The moose is calling.
Canada’s national animal symbol is actually the beaver, I hate to report, but I can’t work out how a beaver might sound. And frankly, do I really want to advertise that sort of symbol being attached to my new country of residence?
After a full year rooted to France’s good soil, our final few days have slammed into my little family, full-throttle and without warning. They’re a bit like that pool of rainwater that accumulated on Bellevue’s terrace last February and crested onto our balcony’s shuttered doors – those first, overflowing droplets that seeped through giving way to a magnificent, three-story cataract within our home’s cylindrical, marble stairwell.
Yes, it’s exactly like that. Our last few days in la Côte d’Azur (until we return next year, that is) have plastered us all of a sudden, out of the blue. With twinklings of glory, magnificent send-offs, and a whole lot of clean up afterward.
Yet the closure of this chapter also has come at a gradual, even agonizing, pace.
· In May I began outlining which blogs I should write before putting French Lessons on an extended holiday.
· I started calculating the number of cantine tickets to buy for Laurelle’s school lunches – whether the carnet of 10 was worthwhile, or if I should spring for single vouchers.
· I’ve dumped oodles of agonizing hours into address changes.
· I’ve noticed that the expiry date on our long-life milk is in August.
And then a crushing realisation: The milk will last longer here than we do.
So I’ve taken time ahead of time to organize our life here, hoping that a bit of pre-planning will achieve some semblance of normality for our family in these last, cherished weeks and days.
My attachment to life here wasn’t always so intense. February, for example, had brought the midterm exam. A pop quiz of sorts.
Pierre and I met our Denver-based, culture-hound friends Jay and Emily in Paris for a couple days. One night over a mound of salt-encrusted, roasted beets, Emily popped the question: How did life in the feted Côte d’Azur stack up to our original hopes and aspirations?
Emily’s was an obvious question in many ways, but my brain shimmied like the bubbles that sprang from my glass of champagne. Yes, I was enjoying my time immensely, thank you – what’s NOT to like about life in the south of France?
But as my thoughts multiplied like those dancing champagne bubbles, I knew the full answer wasn’t quite so simple. Folks here were nice enough, I said, but I wasn’t making real, life-long friends. Not that I’d ever set out to do so, mind you. I always knew language would be a barrier.
A francophone himself, Pierre’s response to Emily’s pop quiz dealt with his brain. Sure, life in France was fabulous, but he missed the intellectual stimuli he knew in North America – the business deals, the broker chats over cups of coffee, the budding prospectors who’d waltz through the office with sparkling drill results. Not that Pierre would change history, no ma’am, but he already was stir-crazy.
Never one without two. Shortly after the first inquest, I went for coffee with a new Welsh writer friend Lynne, who’d recently settled in Antibes. She popped her question.
Could I live here? Lynne asked. Meaning, could I live here forever?
No, no I don’t think so, I said. I blamed the language thing. (Lynne’s French is far superior to mine.) Living in Antibes was great and all – and here I trod carefully to respect my friend’s own recent choice of residence – but I knew I could never stay forever.
The month of May began our jam-packed visitors’ book – a standard feature for Côte d’Azur households. May also brought a new onslaught of questions. First up was Kathy’s.
An effervescent connector who’d just jetted in from Utah, Kathy enthused over us, our sunshine, our view, our geraniums, our lettuce. Life was perfect here, she declared. Exuberantly perfect.
Which, yes, sometimes it is. But my enthusiasm didn’t exactly match hers at that moment. So Kathy asked me: Had this place lost its magic?
No, no! I’d replied a bit too quickly, a bit too passionately. And that made me muddle over the issue more enduringly.
There were the daily realities of life in the south of France that well-meaning visitors didn’t get, I later explained to the enthusiastic Kathy. They didn’t know how awful it was to get things fixed. They didn’t appreciate the travails of parking in a city having certainly twice as many cars as slots. They didn’t endure the weight of my grocery bags that I dragged while searching for my illegally parked car. Those were the headaches that troubled only folks like us, les habitués.
But there was something more. It was I who’d made a valiant effort to downplay the cute stuff in town. To not remain in continual awe of la Côte d’Azur’s crooked streets and the poetry of its restaurant menus. Magic, after all, wasn’t real, and in staying here a full year, I needed to live in whatever real world I could create.
A few weeks later it was Doctor Laurent who launched the inquisition. His invitation to dinner chez nous was long overdue. Now, seated on Bellevue’s terrace – outside his small cabinet on Boulevard Albert 1ere and stripped of his usual white coat – the good doctor was more gregarious than ever.
Dr Laurent wondered: Now that I’d enjoyed life here for nearly a straight year – the beauty of this magnificent place and goodness of its food – could I live here? Again meaning, could I live here forever?
I could hardly answer his question. The doctor’s soliloquy continued. After all, he pleaded with my husband Pierre, his wife’s background was so European. She loves Europe. She IS, in fact, European! He couldn’t take me away to frigid Canada!
Dr Laurent is right in many ways. At the pivotal age of 24, after a single year in London, I’d fallen in love with the place so enduringly that I ended up staying for 12½ years. If not exactly European, I’d love to be considered international.
Dr Laurent was Welsh Lynne to me all over again: a local, or newly proclaimed local, who wanted me to share the love. But get this: Just three months after Lynne had posed the same question, my response felt different. My French had gone up a notch. I’d become more engrained in life here. I had more friends – even the notion that I’d work to keep some of them after heading across the Pond to that howling moose.
Yep, you know, Dr Laurent, I’d happily stay on a bit longer in la Côte d’Azur.
But I can’t. We can’t. It’s not just about me anymore. And anyway, the French taxman’s bite is just too horrifying for those Francophiles who fail to push off in time. We can (and will) return next year, but for now, well, there’s no other way. And I’ve always known it.
School is out, and I’ve begun counting the things I’d “meant” to do when we first arrived in Antibes, the list I’d begun when life was awash with possibility and a whole year spanned before me. I won’t be taking that pottery class, or the painting one. I won’t learn guitar. I won’t improve my sailing. (“You have only so many hours in a day,” I can hear Pierre telling me. Again. Even Dr Laurent had begun telling me to drop the to-do list and go wander along the beautiful beaches.)
Tackling life more positively, I also start measuring what our little family HAS accomplished in this year. Each of us has achieved something toward his or her basic goal in living here:
· Four-year-old Laurelle survived a year at maternelle, emerging with the tongue (if not the manners) of a little French girl.
· I’ve survived a year surrounded by foreign language, even extracting a quite undeserved “excellent” from my French teacher, Madame Sire, who, when I speak, still gives me the LOOK (that thing French folks do when they tense their eyebrows and jut out their necks as they strain to figure out what some Anglo might be saying).
· And Pierre, well, there’s Pierre. He managed to actually be here. His goal sounds the simplest among ours, and it is – but it was tough enough for him to fulfill. (He has just returned from a three-day jaunt to Nova Scotia for a game of golf. And hey, why not? (Okay, the full story is that it was with Tiger, but the principle of his itchy feet carries on.))
Our outbound flight taunts me through the barrel of a gun. My to-do list screams. The suitcases! The address changes! The rental cars! The suitcases! The toiletries inventory! The blog! The suitcases! Those wretched suitcases!
As Antibes’ sandy beaches begin to pack in the sun worshippers, in that proverbial, south-of-France fesse-à-fesse fashion (that’s to say, butt-to-butt), I try to silence the to-do list and soak in my dream of life in la Côte d’Azur:
· The beauty Monet understood when he painted our very view: Antibes’ medieval city jutting into a blue, blue sea – these days their waters spotted with the latest luxury yachts and sailing vessels;
· The stream of white-grey clouds that hover low behind Old Town Antibes on turbulent days, with the seas beneath Bellevue’s terrace churning a chalky teal hue against deep, angry skies;
· The peach, rose, goldenrod and indigo sunsets that ignite our nighttime sky on clearer eves;
· The goodness of French soil and what it produces – even as I dwell a little longer at market stalls, heavy bags dragging me down, just to choose the ripest, fattest cherries from one vendor and the most succulent cœur de bœuf tomatoes from another.
And what better way to recapture the very magic I’d purposely bulldozed those few months ago than to use new eyes? Like those of my younger brother Steve, who visited from the US last month. He’d gone out for a stroll one late afternoon and returned to Bellevue with a crusty baguette wrapped in our local boulangerie’s paper.
“I just walked to a real French boulangerie,” he said almost incredulously, his face alight like I’ve rarely seen it, “and I bought real French bread!”
Ah, the simple things. We must remember.
Now fireworks explode up and down the Rivieran coastline. ‘Tis the season. Bastille Day ushers in the silliest part of France’s silly summer. And our supply of long-life milk is running dry.
I hear the moose. I must pack.
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