Eight Years in France and the Thrill Lives on

I can’t decide whether the contentment and wonder I feel walking through the vineyards or looking out of the car window to see the tiny villages perched atop hillsides is a function of age or just France.

Maybe it’s a bit of both.

Perhaps if I’d moved here a few decades earlier the shuttered villages would have bored me. I see teenagers huddled in the village bus shelter, eyes glued to mobile phone screens and think of myself growing up in an English seaside town, restless and dreaming of one day moving to London.

Instead, my mother moved us to America. Saint Louis, Missouri where I dreamed of one day moving to California. Years later, after the glitz and glitter of the Golden State began to tarnish, I yearned for the cool green peace of the Pacific Northwest — where, naturally, I grew bored and dreamed again.

Ah France, I love you, I thought when I first arrived. Maybe it was more infatuation than love; everything thrilled me. From the intricacies of a French washing machine to fears of encountering a wild boar on my daily walk, to the man in the boulangerie who weighed the bread before deciding the price. Amazed, I wrote about it all.

In one of my journal entries, written three months after I arrived, I wrote:

I feel a bit like a college kid cramming for an exam only I’m cramming experiences. New words, people, food, customs. Some days, I’m on sensory overload and glad to retreat to my writing table and the quiet of my apartment.

Eight years on, I’m slightly less excitable — daily life would be difficult otherwise. But even on the most ordinary day, the thrill is still there.

The way a beam of winter sunshine falls on the honey-coloured stones of houses built long before I was born; the sense of history in the narrow streets that wind up to the mairie, once a chateau, with its improbably Disneyesque turquoise tower.

On a hot summer day, I walk past a tray of just-baked bread set out to cool on the windowsill of the boulangerie, I hear the chatter of women at the weekly market, shopping baskets on their arms.

It’s like drinking in the features on the face of a lover. All those little details. My heart fills.

Sorry, I’m getting a little syrupy.

France, or my life in France, is not perfect. Maybe, just maybe, it would be nice to go to a restaurant at whatever time I feel like going — rather than between the holy hours of noon and two or seven and nine-thirty.

And if I need aspirin or antiseptic ointment, how much more convenient it would be to pick them up at the supermarket rather than having to make a special trip to the pharmacy — which, of course, is closed Sundays. And, speaking of supermarkets, why can’t I get cashback with my purchase the way I used to in the States? And why do I have to drive fifteen minutes to find an ATM? Why can’t the Tabac put one in — next to the the lottery tickets and tobacco products?

I could go on, but I won’t. True love requires compromise — a few adjustments, a little give and take. Which is all fine with me because I know, deep down, that this is the real thing.

France is exactly where I want to be.

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The Memoirist

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