Friends, Food, Poetry

A 50th wedding anniversary. How many get this far? and how many get this far with such love and tenderness in their eyes and gestures? They've certainly shared values, joys and wonder. The many quotes and references fly about us from Shakespeare (King Lear) to Dr. Seuss and everything in between.

Poems bring tears to all our eyes.
A royal roast pig is a joy to behold and consume.

The kitchen is in motion at all hours of the day: breakfast, clean-up, lunch, clean-up, tea time, clean up, dinner prep, drink hour, dinner, clean-up. We take turns and it all gets done.

The kids roam, swim, go tubing, read, play games, grab some chips and the normally forbidden soda, discover poker and bridge. The dogs are under foot, sneaking a bit from the floor (or a child's hand!), cuddling, playing, barking, sleeping.

The elder folk enjoy the comforts of the deck, a wide range of reading material in their hands.

wild flowers deck the cakes. Bag pipes ring in the air, song is crafted and sung.


And the values of love, consideration, tenderness, communication, respect, honor, attention, and the age-old virtue of being sure and steady waft upon the air and envelope us all.

Another's Point of View

I have this thing about generalizations. Granted, I’m guilty on occasion of such, but... As I read my way through The Secret Life of France I am startled and frustrated by some of her chapters. Now, to clarify, this book is very well written by a woman who moved in circles I will never come close to. I am in admiration and I am aware of the quite privileged access she has had. (Had I married a Frenchman who shared my classes at Princeton, perhaps, but that's not how my story has played out). She is describing the habits and tendencies of a rarified circle of the very highly educated elite bourgeoisie of Paris. What she says does not hold true for my world in Provence of teachers, farmers, vintners, artisans, massage therapists, essential oil practitioners, artists and musicians.

The last two chapters I read have been strong on politics and the relationship of France (since WWII), to its British neighbor to the West and the Americans across the ocean. She has encountered (she being British, not American), tremendous nostalgia and respect for the British (all the while acknowledging that the sentiment is not returned from across the Channel), and outright scorn, annoyance and disdain for Americans.

Hmmmm. Can I say Thank Goodness I’ve not encountered this in the South? Nor has my mother (granted, a Ph.D in French literature) in her many years backing and forthing across the Atlantic to the city of Lights.

But, as she perpetuates the unfortunate opinion that all the French hate the Americans (NOT TRUE!) I am forced to consider my impression upon people here.

I’ve written before of the cultural confusion I feel when in the US – where I am received as hyper-verbal, WASPy, New England with a European gloss – thus I intimidate on occasion. And the concurrent reception I receive in France where it takes quite a bit of time and knowing me to be convinced of my cultured self (is it so hidden?) and rather deep education (all is respective). Mmmm Yes, my first impression in the hexagon shines through my surface self : bubbly, American accented English (though my French accent is well-received), optimistic and outgoing, as JP would say, my enthousiasme enfantin lends people to not take me seriously and to underestimate me.

A friend recently confirmed that when outsiders saw me (young, pretty, ebulliant) with Erick (older, more established, local) upon our marriage they assumed he had to have wooed me with security, wealth, comfort... Why else would I have stayed? No, he didn’t offer me this, but he did offer me a foil upon which I grew, expanded, developed and discovered my talents, previously unknown to myself. It was his passion for cooking and his region that gave me the impetus to create our business from scratch. He was also willing to do what he was skilled at to complete the picture – the physical renovations of the house, the shopping and cooking, the driving, etc.,

When we were in the midst of divorcing and I was advised by both my lawyer and JP that I really shouldn’t continue to work with him, I am convinced (now) that they assumed he had the where-withall to continue to support me and the children. That the business might collapse without my participation, that I was the one that brought our clients to us... this was an idea completely outside their scope of imagination. I was simply a pretty young thing from America, right? Much to my chagrin (and at that time low self-esteem) I followed their advice. This timed with the economic crisis brought near financial disaster on both our heads.

Over the past year Erick and I have knit our working relationship back together and we now help each other as we are able. A far better solution for both.

So, to conclude: that yes, if Americans are sweepingly (and ignorantly) considered to often be uncultured and less civilized than their European counterparts (particularly by a class of individuals that truly revel in criticizing and judging others) ... I do suffer occasionally from this stereotype. But, not for long. Where people have open minds and the desire to learn, discuss, exchange, snap judgements can be altered.

Curiously, I more often encounter a certain level of cynicism towards the English... but then, I’m American and no doubt our French hosts occasionally play games with the suspected rivalry of the Brits and their former colonists. All is fair game for the gullible...

Meadowlark Farm - Cedar Michigan

One of the things I adore about this part of the world (Northern Michigan) is the growing consciousness and support for environmentally intelligent activities: houses off the grid, solar panels, individual windmills, organic farms supported by a whole array of clients willing to pledge a seasons' commitment to a crate a week, and so much more.

One of the magical places that I've been introduced to by my dear friend Nancy Allen -- a fantastic cook and cooking teacher of many years -- is the Meadowlark Farm outside of Cedar. It is a small family-run farm firmly anchored by Jenny and her husband. Their children, Ella and Elijah, help out and welcome visitors as graciously as their parents. Nancy has an arrangement with them to cook every Friday for the entire crew of helpers and workers and family and visitors (in this occasion myself, my mother and my two boys) with their array of organic vegetables and herbs freshly picked that morning.

She has also taught cooking to the kids (who are both home-schooled) and written quite a bit about her experiences on her own blog. It seems a fruitful exchange for all participants.

When I called Nancy the other day to see her during my very short vacation up here, she suggested I come over to the farm and join her in the kitchen -- something I always adore doing! When I arrived she put me immediately to work on rolling out the dough for the special Mediterranean pastries, Za'atar, that she was making from Paula Wolfert's superb book, The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean. I rolled them out quite thin, and spread a marvelous mixture of herbs and sesame seeds and olive oil atop them. She assures me that as this is a Moroccan specialty, I should be able to find some mixtures in my local stores in France to recreate this wonderful flat bread.

Then I helped her with the beet falafals (sweet, delicately spiced, and crispy fried!) - also from Paula Wolfert- while her friend Maureen and my mother worked on a Greek zucchini and celery dish with raisins, cinnamon, vinegar and onions.

I brought along some of my fresh bread (a bit heavy as the starter has yet to truly bubble away like mine back in Provence. However, it was received as a good, nourishing, whole grain loaf with a nice acidic bite. Little in resemblance to my bread back home, but nonetheless a crowd pleaser.

My boys happily went off to play with Elijah and the farm dogs. I cooked away, and then we all sat down to a delectable and somewhat exotic feast. Yum! After a lovely chat with Jenny, a tour of the barn and the flowers she adds to her vegetable crates (a creative outlet for her), I suggested we bring Elijah back to the lake with us where he spent a fun afternoon with my boys playing Monopoly, swimming out to the raft and exploring our little corner of the woods.

Back to Michigan

Back to Michigan and back to my boys. Here such a short time, but here nonetheless. Chicago and Detroit bookend the trip. Efforts to connect with wine dealers/importers and distributors are taking time, but I trust will be fruitful. I’m here, but must get to town daily for 2-3 hours (at least) on the computer. This is not always so easily done. I trust my jet lag will continue for a few more days! Only one car between us (my mother and me). The idea of vacation is marvelous, but the realities of running my little businesses when in a home without internet access are tough.


Barely up on my first day and I got out the cutting shears. Mom wanted her hair cut, and Leo offered himself up to me as well. Quite amazing. He’s spent the year growing and growing and growing his hair.

I think I did a beautiful job (pictures to follow), but it is rather a shock to him. He was quite the romantic poet there for a while. Samson has lost his locks.


Jonas is swimming (yeah!). Both of them are playing better tennis. They are taller, more independent, but still themselves and mostly pleased to have me here. With Leo I’ve already had a run-in about summer home-work – writing a page or more by day – that Mom had begun. Oh it just isn’t easy.


Jonas is in do anything to please mode. So he’s got Mom wrapped around his finger. Helpful, delighted, present, lively, quick to respond... Can you ask for more?

And myself? Eating too many yummy local pastries! But reveling in doing my yoga on the deck under the swaying trees. It’s all in the balance.

Yet another book about France...

My dear English friend (the one with 6 kids, not the one who teaches at school) has shared her copy of a new book by yet another Anglo-Saxon (this time English) about life in France. It is aptly named, The Secret Life of France.

It is amusing, and well-written. I'm mostly enjoying it. However, she makes some serious statements damning a nation's people when her experience is, well, limited to that of a wife of a wealthy and superbly well educated Frenchman of the definitely upper bourgeois class.

Apparently, in such a situation, finding marvelous and true and deep friendships amongst women is near impossible. They're all out to be the most elegant, sexy, alluring to the many (or too few?) men in their world and this competition crushes the possibility of true connection.

What a shame for her is this is her experience. I will testify that it took me some years to make good friendships with women in France, but this is more for their skittishness that you will leave. As a foreign-born woman, are you someone who they can hold in their heart for a life-time? Or will you skip out when the going gets tough? As such, there are perhaps a few more barriers to cross before these very special frienships are offered.

Yes, I do have dear friends. Friends I can count on. Friends I can confide in. Friends who shore me up when the times are difficult. Friends who are honest with me, supportive, at times critical, but with love. I can laugh, hug, cry with them.

As I work my way through the book, I learn that Parisians (of a certain class I assume) have different mores when it comes to sex within and ouside of marriage. Again, I didn't experience this in Provence. Outside of the capitol, fidelity is definitely the preferred way to live and divorce is often the result of infidelity. But then again, duplex apartments in the 16th and castles on the Loire are not being put at risk.

I'm still reading, and finding her observations about politics and other elements quite interesting, at times elucidating. I'm not finished. In any case, one of the details of her story that interests me is she in the end gave up on French men and married an Englishman. They live in France, so you could say she's got the best of both worlds.

Curious. I'll write more when I get to the last page.

Going to the Beach - Un saut à la plage

When you’ve an urge to go to the beach, and the desire to spend the night there, you are open to what the universe offers. Here in Provence we’ve quite a number of possibilities. Best known to me are Beauduc – the wild beaches that my former husband took me to the first week I knew him and where I’ve held two overnight parties for Leo’s June birthdays – and the Plage d’Arles just beyond Salins de Giraud, the site of many an evening’s dip and barbecue, grillade.

The former is the site of an old fishing village, and once held (till just a couple of years’ ago) a completely illegal squatters’ village of camping cars and proper hand-made cabins, all lacking plumbing, gas, and decent electricity. It was the romantic edge of the Earth to many. A place to completely get away from things. The route there went over a long dirt road with impressively deep pot-holes, past salt paddies, flocks of pink flamingoes, to the end of the European continent. Any further and you’d start pedaling to Africa.

Sad to say, the powers that be decided one fine day to raise all that had once been of the make-shift village of Beauduc. As such, you can still drive down there, camp for a few nights in your tent, even perhaps position your camper van for a few days, but the community is mostly gone, the great open air restaurants specializing in grilled fish have been displaced, and the sky and beaches are more likely to be filled with gliders and power-sailors than amateur fishermen.

The beach beyond Salins de Giraud is a bit more official. In any case the road to it tails off just twenty yards from the waves, so it is far easier to reach. To the left, a couple of hundred yards down the beach is the naturiste (nudist) scene. Camper vans with Dutch, German, British and the occasional French plate are settled there for the summer. Remember tales of seven weeks of vacation? They spend it all here.

To the right are the ‘textile” or suited folks. Here families play in the surf, people build make-shift barriers to define their summer gardens, i.e. the 10 square meters in front of their camping van. Mosquito netting in some cases, many barbecue grills, and a fare number of dogs puncture what in winter is a rather marvelously barren and majestic landscape.

But, I did not get to either of these destinations. When I suggested to my dear friend Martine that I wanted to spend a night at the beach she told me flat out that she doesn’t like sand. She also went into rather graffic, suggestive (can this be done?) detail as to why these first two options were not to her liking. Something about a lack of local outhouses was key to this... Imagine where everyone is at 8AM every morning when you’d like to have a quiet swim? There’s the dunes, and???

You get the picture.

No, her preferred get-away is a pebble beach in Martigues. It is a plage naturiste of old, a place she’s been going to for over twenty years. Where her son learned to swim, where she is at home. She listed its vices before its virtues: lots of old folks (though this goes both ways of course), a close-up view of the oil refineries of Fos Sur Mer (thus best to go when the wind is blowing in the right direction), dinky, small, a bit far away.

However it was the virtues that keep her coming back: right on deep water, one of the deepest bays in the Mediterranean and just at its entrance. Cleaner than Beauduc as it is a pebble beach and ‘ahem’ all the pollution that hits it also reaches the wishfully pristine (not) Camargue, so let’s not be a Camargue snob. And in fact, with the wind going the right way, though we had an uninhibited view of the refineries, they were materially affecting us less than the beaches down-wind. There was also a cafe on the beach run by someone she’s known forever who keeps an unofficial eye on the beach at night. It is a members’ only beach, and there are showers and toilets hooked up to the proper plumbing elements just off the beach.

And so, I found myself one morning not too long ago, lying in my (very pale) birthday suit, enjoying a number of dips into the great waters of the Mediterranean after having spent a quietish night in our tent. With the morning air came large bronzed bellies, deep mahogany tanned drooping breasts, shaven heads and privates, bleached hair, borrowed flippers and protruding body parts as long-time acquaintances came over to our little haven of beach pads and umbrellas to say hello.

Just to confirm a note about hygiene: when visiting the cafe you bring along a towel to sit upon. Though the rest is left open to the air as nature intended.


We stayed but the night and the morning. As it was, though I’d put lots of sun cream on, I did fry my back some (and my butt... underwear and bra straps both were a bit sensitive for the next few days). It was a great get-away. Completely other. We chatted, swam, read, ate our picnic lunch and reveled in the waters of our little corner of the world.

Never say never.

A chèvrier without his chèvres.

For the first time since the death of Isabelle I've come to visit Paul Pierre. I'd called earlier in June and left a message on his answering machine. Simply stating that I was here, that I was thinking of him. And he called me last week to set up a time for a visit.

As to be expected, he'd plunged right into movement and activity after the funeral, and then collapsed with advanced pneumonia, liquid in his lungs and more. He has now been through treatments galore, hospital stays, and weeks of bed rest. He is up and about and plowing through the papers that must be attended to. The house is layered (they are relatively small layers) with all that beckons. Health insurance, shifting of names on property deeds, retirement accounts, banks, accounts, etc., It is a truism to state that with death comes a pile of paper work, but being close to it is quite impressive, in a rather frightening way.

It is now two months later. You could say he's been through the gauntlet. What is glorious is a sense, a feeling, a knowledge of what solitude might bring him rather than the loss that he has suffered. He was conscious and present throughout the four years of his wife's illness. He prepared, he projected, he handled it in a mighty way. And now, next?

There are projects. Next year Aurelie will take the goats to her own farm. That leaves space below that is refrigerated, clean, kitchen oriented. Perhaps stages, courses in preparing pâtés and pork products? He's done that before, taken three whole pigs on Friday and by Sunday all who participate walk away with their preparations. It would be fascinating, a learning/teaching experience, and worthwhile.

He has land that could be farmed by another, from whom he could collect rent (not to mention well nourished land with the many years of goat droppings upon it). He has a home that could be rented by the week for vacationers (view of the olive grove included). Why not rent to photography folk during the festival in Arles? and offer transportation morning and evening?

The possibilities are there. He is eager and coping. He is open and sharing.

Yes, we spoke of much. I listened. He gave me a father/uncle/man/s advice concerning the demise of my relationship with JP (I said thank you as I listened, rather humbled). He is encouraged that I seem to be learning, growing -- but agreed I've a ways to go yet.

Precious.

Meeting an old friend for the first time

I mentioned the pleasure I felt in meeting a woman who follows my blog. Truly, it was touching, surprising and enlightening. There was a moment of cultural confusion -- the written English language is relatively easy to communicate in for those of us from the Americas/British Iles/Australia/New Zealand/ etc., but our accents can be quite different! She with her beautiful Irish lilt that I had to listen carefully to, myself with my speedy delivery with no doubt a nasal touch from my NY/Seattle/Mid-West past.

We found subjects in common -- I'd not realized (or had not carefully read) that she shared a love and knowledge of photography with me. We came together in a city and on a day when there were shows aplenty to see, and so we were able to explore this dimension of our connection. We were able as well to touch on the powerful subjects of the soul mate, the couple, the expectations of collaboration, sharing and love. She has lived and lost what I dearly would like to experience. Having lived such beauty once in her life (for 20 years if I remember correctly) will she be granted another such? or will her knowledge, love and expertise shine on a larger world?

To know each other and yet to not know each other at all. I, the American in Provence, getting her hair done, wandering about a city with her dog, bubbling with nervousness and pleasure at our encounter. She, seemingly more poised, a touch older (but not by much), certainly calmer. Her experiences and direction appeared focused. Whereas I am only just gelling a few ideas into a larger whole.

The world of blogging has offered me a chance to share and to communicate. I love the written word. I've now met two different woman who've been following my blog for over a year. It is startling. I know little of them. I have much to learn. It is my turn to ask questions, to listen. They know intimate details of me. They've read me and mine. My time for sharing is put on hold.

Once the first encounter has passed, will we keep in touch further? Will I hop on a plane to Ireland? I'm tempted, but scared to drive on the other side of the road, I might be a burden. Will we collaborate on future projects?

The written word is a first level. The physical presence of two beings in the same space is another. As many who've tried internet web sites to meet a beloved have discovered, the reality doesn't always fit the words read. I wonder again about my outer and inner self. Is there yet a schism there? Do I surprise? or do I confirm?

However, I am also simply grateful. This has been a magical summer filled with much of what I seek: beauty, work, friends and new encounters. Thank you.