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.
