot front and center in the desert wedding paradise,

in case the sign didn’t do the trick.  Holding your own in the desert is a special skill, and that’s what this wedding was all about.

American weddings usually do have music, and this one was no exception.  No choir, no organ, no soprano, just a lone guitar sweetening the dusty air.

No one wore fancy shoes to this nuptial.  The road we walked to the wedding site was soft red dust and sand.  Even the bride didn’t dare arrive in her wedding dress

but instead changed into her finery behind this little screen, trying not to drag her hem in the red earth.

Like most American brides, she was walked down the aisle by her father.  Okay, it was an aisle in name only, more of a red carpet, really.

The minister, sister of the bride, who had gotten herself ordained just for this occasion, awaited the bride and groom at what would have been the altar, if there had been an altar.

The bride and groom’s beloved dogs were the ring-bearers, and the wedding vows included commitments to “love your dog as much as I love my dog.”

The promises to have and to hold and to cherish were by turns serious

beset by giggle fits, momentarily tearful, jubilant

and passionate.  And then, the newlyweds eased back into their normal life

doing all the things that come naturally to them, holding their own,

while the desert prepared to sleep.

And now we board a slow American train for the two day trip back to our island.  There are no TGV’s here, nothing close, and we’ve stocked up on piles of books to read along the way, catching up with what’s happened in America while we were away.  Come along for the ride, it’s a beauty.

Fresh from the old world, our eyes are trained to scan the horizon for castles,

towers,

moats and ruins.  And so we see them everywhere here, in these monuments to times long past: majestic, imposing, not formed by centuries of culture and civilization.  This, the raw new world,

crude, powerful, instantly recognizable as the land that shaped us.  I can see why Americans feel they can conquer anything, coming from such a land.

The Kennecott copper mine, nearly a mile deep, man’s largest excavation, visible from space, reflects that drive to dominate our environment.

In 1906 this was a mountain.  Now the overburden and slag piles from the excavation make new mountains where once there were canyons.

That line of trucks, traveling across the face of the mine, twenty four hours a day?  Each one is 44 feet tall, just about the height of the tallest buildings in our small town in France.

And of course the French appreciate good copper as much as anyone.

We think a lot about France.  Yesterday, as we were picnicking, a man walked by us and said “Bon appétit,” wishing us a pleasant meal.  Nothing more natural in the world, a perfect stranger passing by wishing us bon appétit.  Except, we’re not in France.  Startled, I asked him, in French, why he had said that to us.  “Because you’re eating” he replied.  “But why did you think we speak French?” I asked.  He just shrugged, as if of course everyone speaks French.  Which turned out to be almost true yesterday

as we kept passing French tourists on the trails of Arches National Park.  Finally I asked a pair of ladies why there were so many French people in the park today, thinking there must be a huge tour group traveling together.  “We were just wondering that ourselves” she said.

I have to say that speaking French in a place that looks like this gave me a funny colliding -worlds kind of feeling.  But that’s ok, because in fact my worlds are colliding, and it seems only normal that the universe is conspiring to remind me of that.

Even here, on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, if we squint our eyes and click our heels, we can almost imagine ourselves back in Europe.

Except that in Europe this would be a Brancusi.

We spent yesterday in the sky.  No longer in Europe, not yet in the US, for 10 hours and 22 minutes we were nowhere in particular, with no choices to make and our loyalties untorn.

I usually claim to be scared of flying, but yesterday I realized that what really scares me is thinking about flying.  Barring all imagined disasters, I’m actually quite happy once I’m in the sky.  There’s no other way I’d get to see Greenland, always a splendid sight.

10 hours and 22 minutes to think about life, 38,109 feet in the air, -51 degrees outside, 68 mph headwind, 508 mph ground speed, thin air above and polka dot ice floes below, it’s not your average day.

While in the sky I remembered how amazed I was the first time I flew, child of the San Francisco fog that I was, to learn that the sun is still shining, above it all.  That’s when I learned that it may be foggy in your own personal life at any given moment, but up there somewhere, the sun is still hard at work.  It was a joyful revelation then, and it hasn’t worn off since.

The ice is beginning to melt for the summer, and I thought about how the day might soon come when polar bears will have to swim for their lives.  The water is large, and the ice is getting smaller.  That’s a different kind of revelation, a glimpse of a future that won’t be kind to the bears.

Up that high, where you can see the future just around the corner, you can almost see the natural curve of the Earth.  But if you look closely there’s a straight line, something not normally found in nature.  An ice road, the first of many I’d see, going from what looked like nowhere at all to another nowhere place.  Destination’s aren’t always obvious, that’s what our recent life has taught us.

Finally the ice yielded, to the wildest looking land imaginable.  I don’t know where this was, possibly somewhere in the far north of Canada, but I know I don’t want to live there.  There, that’s one less decision to make.  This was the kind of beauty best admired from a great distance, lest it swallow you up entirely.

But this, now this is Montana.  America at last.  America the wild, untamed, savage land that it really is, away from the thin veneer of population and two hundred years of Western culture.  The wild, wild west.

And then Utah, lightly tamed against a backdrop of wilderness.

Salty Utah, brine shrimp central, a fantastical moonscape of salt lagoons.

This is the wing that brought us here and set us down gently.  This is where the wing brought us.  Like migratory birds taking a breather, we’ve come aground in Salt Lake City.  Where one thing is certain: we’re definitely not in France anymore.

No matter how much we do, the pile of boxes seems undiminished, although the suitcases get undeniably closer to overflowing.  So many things are left undone.  We leave tomorrow, and the leaves I’ll never have time to rake reproach me.

The peaceful stream of our daily French life has become a jumble sale of disparate remnants crying out for someone to come and create order.  That someone would be me, if I weren’t busy wandering through the garden

wondering whose supper will benefit from my tiny thyme flowers and fresh, new sage leaves.  Will the people who are renting this house for the summer even know what to do with my herbs,

or the tiny nectar-filled plums that have to be gathered the instant they turn red, before they lose their tenuous grip with the first breath of the mistral and end up as something stuck on the bottom of an uncautious sandal?

We haven’t done much cleaning up yet, sandals or otherwise, but we did move some furniture back to where we found it.  Luckily for the new renters we did it for them, because Zazou went off to Kitty Camp without mentioning to us that under the sofa we’d find her secret hunting stash: two dead lizards, one dead scorpion, and half a dozen dried up olives.  I might have forgotten to tell you that Zazou has an olive fetish and harvests them herself to bring in the house, just as she forgot to tell us that she could catch a scorpion with impunity.  The things we don’t know about the lives lived all around us, so many mysteries, so few really good explanations.

In the midst of all this we’ve had a couple of deliciously warm days, and whereas earlier in the week we had a cherry tree covered with green fruit, today we have something that’s nearly tempting, almost edible.  In a week the cherries will be begging for juice-stained fingers and jam jars and sighs of fruity pleasure.  Not my fingers, though, not my sighs.  For all I know, this year half of the cherries will fall to the ground and the rest will delight the local bird population, those same birds that Beppo won’t be hunting this summer.

But whatever the fate of the crop, there’s one cherry destined for me.  I’ve been keeping my eye on it, the ripest one within reach.  It’s not really ready to be eaten, but I’m going to eat it anyway, because in this life sometimes you just have to jump at a chance.  Tonight, when the last box is in the garage and the last suitcase is zipped, I’m going to make that cherry my own.  Like our life here, it will be a chance worth taking, a no turning back, pick me now, enjoy every bit, ready or not here I come, tart, sweet, juicy, messy, kind of moment.  And then we’ll leave.

This just in: despite appearances, you’re not really here for the French food and wine.  I have to admit to being a little stunned myself, but 100 of you have spoken, via the poll, Facebook, and email, and the results are as scientific as a hand-dated label, as robust as a good red Saint Nicolas de Bourgueil, and as clear as the silvery trail of a snail on a cool winter morning.

A kindly 2% of you think that I might need a break from writing.  A tiny 4% are only interested if French Letters really pertains to France.  18% of you want me to write about food and wine, wherever I am.  And the rest, a whopping 68% of you,  just want me to write something, anything, so you can follow my mind’s meanderings and see through my little Canon’s eye.

Because the poll allowed for comments under the heading of “other,” I also received some interesting anonymous advice.  People suggested that I write US Letters in French in order to practice the subjunctive (thanks, but probably not), that I talk about food that’s available in the US as compared to what we have in France, that I write about food on Bainbridge island (our little corner of America), and above all, that I just write.  Lots of you also left comments in the public Comment section, and you can see those here.  I appreciate them all, each and every one.  Thanks so much for taking the time to tell me what French Letters means to you.  It’s made these last days of packing and saying our goodbyes that much lighter

A comment that really hit home for me is the one from Lori, someone that I don’t know in “real” life.  She said “Your blog has made me pay attention to things in my own life that I would never have noticed before.”  And although I hadn’t thought to articulate the mission of French Letters in quite that way, it seems to me now that indeed, that must be why I write, to enrich the way you see your own world.  

Since serendipity and the unfolding of the universe, whether orderly or chaotic, have dictated that you and I are on the planet at the same moment in time, and that we have access to the collective thought form that is the Internet, let’s profit from our proximity.  I’ll write, you’ll read, it’s symbiotic. 

So, I officially invite you to come with me on a wild ride to the US.  I can guarantee that food, wine, and yes, even France, will play a big part in the story of the next four months.

We’re doing everything we can to avoid regret.  Am I going to miss these pans over the summer?  Certainly not.  Are we going to miss Zazou?  Unquestionably, and Beppo even more so.  We’re in non-stop decision mode, which requires touching each and every thing that belongs to us in this life, right down to the most trivial.  Like how about my exercise sheets on the use of the subjunctive?  I could take them back with me, but would I really study them over the summer?  Do we want to have French toothpaste with us or would we be happy to use Tom’s again? Really, nothing is too insignificant for our consideration today.

In the great triage extravaganza everything is trying to find its place in the scheme of the summer, so that we don’t find ourselves somewhere, someday, lacking what seems at the time to be the one essential element of happiness.   There’s what to take back to the US for good, what to take over there and bring back to France in the Fall, what to take to the US with the plan to leave it there altogether, what to throw or give away, what to leave here awaiting our return.  What the heck are we doing with all this stuff?

And there’s even a bigger question, what’s to become of French Letters when I’m not in France? Would you be so kind, dear readers, as to give me some feedback on this existential issue? I’m not 100% certain that this poll will work, but then, nothing’s really 100% certain. Go on, give it a try. You have the opportunity to shape the immediate future of French Letters, and I invite you to speak up. And if you want to come over and help us pack, you know you’re invited to do that too.

Like the glycine in the garden this year, our life here is lush, richly colored, fragrant and delicious and brimming with growth.

How quickly we’ve grown roots, how our lives have become entwined with this place.  How profoundly we flourish and flower here.  How hard it is to leave.

Far more than just  a place to call home, it actually feels like home to us much of the time.  We constantly envy our Dutch and English friends, who can have two homes in two countries that are only some number of car lengths apart.  Our two would-be homes are so far apart that we’re torn between them, every day.

Meanwhile the days pass faster and faster, as days are wont to do.  The to-do list grows by leaps and bounds, the wisteria climbs the cypress, the packing boxes pile high.  Friends here ask us why we’re leaving, if we’re coming back, and how soon.  Friends and family on the other side shower us with come-home wishes.  Beppo and Zazou are blissfully ignorant of the fact that they’ll stay in France and wait for our return, a long wait, in the life of a cat.

One day soon we’ll close this gate behind us and step back into the world we once called our own.  I’m so glad we didn’t leave before the wisteria bloomed.