Wednesday, December 8, 2021

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.


Thursday, July 1, 2021

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.