Living My Best Life

When you are living your best life, you don’t always stop to let it sink in.

I think I’m living my best life, although I barely stop to notice it. We are surrounded by mountains and look down into the valley to see a gorgeous winding green river. These are constants. Occasional mist or clouds around the mountains lend an air of mysterious beauty to the ridiculously awesome panorama.

Other constants include lightly soiled clothing. Accustomed by birth to the conveniences of a middle-class life in the United States, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I’m not as spoiled as I would have guessed. There are no electric dryers in our little mountain town, so after I wash our clothes in the tiny complicated washer hidden behind a curtain in the bathroom, I have to hang everything out to dry on our balcony. I have become quite intimate with every color and size of clothespin out there. Only once have I forgotten to bring in the clothes before it rained. That once is today, and I arose just too late at 6:20 AM to stop the deluge from soaking our shirts and underclothes. My current plan is to simply wait it out. They will be sodden by nightfall but hey, maybe with 24 hours of wind and the occasional burst of sun, a miracle will happen tomorrow. In the meantime, I don’t entirely hate this ritual.

Another thing Americans who are comfortably well off take for granted is central heat and air, neither of which exist in these medieval buildings, where two feet of stone is intended to provide all the insulation you could want. Sometimes I want more, especially on cold and rainy days like today where the temperature will not rise out of the 40s. On the other hand, this is as cold as it gets. It might drop to freezing overnight but that will only last for a few hours. Normal winter days hover at around 50°F, and we have probably at least 300 days of sun a year. We are not far from the Mediterranean, so I suppose that means our sun is largely Mediterranean. It is certainly warm enough in the winter, a far cry from the Kansas City hellish winterscape that we we recall fondly as we gather around our beautiful blue ceramic Godin wood-burning heater. Everyone raves about these particular heaters, but while ours is gorgeous, it barely heats the air around it. Still, it pleases me aesthetically. Beauty over function, I suppose.

We’re usually not here in July and August, when it can get hot. Not hot like Kansas City summer hot, but uncomfortable without air-conditioning nonetheless. Our little abode stays cool enough with the help of standing fans. I have yet to see a ceiling fan in this village, which I think is less a failure of imagination and more a problem of electric wiring. We actually have a 40 amp fuse box which is supposed to provide all our power needs. Electricians here are prohibitively expensive. We have fantasized about paying for an opulent working vacation for our friend Jorge, an electrician, to see if he can figure out how to rewire the house. I think there are visa or immigration challenges with that idea.

Our little town boasts a tiny grocery store and a cheerful husband and wife who run it. They also take extended vacations, and there is no one trained to take their place while they are gone. The wee shop is simply shuttered, and I wonder how the inhabitants of our little village who do not own cars get by for two or three weeks at a time.

 Depending on the day of the week or whatever hours the proprietors have chosen that particular week, you can get good food or a cup of coffee at three or four different places in town. We often drive to another town, in Italy or France, for more lavish meals. I suppose sitting very close to the sea and watching the waves roll in while sipping wine and noshing would also go under the rubric of living one’s best life. Yet I’ve learned that it is possible to take beauty for granted if it stretches out before you, one lovely twilight succeeding another. I try to remember to summon awareness.

The people who surround us love their little festivals, and they often perform ancient dances that please and confound me. The steps are not difficult, but I am not the extrovert my wife is. She will simply throw herself into the dance and cheerfully perform as many missteps as it takes to get through a tune.

A little town just down the mountain had a Christmas festival this week, and it was quite enjoyable walking down the main street stopping at the little stands to sample or buy homemade wares, passing merrymakers sipping from tiny plastic glasses of wine. We returned that evening to a fireworks display, which, while short in duration, was the best I have ever viewed. That was because I was about 50 feet from the place where the fireworks were lit. They literally exploded over our heads, to our oohs and ahs of delight. We were standing next to the local fire trucks and pompiers, the friendly firemen. I might have been even more tickled than my son Jonah. Certainly I was louder in expressing my enthusiasm.

Jonah finds his best life in traveling. The destination doesn’t much matter to him. He enjoys the travel, whether by car or train, bus or plane. He enjoys tramping about town, holing up in an Air B & B, visiting markets and eateries. And he really enjoys churches. Over here, it is just a question of degrees of ancient glorious church architecture. We rather expect to be wowed when we step in the door.

Although he is young yet, at this point in time Jonah plans on an around-the-world adventure when he graduates high school. I am still hoping that if he chooses college, he will go to the Sorbonne, where education is practically free, rather than saddle himself with the absurd debt college grads take on in the United States. Whatever he chooses, I hope he continues to choose his best life. It took me long enough to do that.

Saorge chooses its people

I have developed a theory that Saorge is self-selecting. By that, I mean that this petite village seems to beckon certain people and repel others. My family’s own history marks an example: We first visited here in 2017, and I was quite taken with this medieval citadel town, home to fewer than 500 inhabitants. It’s a multi-cultural polyglot of individuals, most of them intelligent, many of them artistic. The multi-colored cobblestone streets of the no-car village are quaint and pleasing to the eye, and the blocks of jade and purple stone taken from the local quarries that make up many of the staircases and doorsteps are magnificent. It gives me goosebumps to learn that the only other place in the world that has these particular stones is Brazil. Continental drift much?

After our initial visit, when we realized we liked this placid aerie more than we liked our visits to Florence, Venice, and Genoa, I told Andie wistfully that I wished

we could live here. That seemed highly improbable at the time, but circumstances changed when Andie was diagnosed with breast cancer. At that point, she was more open to a significant change in our lives, and we began planning how we might carve out a year to live in France. Since our son attended a French immersion school in Kansas City, we figured he would be fine. We began studying French on Duolingo and Andie began compiling the daunting amount of paperwork that would be necessary for such a move.

It was scary, but within weeks of our move we were enchanted with the place. We had been here about six months when we realized we wanted to stay longer, and decided to add a year to our stay. That led to buying a little apartment to secure a more permanent foothold here. At this point, we are splitting our time between France and the United States.

Our friends Jim and Mala were similarly enchanted five years ago, when they drove up into the mountains from Monaco to escape the heat on their European vacation. They paused their ascent in Saorge, and rented a place for the night. It was love at first sight. They came back a year later, bought the house in which they had stayed, and have been here ever since. This couple hails from New York, and they are, respectively, in their mid-70s and mid 80s. They fit right in here, where people of respectable age, many of them octogenarians, hike the mountains casually and easily.

Oh the mountains. They aren’t big, like the Rockies, but they are picturesque as hell, accented by a lovely jade river that forms part of the breathtaking view from many of the balconies and windows in town.

Simon had visited here in his youth, and by the time he was approaching burnout in his 40s asked his sister to help him find a place that met a list of criteria he had in mind. Not surprisingly, at least to me, Saorge emerged as his top choice. He moved here, and it was here he met his future wife, Elizabetta. 

Blanche and Pablo were chosen by Saorge as well. She hails from Paris, and he from Argentina. Did I mention that many people in our little town speak two or three languages? Mala speaks eight , but that is a story for another time.

This couple has traveled extensively around the world, since Pablo is a professional musician. Like us, they fell in love with Saorge. They lived for five years in Argentina, and Blanche relates how they were living on a beach in Brazil, captivating and gorgeous, when she found herself online every day looking for apartments for sale in Saorge. They moved here in December of 2019. Which means, like us, they have weathered both COVID-19 confinement and our devastating river tsunami, known as Tempete Alex. Alex left countless broken roads and bridges in his wake, and we all hunkered down and lived off supplies flown in by helicopter for several months. Now we are used to the strange new routes we must take to get out of town, but the scars left by Alex endure: solid stone bridges cracked into pieces, landslides that took part of the terrain and some houses with it, huge trees thrown up on shore like so much kindling.

But Saorge still looks like Saorge, and most of us remained here after the devastation. Blanche told us a little history of her sister, whom she had invited to town to stay at her place while she and Pablo were on a road trip. The sister came, hated it and the inhabitants, and promptly left. Saorge clearly rejected her.

My own sister came to visit the autumn before Covid, and loved it instantly. She is eager to return. If she were not encumbered by a partner and two dogs, I think she might consider making the move.

If my French were polished enough, and I were less introverted, I would probably have finagled more stories out of people in town who were drawn here. Like our friend Ewan, a burly hard-drinking Scot who is acutely intelligent and funny. Or Olivier and Ronnie, who own the local café and bookshop and came here after more than six years running a hotel in Chile. Or our dear friend Julien, tall and handsome, ridiculously kind, who was the local mail carrier here before he transferred to a town an hour away. We were afraid we were going to lose him, but he decided to buy a place in Saorge and make the long commute in order to stay here.

Saorge seems to have a subtle magnetic effect on us, our interior ore drawn to it like a lodestone. I am not adventurous and I am a self-conscious person, so it still amazes me that I pulled up roots and took the plunge. I have not regretted it for an instant, and I am supremely happy with the independence and quickening intelligence the town has elicited from our son. It’s quite the bonus.

Dancing in the Streets

When the networks finally finally got around to officially declaring Joe Biden the president elect, our first reaction was to scream with joy. We threw open our window and yelled (in French, naturally) Joe Biden won! Joe Biden won! Four or five French people who were outside came running up and began hooting and screaming with us. We weren’t (yet) dancing in the streets like the denizens of Philadelphia and New York, but we were feeling it.

It only struck me later how interesting it was that our French neighbors were at one with us in our celebration. Everyone in our progressive little village here has contempt for Macron, which I confess I do not understand, and if a new president of France were elected I somehow doubt I would be screaming with joy alongside my French friends.

Someone on Twitter explained it to me: the French lived under Nazi occupation. They know their history. And obviously they know the danger that Trump represents to the world. The celebrations across the United States and the rest of the globe recognized that a dictator had been overthrown. I guess my sense of outrage hasn’t been completely obliterated by the nonstop barrage of corruption and lies we have endured for the past four years, because it still shocks me when I realize how undemocratic, fascistic and totalitarian, trump’s actions and impulses have been. This is not a guy who likes or respects our democracy, to put it mildly.

I read progressives and rightwingers alike on Twitter declaiming loudly that there have been shenanigans, cheating, underhandedness in this election. I do not know enough about software or hacking to hypothesize how large-scale cheating could’ve taken place, although I laugh at the thought of Republicans believing Democrats cheated in this election and yet somehow let Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham get reelected. The few instances of actual voter fraud that I read about were simply  Republicans voting twice, and in case you haven’t yet seen the statistics, voter fraud is so vanishingly rare that it is a decimal point followed by six or seven zeros and then a six or seven. Like this: .0000006. That’s how much voter fraud takes place. I mean come on people, even in this year of record turnout there were at least 90 million Americans who could’ve voted who chose not to. We can’t even get people to vote once, let alone twice. And please stop with the 60-year-old bullshit about dead people voting. You might see dead people, but they never vote.

I’m about as far from a conspiracy theorist as one can get, but I was troubled in 2016 when Trump won by less than 1% in the three battleground states that would give him the election. And some of the math from Florida did not seem probable. But that’s not my area of expertise and apparently no one thought it worth pursuing. So I am by temperament inclined to dismiss allegations of broad cheating during the election.

What many people seem to overlook is the massive amount of cheating that went on BEFORE the election. Gerrymandering, of course, an evil that has been with us for a long time and that I hope we can address sooner rather than later. The subverting of the post office to cause delay and failure to deliver ballots. Trump’s specious attacks on mail-in ballots and the electoral process itself. But let’s not overlook the modern-day poll tax the Supreme Court approved in Florida after that state’s Republican Legislature pissed on the referendum their citizens approved to allow ex-felons to vote. These lovely bigots announced that the newly un-incarcerated could only cast their vote once they paid off any fines and fees they still owed. Mind you, no one in the state had any idea of the specific amounts each of these ex felons owed, making it impossible for them to clear the slate and enter the voting booth. That same Supreme Court cursed us with dark money in Citizen’s v United, and gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, giving immediate rise to a slew of voter ID and other voter suppression actions in red states, including drastically slashing the number of polling places in largely black or otherwise democratic-leaning counties. In Texas, republicans yanked away drop-off ballot boxes just weeks before the election to make it harder for people to safely drop off their ballots. The courts approved this as well, including having only one ballot box in Harris County, home to almost 5 million people. Navajos had to fight for many months to be allowed to vote because many people on reservations don’t have specific street addresses. (It was Navajos who flipped Arizona to Biden, by the way. They were smart enough to give more than 90% of their ballots to him.) And Republicans have long cheated when they hold power over elections in their state by coming up with ways to purge the rolls, getting hundreds of thousands of people thrown off the voting rolls before an election. This, more than hanging chads, butterfly ballots and a Republican Supreme Court, is what actually gave Florida to George W. Bush in 2000. Fuck you, Katherine  Harrison.

Fuck you too, Brian Kemp. Now presiding as governor of Georgia, Kemp served as secretary of state in the months leading up to his gubanatorial battle with Stacey Abrams. On a single day in 2017, Kemp removed 560,000 people from the voting rolls, people flagged because they had skipped one too many elections. An investigation revealed that 107,000 of those voters should have been eligible to vote in the 2018 election. Kemp “won” the election by a margin of 55,000 votes.

At this point I feel like going on a rant about the antiquated, rooted-in-slavery electoral college that has fucked us so thoroughly. Maybe another time.

We currently have a Supreme Court dominated by rightwingers chosen by presidents who did not win the popular vote. This means that we are being ruled by a minority, which is not how democracies are supposed to work.

Without cheating, without voter suppression, which is just another form of cheating, our history would be different. It would be better and more progressive. Al Gore would’ve tackled climate change 20 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people would still be alive. Children would not have been put in cages, their families destroyed. I’m screaming and dancing in the street right now, but I’m also angry and sad that this shit has gone down in my America. I’m even angrier and sadder that 70 million Americans are ignorant about this or are okay with this.

Sent from my iWalkieTalkie

Petites Pensees (Tiny Thoughts)

Cars, clothes, and colors

(With a contrary nod to the Oxford comma)

Tauron, Lancia, Dacia, Berlingo, Kangoo, Twingo, Elf, A3, 207. . . 

You’d understand that list if I Americanized it: Accord, Elantra, Taurus, Sierra, RAV4, Corolla — clearly, they are the names of cars. The cars in Europe, in France, here in Saorge, are a source of perplexity to me, so different are they from the vehicle names I grew up with. I have long wondered if there was a specific job, the job of Naming Cars, and this person or persons sat around everyday just spitballing: How about Galaxy? Constellation? Stardust? Oh, I know! Pinto! (oy) This is a job I think I would enjoy, for a week or so. 

Most all of these strangely-dubbed Renaults and Peugeots and What-Have-Yous are small cars, even smaller than American sub-compacts. They have to be, both by virtue of the teensy parking spaces they are expected to wriggle into, and the price of gasoline here in a non-oil-producing region. About $7 a gallon right now. Feeling luckier, American friends?

I know it’s difficult to feel lucky when you’re “sheltering in place,” home quarantining so as not to catch this nasty Coveed-deese-neuf, as we refer to it here. Weighty issues of grave illness, mortality, job loss can press in on us in the very long day-to-day. But I find that many — probably most — of my thoughts are small ones. Like staring at cars and trying to spot yet another weird name. I find myself caught up in musing on, oh, I dunno, the Great Clothespin Game.

There are no dryers that I know of in Saorge. If I hadn’t spotted one in an Air B&B a few years ago in Florence, I’d think they were banned in Europe. Given the non-oil-producing issue and the resultant high electricity rates, that makes sense. So: We hang our laundry out the window to dry. On clotheslines. Attached with clothespins. And since most of these clotheslines are some distance from the street below, it’s inevitable that clothespins fall. They fall to the pavement — I know, because I’ve watched them fall, from my very own clothesline. And if you don’t go down directly to pick up your fallen clothespins, they disappear. Poof, into thin air.

Except I’ve figured out what happens to these clothespins, because it did not take me long to join in the Great Clothespin Game. It goes like this: I’m walking up the street, and I spot a clothespin lying on the cobblestones. I pick it up, and then I do one of two things. After I look directly upward to see if I can spot a clothesline, I either place the clothespin carefully in a doorway — or I tuck it into my pocket.

In this way, I maintain a rough equivalence between Clothespins Lost and Clothespins Found. I always feel a little frisson of guilt when I pocket a pince á linge, but it’s not as if I know to whom I should return it. There aren’t many separate abodes here; Saorge is essentially a number of really long stone buildings with many windows and apartments stretched along their length. Many, many clotheslines, and the frequent dropping of clothespins. (Although I also feel a bit of self-satisfaction when I pick up the Found Clothespin and put it where I hope the owner will quickly spot it.) Which reminds me: Elisabetta, I think I owe you a few clothespins. One day a month or two ago, I came outside to find multiple clothespins on my stairs. There are no apartments directly above us, and I was thrilled with my Gifts from the Wind, but now I think maybe they blew from my friend’s balcony. Like her favorite black brassiere did one day (we returned it, after consulting her on our find. I guessed it was hers, since I was sure it did not belong to our nearby, petite American neighbor. Hrmm . . . )

When I’m not joining in these laundry games, I’m out walking along the mountainside, where I often stop to gaze at the flowers. There are so MANY different kinds here, and to my great joy, many of them are shades of purple. Light,  lilac-y purple, deep purple, purple shading to blue, purple shading to pink. One of my favorites is a reddish purple, a clumped flower on a long stem that almost always grows directly from rock walls or the rock wall of the mountainside. HOW? I mean this flower doesn’t look stunted, or as if it has a difficult life, trying gamely to poke forth from almost-non-existent soil. No, it looks hardy and healthy, as if it positively THRIVES on its placement. If my Mom had been a flower, I think this is the flower she would have been. 

Another flower I really enjoy looks like a tiny daisy. It’s usually white, but sometimes there are lavender daisies growing alongside the white flowers, and peer though I might, they seem to be coming from the same plants. I’m a few parsecs removed from being a botanist, so someone tell me: Can two different colors of flowers grow from the same plant? Because that’s the sort of Petite Pensee that can extend my insomnia.

Hunkering down doesn’t necessarily suck

There are doubtless millions of quarantine stories making the rounds now, stories of sheltering in place and the ennui that results from it. But life is personal, and this is my life, and this is my story. Our story. The story of my little family, of my wife and my son and me, blessed by Fate to be sheltering in the most beautiful little mountaintop town you’ve never heard of, Saorge, France. Which voice-to-text always renders as “sewers,” which is both amusing and insulting. 

We are 40 days in — the 40 days from which “quarantine” derives its name. It must be French, that word, since “quarante” means forty. I wonder how old that word is? As old as the language for the plague. A plague. This very specific plague, COVID-19, vicious and unpredictable and yet so much LESS fatal than it could be. I think it is the plague’s way of throwing us a lifeline, giving us this pandemic for practice. Because the mortality rate could be so much worse, and we’re so unprepared, so unequal to this challenge, that a REAL Black Death sort of plague would wipe out half the earth. At least. 

Can you imagine a Donald Trump putatively at the reins when a truly horrific plague hit? Dear God. 

Many of us have walked through the fear engendered by COVID-19, the heart-stopping terror of losing a child, the fear of losing a loved one, the fear of one’s own mortality. Cloudy frightening dreams plague our nights, restlessness and inertia and boredom dog our days, thoughts of dinner take on undue power. Fix the coffee (I’m painstaking about my coffee making, as you should be), feed the cats, check the weather and the news, practice some French on Duolingo, prepare breakfast for my son, wake up my wife, rummage for my own breakfast while sighing for the 200th time about the fact that I cannot find a cereal in France or Italy that I like as much as my own, American, choices. I absolutely adore the tiny grocery store in this tiny town, but my grand love for my Midtown Kansas City Costco has not waned.

The silence in town is profound. I find my heart lifting when I hear voices during my morning walk: I’m not alone, someone else is up and about! I’m an introvert, as is my son Jonah, so we are more resilient than most in the face of this enforced loneliness; still, I miss talking and dining with our friends here in Saorge. They are so compellingly kind and gracious, and I marvel anew that I ever thought of small towns as somehow suspect, dusty and backward. Our little French utopia is chock full of progressives like us, artists and musicians and really, really bright people. As my comprehension improves, doubtless I will discover new depths in these friends. If I ever get to visit with them again. The streets are so EMPTY; it’s spring, and I do occasionally spot a Saorgien(ne) digging in the dirt down one of the mountain slopes, planting legumes. But for the most part, when I walk alone, it seems I am in one of the many dystopian novels I have read, walking a depopulated Earth after a cataclysm. Most often in those bittersweet books, it is a virus of some sort, smallpox-like, that has ravaged the planet and reduced its inhabitants to a wandering handful. Which is why I think again that COVID-19 is a gift, a truly awful gift, the chance for not-so-bright earthlings to learn how best to prepare for a horrifyingly fatal pandemic.

If the United States can learn from what is surely the most benighted pandemic response on the globe, sabotaged by incompetence and malice and a terrifying level of stupidity, then the rest of the planet can survive. And I want it to: Earth is so beautiful, so rare, even with billions of other planets out there. Our land, our seas, raped and polluted as they are, teem with life. We are a jewel, and I want humans to survive for eons to bear witness to the astounding beauty of this world. On a micro level, of course, what I want most is for my family and my loved ones to survive this pandemic. I miss my parents, who passed on a few years ago, but more than once I’ve had the thought that I’m glad they are not here now to be threatened by this relentless coronavirus. I’d be soaked in fear that I’m so far away from where they live, unable to help them or protect them. The course of this virus is so cruel for some that I can’t bear to think of it ravaging Mom and Dad. Or my sisters, or my chosen family of friends. I have always hated and feared suffering, and I do not wish it on anybody.

We’re not exactly suffering in this decreed silence. We are physically comfortable, with plenty of food and fresh air, with Netflix and Prime and Kindle. But the days are too long, too much the same. Even watching the valley road below while I exercise, I am struck by absence. The absence of cars, of noise, of movement. We have had a blanket thrown over our lives, and at times it feels suffocating. It must be worse for my wife, Andie. She’s such a talker, an extrovert, and her life this past nine months in Saorge has been one of nurturing, cooking regularly for our friends, going out to eat, socializing whenever she can. She is of course chatting with friends via Facebook Live, reaching out when she knows she needs to, seeking connection to help her through these solitary days. She loves us, our little family unit of three, but she needs others as well. I do too, but not nearly as much.

While out walking the back mountain path behind the town this week, I ran into another walker, a man from our end of town to whom I have never before talked. We fell into a discussion of “The Incident,” a night a few weeks back when some unhappy or unstable soul decided to slash the tires of most of the cars in town. A few cars escaped harm; some had one tire flattened; others, two. Or three. Or four. This is not a wealthy town, and I grieved for those who would struggle to find the money to replace their tires — but at least most of us aren’t going anywhere right now. Our own car (two) has still not been repaired, but at least the tires are on order.

This man opined that The Incident has caused a loss of trust in town; we don’t know if the perpetrator is from Saorge or another of the little towns down in the valley. He said the unknown suspect might be crazy; I suggested he might also be angry — angry at this confinement, or at his life. My neighbor cocked his head, and with only the hint of a smile on his face replied, “Well yes, he might be angry, but you must know that the French are always angry.” I burst out laughing, and heard my laughter bounce off the hills around us, and the very sound lit up my soul. I realized I haven’t heard unrestrained, loud laughter like that in many weeks — another casualty of COVID-19.

We derive small laughs each night from our bedtime ritual. We brought with us to France, in our crammed-to-bursting, way too heavy suitcases, a little stuffed creature named Kickface, blue, with a wedge-shaped head, one eye, and two large, fang-like front teeth. Every night, Kickface entertains us: first, by hiding somewhere in Jonah’s bed; next, by singing, or doing the Hokey Pokey, or musing wistfully on whatever subject Jonah demands he talk. Our two cats also opine on matters great and small; all of them seem to me to have the same voice, although Kickface always sounds, to my ears, naive and gentle. Apparently these are the qualities I choose to channel for my son.

Lately, Kickface has begun to serve as the spokesmonster for PSAs on commonsense matters such as the dangers of ingesting bleach and the need to support the U.S. Postal Service. He is funny, and Andie has visions of making him famous on YouTube, despite the fact that neither of us has any experience of YouTube. Also, Kickface is shy, like Jonah, like me, and he shies away from the camera. But he is undeniably charming, and you never know. He also speaks some French; he’s not fluent like Jonah, but he can converse fairly well. He generally speaks French when he’s agitated; make of that what you will. It’s possible it’s just the confinement getting to him.

Our second stage of confinement ends in 12 days, and I’m sure everyone else is counting down as well. We are so much safer here in France, with a government that is actively leading the fight against this coronavirus. I’m sure social distancing measures will be in effect for a good long while to come, but I am so looking forward to cocktails and dinners with our friends, even if we have to sit a ridiculous-looking six feet apart. I am most especially looking forward to, hoping desperately for, our summer trip to the United States to pick up our dog. She is old, and we thought we would only be in France for a year, and we were wrong, and we want her with us for her final adventures. Please, please, pretty please.

Americans in France: Facing COVID-19

Living in a tiny medieval town at the top of a mountain in France provides a unique environment for our family. This setting couldn’t be more different from our other life in urban Kansas City. Jonah, a young 10 years old, delights in the peculiarities of a village without cars. We delight in the fact that no one here seems interested in guns.

On this extended family vacation (thanks, COVID-19), we are trying to impose a vague shape on the day. I wake the night people (Jonah and his other mother) at 8:30, having been up since 6:30. Breakfast, lolling, reading, then my exhortation to take a walk. Sunshine, exercise, Vitamin D: just what the doctor ordered. Perhaps a quick trip to the petite local grocery to stock up on fresh vegetables or to restock Jonah’s latest favorite cookies. Tramping on the ancient cobblestones, still marveling at the lucid beauty of the purple and green slate that borders most of the narrow streets.

I’ve decided that since it’s supposed to be full sun and 65 degrees tomorrow, we’ll find a site for a picnic. That picnic was SUPPOSED to take place in the wee (perhaps 30 houses) Italian hillside village of Fanghetto, our second favorite village in the world. Our first favorite, of course, is where we live: Saorge, in the Maritime Alps region of France, a place of ridiculous beauty: mountains and beautiful green rivers pouring over stones that are themselves architectural marvels. Our little village is 800 years old, a citadel town designed to foil would-be invaders.  Some of the houses built into the side of the mountain have arrow slits and murder holes; villagers of long ago would pay to come inside the citadel walls when an enemy army approached. 

I can’t imagine any invading army bothering with Saorge. It’s straight up on top of the mountain, and I’d wager that the townsfolk here could easily compete in the tight butt muscle Olympics: you can’t get anywhere in town without walking up hill. Some of the people here, in their 70s and 80s, still tackle the mountain paths every day. I myself don’t care for hills, but Jonah doesn’t even notice them as he skips merrily on his way. And yes, he LITERALLY skips. I have never seen a happier kid.

We have talked with him about this life-changing pandemic, of course, and he is interested, after first having asked if we were going to die. I honestly think we’re less likely to die here than most other places on the planet, and we have reassured him. I am more worried about our friends in America; once we learned that this virus didn’t seem to hurt children, the weight of fear lessened considerably.

Right now, Jonah is upstairs in the shared bedroom of our narrow 3-story tower, taking a virtual tour of the San Diego Zoo. I’ve asked him to practice some math on his i-Pad later in the day, and to read another 15 minutes in his current book, some tale of mummies and grave-robbing. I think. My French isn’t all it could be, all I hope it will be in another year. Jonah is proficient, courtesy of a French immersion school he’s attended since kindergarten. 

Here, he travels down the mountain four days a week to the tiny one-room school in the city hall of the village of Fontan, where his class of 18 students comprises four grades. He’s thriving there, and is daily excited at the fact that he takes a bus to and from school for the first time in his life. The bus, which we call the ROCKSTAR BUS, is huge. It carries five children, a monitor, and a driver up and down the narrow switchbacks. It could fit another 50 people on its upholstered, capacious seats, but I’ve given up trying to understand anything about the Byzantine French bureaucracy. Every day, the local Zest bus climbs up to Saorge on the hour. It seats perhaps 15 people, and everyone else has to stand. WHY DON’T THEY SWITCH BUSES? 

The hours pass slowly for us here, but they did so even before this enforced isolation. We’re not working (well, I cheat a bit and do some editing via computer, but that scarcely covers our bills for dining out. Which should be almost non-existent this month, sadly.) The local restaurant is closed; ditto for the local bar and grill. I think the honey/olive oil store is still open a few hours a day, but our dear friends’ cafe is shuttered, and I’m sad every time we walk past its darkened interior. I don’t care for you, COVID-19. These people never DID make a lot of money, and I don’t know what they are going to do during this enforced shutdown.

Dinner varies for us; Andie is a marvelous cook, and kitchen time serves as her daily therapy. At this phase of his life, Jonah insists on either fish or a hamburger for dinner. I get to taste much more variety. I’ve seen chickpeas soaking on the stove, so I’m looking forward to hummus. Or falafel. Perhaps both. I hope. Although we’re almost out of yogurt. We’ve decided that only one of us will travel down the mountain to the grocery store to lay in supplies; I’m always touching my face, and Andie is the chauffeur here, since these mountain lanes terrify me, so she will do the shopping. We’ll make sure she disinfects when she returns home.

Andie usually takes Jonah and me with her on grocery shopping excursions. Her solo adventure goes like this: She travels to a nearby town that has the cereal bars our son will agree to eat. There is a line outside the store and the person at the head of the line can only enter when someone exits the store. People in line are staying a meter apart. This stop takes her about 15 minutes, after a 25-minute drive.

Then it is 40 minutes in the other direction to our regular supermarket in Breil-sur-Roya. The same situation exists here, but it takes longer since the line is longer. The bread section is cleaned out and most of the fruits and vegetables are gone. Ditto for the cheese. But the worst discovery is that there is not a single bottle of milk to be had, and our son goes through a one-liter bottle almost every day. It’s the only way we can keep any weight on his slim frame — we fortify the milk with a chocolate-flavored supplement.

Andie phones me with news of the milk outage, and Jonah and I quickly walk to our tiny local grocery to scan the shelves. Happily, there are about 10 bottles of milk remaining, and we snag three. I ponder overlong whether I am being too greedy or am being a terrible mother by not taking more of the milk. We are not hoarding, but it is an impulse that has to be consciously resisted.

Andie buys a few cans of beer for one of our neighbors who is at the grocery store, and doesn’t have the heart to refuse him a ride back up the mountain to town after she has finished shopping. She tries not to breathe his direction. The coronavirus pandemic is stressing our notion of community.

What I miss most are our friends. We have them over for meals at least three times a week, usually. And now we can’t even give them the two-kiss French greeting, much less our tight American hug, although our friend Melanie has introduced us to some arcane foot-knocking ritual. Yesterday, we walked through town to halloo! at our American friends, chatting with them from the street as they leaned over their upper terrace wall. It was a nice break. But then Jonah’s friend (and our new neighbor) Donin ran excitedly up to us, wanting to play, his rapid French overwhelming my brain but his intention unmistakable. We had to crush him with the news that we are all supposed to stay six feet apart.

The pre-bedtime ritual is always entertaining. I have with me a small, stuffed, one-eyed ax-headed blue creature called Kickface, who is nightly exhorted by Jonah to, variously, sing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” tell us a tale of our two cats, or opine on the general hilarity of “I cook in the kitchen,” which in French is “Je cuisine dans la cuisine.” So drole! according to the 10-year-old.

Our typical day, we realize, is not so typical. But it is full of love and laughter and literal sunshine, and we know we are luckier than anyone else we know. We knew this before we moved to France, but our life here is so very very good that COVID-19 is just one more hurdle to be gotten over. If you had ever tried to open a bank account in France, or apply for insurance here, you would realize you had the stamina to endure a life-changing pandemic.

Libations and Comestibles

Saorge is a water-friendly town. Cold, clear water flows from the mountains and supplies the town — and we’re told it’s pure. I sure hope so, because I often see people drinking from one of the many spigots that flow ‘round the clock into basins and troughs. Said troughs look ancient, like most things around here.

In Kansas City, our water bill is by far the biggest of the utility bills we receive. Here, we pay €20 a month for water and trash service. Just a flat fee. But the standard monthly electric bill is about $90, which does not include any air-conditioning, and it costs us $70 to fill up  the tank of our small car. 

While bread and wine are dirt cheap on French soil, fruits and vegetables are quite pricey for those of us used to American prices. I suspect the prices here in France more accurately reflect the labor and the value thereof. Meat, too, is expensive. Beef seems popular,  but I am here to tell you that it is not nearly as tasty as American beef and costs at least twice as much. The most common meat found in any restaurant seems to be pork. Especially ham. Veal seems to be quite prevalent as well, although it is not something we order. Our murderous tendencies don’t extend to baby cows, it appears.

In Saorge and in the nearby towns, you can get a sandwich or a Panini (usually ham and cheese ) for €5 or less. But the standard price for a Caesar salad is €12.50. Wine can be had for about three dollars a glass or six dollars for a half carafe, which is about 17 ounces, or more than half a bottle of wine. I have no idea what sort of wine I have been drinking here. So far we haven’t been to any place fancy enough to specify anything other than red or white. It is all fine, quite unlike the cheap American plonk I avoid at all costs.  

Saorge is a stone’s throw from the Italian border, which makes it even stranger to me that regular coffee is so mediocre in France. Everyone seems to buy the already ground coffee, which any true coffee lover could tell you is a few steps down from optimal. I have found two stores with beans but so far the beans are only average. Italy, of course, is home to the best coffee machines on the planet, so there is no excuse for this pre-ground shit in France, in my opinion. So far, we simply order cappuccinos, although I have also had one really good macchiato. I might order it more but it is such a tiny pour it makes my wallet flinch.

Jonah orders hot chocolate everywhere we go, chocolat chaud. It doesn’t come with a huge dollop of whipped cream as he prefers, but it often has a head of frothy milk. A note of caution here: if you are in Italy and order a hot chocolate, you may literally get a hot chocolate. A steaming glass of what appears to be chocolate pudding. We have figured out a workaround by asking, in our butchered Italian, for  hot chocolate with a lot of milk added. 

And now a last word on liquid refreshment in France. I am relatively sure I have the best three bottles of whiskey in Europe. To whit, Blackened, High West Double Rye and Pikesville Rye. Our shoulders are still sore from our very heavy suitcases, but by God I needed my whiskey. I am only sorry I don’t have someone who appreciates whiskey to share them with. I warned Andie that probably all we would be able to get over here would be Scotch (yuck) and Irish whiskey. I was right about the Jameson and the Scotch, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t spot a bottle of Four Roses in a store one evening. Mind you, I don’t care for the regular Four Roses. 

There is no rye anywhere. But every bar and every grocery store has one example of American whiskey on its shelves: Jack Friggin’ Daniels. How in the love of Christ did this happen, America? And can I have some sympathy for my wife, because that is her new mixer for her freshly made whiskey sours?

 A few of the Saorge waterworks