A difficult part with all of this is that it’s _all_ mental. You can imagine what you’d like but the world doesn’t bend to your imagination unless you’re a billionaire. It’s really more about finding the spot where the puzzle piece fits best, not where it fits perfectly, because it won’t. There’s some chaos to consider, and for some, that’s absolutely terrifying. For me, it’s the sprinkles on the bagel of life. It’s what makes it more than just a bread doughnut. 

“Discovery” is a far nicer way than saying “unknown” and it’s deeply important to both my wife and to me. It might be for our teenage kids too, but it’s tricky to tell, their personality partly masked by the weight of those teen years. Still, we feel that it must be there somewhere  judging on how eagerly they go looking for local cats to pet when the moment dinner is over. 

Dinner is something we hadn’t really thought about when making up our list but it has become a pretty big part of the experience here for us all. Specifically, Wednesday dinner. We had bought our house sight unseen except for some beautiful photos made by the seller and some very janky videos made by the estate agent. It’s hard to wrap your head around what a space really looks like until you can physically stand there and understand how big or small a room actually is. Photos will definitely beat-out descriptions when it comes to a real estate listing, but it can’t rival being there. So, once papers had been signed and money transferred, we came and looked at what we had done. We couldn’t move in yet, for the wheels of legalities move slowly in France, but we could come and see. We had rolled the dice and put a big chunk of our future on the real estate roulette wheel. Like I said… absolutely terrifying.

What we found out was that we were very fortunate in how the dice landed. I won’t actually say “lucky” because there had been a tremendous quantity of work that we had put into research first, but Fortune definitely smiled on us when it came to the little things that actually mean so much. Our house wasn’t next to a neighbor who was irritable and tricky. We didn’t wind up next to the farmyard where the tractor is left to idle during breaks. There wasn’t a streetlamp that shone into the bedroom window. All small stuff but items that can add up to degrading an experience and all items that are tricky to know until you actually go there and experience it. Another added piece of fortune was the seller himself. One rarely puts “delightful seller” on the list when looking for a new property to buy, but delightful he was and it quickly became apparent that our relationship with him and his wife was going to be more than transactionary and last longer than it took to just get everything signed and keys passed over. When we met just him on that first, blisteringly hot, Summer day, we all did a lot of smiling and nodding from behind N95 masks. He spoke limited English, the estate agent wandered around distractedly, I spoke nearly no French and my mulit-lingual wife, though non-contagious at this point, was still recovering from covid that had really laid her low. Communication with them was tricky, but after finally viewing the house and being shown various systems by the seller, we did understand that we were invited to the village to have dinner, which sounded lovely, but odd. 

Most villages of a certain size will have market days. Where our house is doesn’t even rate as a village, but rather, a hamlet. Made up of only a handful of houses, sparsely lived in, there would never be a good enough reason to have a market here, so we go to our anchor village where market day is on Friday. This is actually pretty handy considering how much is closed on Sunday. It’s a good chance to load up. We like to go and look at what is being offered at the various trucks and stands and stock up on the necessities of life such as rotisserie chicken, local honey, some locally grown produce or a fancy, new hat. There’s even a mattress seller there, his display pieces arranged like an ambitious bedroom set for eight, while he sits on the edge of one, typing away on his mobile like a man who just woke up in some strange village square and is trying to figure out what happened. All of this is set up in the heart of a medieval village under the ubiquitous plane trees with their camouflage like bark. But as this was Wednesday and not Friday, the space has other uses just then. 

We arrived that evening not knowing quite what to expect, but whatever we thought, it wasn’t what we found. The large, open spot under the leaves that had been reserved for market day and parking spots the rest of the week had been transformed with row after row of tightly packed, long, cafeteria style tables, filled to capacity with happy locals. They were there as friends and as families, old and young. Around the edges of the seating roamed older men and women looking for all the world like retired school teachers who had somehow pulled extra lunch duty and needed to keep an eye on the very congenial crowd. In their arms they held stacks of paper placemats that if you made eye contact with them, they’d hand to you to take and mark your dining spot with while you scurried off to find your choice of dinner. 

That was the next step. There is no table service here. All along the periphery of all this noisy, laughing and eating enjoyment are the multitude of vendors selling everything you need to make a delicious meal, with a few special dishes spot-lit as local favorites. The family who was selling us our house was there, all smiles and anticipation and had saved us seats with their regular crew. As we looked around and partook of the food and conversation as best we could, we were warmed by more than just the good, homespun food but also the whole picture of where we were and what was happening that night. Those who had heard about the new American family who have just bought a house nearby watched us with unguarded anticipation as we tried the farçous, a sort of swiss chard pancake fried in oil and the aligot (cheese and mashed potato blended until smooth), both regional staples. The aligot was just as you’d expect potato and cheese to taste. It would stick to your ribs and keep you going. It was farmer’s food and did its job well. The farçous was something else. Served piping hot in a foil wrapped stack like pancakes, they were handed around and deeply enjoyed by all, ourselves included. They were warm and savory, peppery and fried and disappeared quickly while a few of our new friends got up from their seats to wait in line and replenish the pile. On that first night, no one would let us buy anything. We shared wine and food and what conversation we could while the accordion player who had set up at the feet of the ubiquitous war memorial played a medley of old French favorites such as the beloved “La Vie en rose” and other less expected songs such as “The Bare Necessities” from Disney’s The Jungle Book as well as Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” and “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi. An eclectic mix that somehow works. Later on, this chaotic playlist would be a major inducement in getting our teenagers to join us in the craziness. Though neither enjoy loud crowds, they both enjoy the moment when the accordion fires up the first few lines of a new song and the two of them stare at each other over a pile of green pancakes, smirking as they attempt to figure out what the latest tune is.

Oh, My, GOD! It’s “I will survive” by Gloria Gaynor!

What we had stumbled into was a vibrant and welcoming region who wanted to make sure we noticed just that. We were invited in, attempted to communicate and even succeeded from time to time, all while being fed by the village and region. What this brings to the experience could never be accurately included in a real estate listing. This needs to be lived. 

Every Summer Wednesday, the square is set up for this communal meal and the people selling gaufrettes, sausage, aligot, escargot, farçous, local honey, local beer, local wine, local jam, local everything will be there and at your service. We save room for a ball or two of gelato as we leave the table, saying “bon soir” to friends and neighbors and then wander the quiet streets of the village with our cones as we look for the well fed communally owned cats that wander about looking for a pat and rub or a bit of a treat that you might have on hand. The river flows past the town as it has for more centuries than we could know and the distant sound of accordion music floats on the breeze. It’s magical and fleeting. 

Come Autumn, the village meals will end as the chilly weather takes hold, but we will be long gone far before that happens. Our time here is limited and even though we have our cottage on the river to enjoy all this from, we still need to work and that takes place back in the United States. Being teachers, six weeks is what we can manage and though that sounds like a dream for most workers back in the States, it seems like a tease once you really get to love this patch of France. We will close up our house, drain the pipes and be gone for the long, cold winter. The long tables put away and the accordion player will move inside the Cafe L’Independance to keep his fingers from freezing. We will just have to wait to enjoy all this again, dreaming of unexpected tunes and green pancakes with friends under a canopy of leaves and tradition.

Background noise is with most of us most of the time and generally speaking, we don’t even notice it until there’s a power outage or something remarkable happens that makes a fundamental change in our environment. Even on the little island we live on in Maine, the thrum of ambient sound never really leaves us. If you stop and listen, even in the island’s center, the sounds of traffic from the city across miles of bay can be heard, their horns and sirens, faint on a whispering breeze, but undeniably there. Then there are the jets blasting over every few minutes, loud enough to pause conversation while we wait patiently to finish our pithy reply to the comments at hand. 

I’m not complaining about any of that, though. I think to do so ignores some pretty egregious hypocrisy. The city sounds on the horizon mean easy access to the trappings of civilization that drew us here in the first place. My wife’s commute to work might start with a ferry voyage to the mainland, but it ends with her climbing into a car and driving on the highway, and highways are noisy as hell. Those planes that fly over our house, way out on a point of land in the North Atlantic, carry people and last time I checked, we’re people too. In fact, if we can figure out a way to use our local airport rather than driving to Boston, we leap at the chance. Why wouldn’t you? This is where we wanted to live… but the noise does get old from time to time. France has the noise of life too, to be sure, but somehow it feels different. There is traffic and there are (happily) more trains to ride and it all contributes to the noise. There are trucks on rural roads and airports both international and regional, but the constancy of the sound seems to be less for some reason. For me, there are noticeable breaks that I just don’t really encounter or maybe notice back in the US and those breaks sort of showcase sounds unlike I’m used to.

For starters, there’s a donkey. Somewhere on the other side of the Lot River, not too far from our house lives one of the more adorably dorky animals that ever existed. We know that it’s there because we can hear it from time to time, and we know it’s a donkey because if you’ve never heard a donkey before, you will most definitely never forget what one sounds like once you have. Horses can be quite loud with a well timed “neigh!” and you can hear them just fine at a pretty decent distance, but donkeys do not neigh, they “bray” and a “neigh” and a “bray” have about as much in common as a red bell pepper and a scotch bonnet. If there is a lyrical cascade to a horse’s whinny, a donkey counters that with what resembles the vocalization of a high speed car accident, all wrending metal and spiraling debris. 

Sounds delightful, right? Actually, it cracks us up every time. 

The good news is that these ridiculous and noisy critters, all giant ears and goofy smiles, are far enough away that their calls fit into the “funny” column rather than the “make it stop” category, and for that, we know we are fortunate. As we bought our house pretty much sight unseen, it could have been so very much worse. On an outing to the other side of the Lot yesterday, we finally laid eyes on what we had previously only heard and got a chance to chat with the two fluffy nerds. As it turns out, they live in a pasture just above a local abbey church, a beautiful view of the village cemetery and the green fields leading to the water’s edge not far away. It’s a pretty idyllic place to be a donkey and they seemed pretty happy with the set up, and I can easily see why. They don’t bray all the time or even often, but rather seem to wait for their noisy, noisy turn in the spotlight.

I suppose the sound here is more about the taking of turns. Background sound follows us everywhere, some man made and some natural, but this little corner of France seems to do a lovely job of compartmentalizing. Even the wind seems to wait patiently and the only real constant I can hear from the house is the jumbling of watery ripples as they pass over the rounded stones in the river. Sure, the occasional car or farm vehicle passes the house, but it’s a sudden “whoosh” and then we’re just back to the river. Well, almost. 

As I sit in my favorite window each morning overlooking the river I have fallen hopelessly in love with, I wait for another sound which I anticipate with almost as much joy as the final sputters of the coffee machine. Though I am nearly always the first one awake in the house, when I am here at the River Cottage, I am rarely alone. I have a morning companion who is perfect for sharing the quiet of a French morning with. He shows up nearly every day around eight and is named Haaron. Ok. We actually named him that, and his full name is Haaron the Heron. He’s French you see, so we figure that the first “H” is silent, just like he nearly is. Haaron joins me innocuously as I try to write in the freshness of a new day and rarely squawks. Instead, I can hear the pumping of large, slate grey wings as he approaches to land in the shallows and hunt for his fishy breakfast. Sometimes he makes a bit of racket if another heron shows up to poach his territory, but generally speaking it’s the rapid “whump, whump” of big wings coming in for a landing that tips me off of his arrival. That, or the sporadic quacking from the ducks who live nearby, letting everyone know that the big guy is back in town. It very quickly all goes back to quiet though. 

“But, I hear you say, “that’s what the countryside is like! You get into a city and it’s right back to the noise you’re used to!” And that’s true, but only sorta. Even when we visit the bustling, urban centers, there’s a cadence to the quiet. Last week, we were in the seaside city of Cassis and though this was once the back of beyond and no doubt, ages ago, just a sleepy fishing village, those days are far behind it. Now, Cassis marks the start of the Côte d’Azur and it is anything but sleepy. Tourist shops and restaurants crowd the waterfront while hoards of holidaymakers wander cluelessly through the streets looking for their hotel or apartment rental. I cast no stones here. I was just as lost when we arrived and it all seemed fairly overwhelming. The interesting thing though is that this city does most definitely sleep still. Waking up in the morning before most decent vacationers, I walked to our balcony and was stunned by the silence. It might not have been dead quiet, but even by eight o’clock, things were still very, very quiet out there. Most cities I’m familiar with of this size would have been in high gear and on their third coffee by now, but not Cassis. The entire population, civil servants included, seemed to be enjoying the freshness of a new day full of brilliant blue water and even more brilliant blue skies. They take it slow and the only real sound is of the beating of pigeon wings and their absolutely ridiculous, cartoon-like squeaking. (Seriously. If you have never heard a European pigeon, you are in for a coffee snarfling laugh when you do. Utterly hilarious.) By nine or ten, the town is alive and the tourists and locals are buzzing about on the itinerary of the day, but the thing is, the quiet was there too, and you can notice it. 

In the France I love to travel, there is a pattern of sounds. Rather than the layering of one thing over another, each moment seems to have its showcase. Mornings feel sacred and the two hours at lunch are still observed by most. Cafés fill up and the clank of dishes and glasses replace the sounds of feet crunching on gravel or shopping or cars whipping past. In the countryside, the after lunch period seems to be made for napping, at least while your food digests a bit. By the dinner hour, roads empty again and if you walk through a village, hamlet, town or city, you can hear families sitting down to talk and enjoy something delicious. There’s a rhythm to the sounds and I deeply enjoy it. It keeps me mindful not to disrupt things with noisy activities until it’s appropriate and it makes it better for everyone in earshot, if a bit confining for those who want to partake of noisy activities. Still, there’s time for that too… if you wait. It might not be enough time to get it all done today, but hey, there’s always tomorrow and that works out just fine. Take your time and do it properly. 

The morning is ending and Haaron the Heron has moved on to his late morning patch of river. Cars are starting to come by more often and one of the donkeys across the river just brayed. The day is awake at last, though still mighty calm. People will get industrious soon and traffic will pick up, but by lunch time, it will quiet down again and evening will be lovely. I can hear the “ca-clunk” of the rental kayaks hitting the rock of the shallows and the chatty hikers will pass our door within the hour. It’s a lovely pattern of sounds and one I will miss once we leave. It is good to know that it will be waiting for us here again next summer. 

This is the world I know now, and don’t get me wrong, I love technology and what it can do for me. It’s just that sometimes, I forget that you don’t need it and that goes for cell phones or premanufactured bits and pieces of life. For our summer here in the backwoods of France, I had packed for everything. The weight of high tech gadgetry easily would outweigh a well fed three year old but to cut myself some slack, I was packing for the perceived electronic needs of four, plus outfitting a house. I was ready, or so I thought. 

The first to die way my laptop. It’s elderly and I knew it was far from perfect, but I had expected to at least be able to write on it and hadn’t anticipated the video just giving up the ghost and reducing it to paperweight status. Drat. The next to go was my son’s laptop. This time it was the operating system that became corrupted and thus putting an end to his ability to work on his digital music scoring. We could try to reinstall the OS, but that requires internet. Luckily, we had just had a brand new fiber optic modem and router installed about three days after arriving!!… and that lasted two more before fritzing out. It’s been on and off ever since, so the first question asked by my spouse and children each morning is, “Do we have internet right now?” Our provider loaned us a cellular system to use while they work out the problem… but that doesn’t function either. We have all resorted to other ways of doing things. Older ways. 

Beyond the computers all being aggravating and forcing us to draw or read, I’ve had to reach into my personal wayback machine of a brain for other skills as well. Our house is in good shape, but like all houses that have stood for over one hundred years, it needs things done. My wife and I are used to this sort of living, having twice done this before with other houses,  but back in the US, I had an Ace to play that is sadly missing here in our French house. Tools. I need French tools. And many of the powered variety. Some tools I actually brought. Old fashioned hand tools, many of nostalgic, family provenance were stuffed in luggage to be flown far away from their old dusty pegs in the basement to be put on new dusty pegs here in France. A screwdriver is a screwdriver, after all. Power tools for here are trickier, however. Household electricity in Europe is not only a higher voltage than in the US, but also runs at a different frequency. Essentially, it talks twice as fast to the motor and in a different language. This means that if your imported powertool connects to the French powergrid, it’s going to overload and fry, much like me after a long outing with French friends. The difference being that I can’t soak it in wine to make it feel better. Pretty much anything with a motor intended for the US power grid is a no-go. You need EU designed tools and like anything of good quality, power tools are pricey. 

Not unsurprisingly, our budget for decking out our new house with all the trappings of life got blown out and exceeded in record time, so now it’s time to make do. If I needed to make a 45º cut on a board at home, I’d go to the chopsaw and zip it out in two seconds. I don’t have a chopsaw here because the cheap ones aren’t that cheap and you wouldn’t want a cheap one anyway. A hard lesson I have learned a few times now is that in the end, cheap tools will cost you more than good ones, but in this case, the good ones are way too costly for now. I’d check just how costly they are and give you a number, but the internet just went out again, so I can’t. We’ll put it down as “too much for the present.” This means I get to take a dose of my own medicine.

Being of that generation who straddled the two worlds of analog and digital, I learned how to do things by hand and with tools older than my parents. Gen X didn’t have to use them for long. Keyless drill chucks and powerful batteries were just around the corner for us to use, but we did learn on the old, rusty, dusty, iron tools of yore and though not terribly efficient, I do know what to do with them. Now to go looking in dusty, dark corners.

Did I mention I have a barn? 

I have a BARN!

The River Cottage’s barn (or grange, here in France) was mercifully dealt with before we received the keys to the place and largely cleared of the decades of debris that a barn inevitably accumulates… but not all of it. As much as looking at the mess that was there during the showing of the property made my fingers tingle with the anticipation of discovery, I know how lucky we are that we didn’t have to deal with the mountains of half or wholly forgotten things that dwelt there under layers of spider webs and bat poop. Nope! Though the boxes were mostly gone, they were not entirely! As I have stated to my young classroom students far too many times, you don’t have to chop down a tree with an ax, but you should know how to. You might need that skill. In one of the few boxes left behind in the barn sat my solutions. Heavily rusted with handles holed by woodworm, a nice clutch of hand tools. And so, powered by necessity and perhaps too much nostalgic pride, I use the miter box I found or take a file to an ancient auger bit to knock the rust off and put an edge back on its tip or assessing the usability of some block planes. It brings me back to memories of fiddling about in my parent’s basement, not making anything in particular but feeling industrious just by making sawdust and wood shavings.

It’s a heck of a lot slower working this way, for sure, but it’s also a lot quieter and allows me to hear the river rolling by out my front door rather than the scream of motorized blades flying. Even the bat that lives in my grange and makes a mess on our newly painted floor sticks around and sleeps while I line things up and saw rhythmically back and forth and humming to myself. It’s not a bad way to be. Ultimately, I’ll need to suck it up and buy some noisy machines for the barn. There are a multitude of things we want to do to our property and three buildings that need doing. Couple that with the relatively short amount of time that we have here each summer and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that doing the work like this isn’t going to check things off the list anywhere near fast enough. So perhaps next year that means a table saw and a chop saw. I’ll probably need a drill press or a joiner too and a big hammer drill and meter long masonry bits as well. Oh, and a tile saw. Obviously. Ughh… I can hear next year’s wallet screaming already. 

For now though, I’m happy to ignore my broken or frustrating computer technology and write on my tiny phone screen. I’ll drink my coffee and then head to the barn to grab a screwdriver to fix the window shutter that needs bracing and cut the new support brace with my lightly rusting hand saw. I can hear the birds and the running river across the road and don’t have to look for ear protection before starting the job. I do actually have a dead tree that I need to bring down before too long and a chainsaw would be lovely for that, but I don’t actually need one if I can’t find one. I know how to drop it with the tools in the barn and I’ll tell you this, though it looks like the old bow saw I found and have in mind hasn’t moved off its peg in about a decade or more, I know that unlike my chainsaw back in Maine, this one will start on the first pull. 

I’ll just set out a few aspirin to take after I’m done.  

 Perhaps “adventurous” isn’t the right word. I could probably do some digging and find some perfect, nineteenth century way of encapsulating what I feel I am, but I associate “adventurous” with “dangerous” or “risky”. Sort of somehow… willfully being an idiot. Risk and danger are with us always and I don’t think avoiding it at all costs is healthy either. Some might see it as a balance of risk vs safety, but I see it as more complex than that. In my case anyway, it’s a complex cocktail with lots of ingredients including dreams, reality and fear. You need to add in the fear, but probably not the way you are thinking. 

Fear doesn’t have to be just an anchor. It can also sort of be the baking soda in life and it’s a powerful motivator once you notice it. I did and it scared me right down to my core. We’re talking existential levels of dread here. What a connoisseur might refer to as The Good Stuff. It didn’t hit all at once but as I grew up, smacking me around like incoming waves on a beach when you wander out a little too far in the surf. That seventh wave will getcha’ though. Man…

The beginnings of all of this probably start with childhood imaginings and the dangers of dreaming big. One minute you’re working out the “details” of how to build the ultimate flying saucer launch facility under the tool shed out back and the next, you’re wondering what you can do to make your resume stand out for that beige colored job you don’t actually want but are still applying for. One minute it’s hunting for snakes by the wood pile and then suddenly it’s hunting for dress socks at 6:00 AM. It’s the duality that blows me away. It happens slowly enough that you don’t really notice it changing but then you spin around and what the hell just happened?! I wanted garter snakes not gartered socks!

I’m a planner by nature, or at least I overthink like hell and call it planning. Either way, my Seventh Wave of fear hit me when I was still in college while I was officially expanding my mind with Academia and unofficially expanding it with personal growth and way too much Pink Floyd. Some folk might assume that this probably included certain enhancing herbal substances, and I make no judgment on those who partake, but I tell you sincerely, a mix of a vivid imagination and overthinking is one hell of a drug and eclipses the need for any other. Paying attention to the lyrics were enough to thoroughly spook me.

The album was, naturally, Dark Side of the Moon. 

The song: Time.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain

You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

I can’t adequately express to you the weapons grade, pants wetting, terror that song put in me. Was that going to be me? Was I going to just sort of move forward until I was too old to build that UFO base in the backyard? My brain tends to works a little… differently than most and I continuously have more amazing ideas than I could ever have time to do them. Life is full of choices and I needed to start picking what to do to build a life I found fulfilling. 

Along with a host of other choices I’ve made over the years, this house nestled in a crinkle of French countryside is definitely part of that. More than just a place to enjoy, it keeps us off balance as well, which I view as a sort of existential exercise. Everything is harder to do here either because we are unfamiliar with the correct way of doing things in a new environment or because we just don’t have the language down yet (though my wife is way out ahead of me in that regard). Because we need to constantly work at understanding and learning, it think it helps keep us from becoming curmudgeons. We’re new here and don’t see the things or people who are gone or how things have changed. For us, it’s all new and exciting and for me, anyway, helps me approach life with a bit of that “wonder in the eye” that young children have in abundance. It’s a way to regain some of that awe, and though I’m not so interested in building a flying saucer base any more, I am interested in rehabbing our barn so that we can have that art studio space that we’ve always wanted but never had space for, time-wise or square foot-wise.

Fear needs to work hand in hand with dreams or I think those dreams are unlikely to be realized. Every once in a while it just sort of happens and sweeps you along with the rush, but it seems to me that it’s the pushing yourself to do the frightening thing in the hopes of a payoff that allows for the “amazing” or at least the “fulfilling” to happen. It’s going on that hiking trip to sleep in the spooky, ink black woods so you can see the dawn over the mountains or starting a project bigger than you ever have before to create something unprecedented. It’s the step of taking what’s a dream and making it real, even when it doesn’t seem possible. One step. Then another. Then another. Is your dream to see someplace far away? Is it to create something beautiful with your own hands? To explore places you’ve never seen or push your abilities (rare or homespun) to higher and higher achievement? Maybe it’s to… oh, I don’t know… buy a house in France and fix it up! Crazy, huh? 

The wild part is that you can do these things, but you have to start.

When I tell people that we bought a house down by a river and overlooked by pastures and castles, I usually get a lot of questions. The first one is “why?” but followed closely with “how?” There honestly seems to be a lot of interest from both friends and acquaintances about the way this can be done and the possibilities that exist. I watch the preconceived notions and supposed roadblocks melt away as I explain how we did it until there is nothing left to stop them but their own reluctance and that’s what needs measuring. In the end it really comes down to the adventure you want versus the fear, but not the fear OF the thing, but rather the fear of NOT doing the thing. You’re already here and time only goes in one direction, so what do you need to do to feel like you’ve spent it well?

Buying this place that we have named The River Cottage has brought a great deal of stress and work into our lives. We’ve just started on this long road and the continuing responsibility will weigh on us for sure, but I wouldn’t have passed it up for the world. The work will definitely wear on me with the passing of years but it also keeps me young and my eyes up and looking ahead. It’s both a culmination of dreams and what I hope is a good path to walk down. As the song says, when I look at the “Ten years that got behind you”, I’m pretty sure that I’ll be happy with how the run is going. I know that I am so far. 

When I look back at my childhood memories, my interaction with water features more strongly than I would have originally expected. There is no ocean in Western New Hampshire so the water I found came in a variety of forms. There were the ponds, usually filled for agricultural or water control jobs rather than the purely aesthetic, filled with nondescript, little brown fish and eighty year old snapping turtles the size of trash can lids, reportedly hungry for toes and lurking in the tea colored depths. There were the lakes, ice cold and fed from unseen springs deep in the cracked granite that made their bottoms and shores. They were harder to get to, usually requiring a parent to ferry young passengers to their edges and then, reserved only for the hottest days as plunging into their waters would suck your breath away. Then there were streams. For me, these were the gold on an endless Summer afternoon. Their sources usually findable, the water moving quickly, keeping the icky things like leeches to a minimum and the water’s speed being enough to undercut root covered banks making the perfect spot to either look for fish or simply play. There were a number of them that I would visit either alone or with friends and spend hours poking around them. On a few hot days, I would just sit down in the current and listen to the sound as it jumped over the round stones. I absolutely love that sound. 

Rivers were trickier. They could be dangerous and needed respecting. The biggest one near my home town would be the Connecticut. True, it wasn’t “near” me, but it’s the feature that separates New Hampshire and Vermont and she runs hard and deep. My childhood was filled with stories of how it was a highway for the native population and later, European traders and settlers. There were other warning stories as well.  Seemingly every year we would hear about folks who drown in it, either falling through thin river ice and swept away under the sheet or simply being sucked out into the current when they ventured too far from whatever calm stretch they were swimming in. It was serious business and one that honestly spooked me. Swimming there to me felt like the equivalent of playing hopscotch on the highway. You could… but you really shouldn’t.

There was a local option that was safer though, a river named the Ashuelot (pronounced Ash-whee-lot) which is an offshoot of the Connecticut and is far more manageable and always called to me. It was also getable by a kid on a bicycle and wound through a lot of the places I liked to frequent. It changed so much from one part to the next and that was a lot of the fun. Some spots were wide and shallow where you could roll up pant legs and flip rocks looking for crayfish. Other parts were deep and slow with old, smooth tree trunks protruding from the calm surface, slowly accumulating reeds and other debris in their skeletal grasp as the water rolled by. You could see the bottom in the shallow places but the water was stained with the tannins of a billion Fall leaves which you could watch pass silently by, turning over and over only a little below the surface. Unlike the Connecticut, there was a calm here. The industries that used to harness the Ashuelot’s power with water wheels and dams and who used to pollute it with industrial who-knows-what were all closed now or had moved over to other interests and were powered by electrical lines, leaving the river to flush itself clean, reclaim its banks and give a young kid a place to explore. I would walk its edge, canoe it with my Dad, mess around in its shallows and fruitlessly try to catch its fish. 

When I grew up, I moved to the sea and there I’ve been for the last quarter century. I love it there, but to my surprise, I discovered that I had sort of forgotten about the rivers.

When we were looking and looking and looking for our future house in France, we knew one thing for absolute sure. We had made a list of what we felt was important and sitting right at the top was water access. Actually, we initially referred to it as “water security” as the world heats up and water becomes more and more of a pressing news item. There are so many places in France that are picturesque and inviting, but not all of this amazing country is green or sadly, will remain so in the coming years. We wanted to bet on green. We had cast our eyes all over this country for the right spot and eventually, the ball in the roulette wheel landed on the upper Lot valley with its high ridgelines funneling a river of the same name on its way to the West. As you travel its length to toward Bordeaux, you’d see something mighty, wide and strong with boats plying its brown waters, but here where I overlook its runnings, it’s a very different thing. 

Not too far from our house, the Lot is joined by another river, the Truyere, and the two gang up to bring cooling, clear water deep into the crinkles of the low valleys and gorges below. Here the river is still very inviting and reminds me a great deal of the Ashuelot. One could even say that it reminds me of it a Lot. 

One could… but probably shouldn’t. Apologies. 

Long ago, our little French hamlet had a job and the river out front looked substantially different. It was a loading station for the river boats that piled up and down this river carrying timber and charcoal for the big cities down in Bordeaux. The place was fairly bustling and the river lapped at the feet of our house and at times, over it. The Lot was prone to flooding and the markings with corresponding dates on the houses up river hold testament to the dangers of living on a waterway. But just as on the Ashuelot back in New Hampshire, priorities of industry changed with time. Wood began to move via the new and more dependable rail network and charcoal found fewer and fewer consumers as the world moved to coal. The industry here died away and the trees grew back and all was pretty quiet in the upper Lot Valley. Other than chestnuts, our little region didn’t produce much. Then, one day, the hydro engineers came. 

Dams are a touchy subject back in the States because of how they change the natural world around them and who ultimately gets the diverted water. Fish stocks suffer as they can’t move effectively upriver and reservoirs flood out and displace old towns. Here in France, guessing by their regularity, the feelings seem largely different. The Lot and the Truyere hosted many an ancient mill that filled a variety of purposes. Some made flour while others drove cast iron machinery on massive leather belts. Now, multiple dams along their lengths bring both security from flooding and electricity for our homes. Without them, I honestly don’t know if we would have settled here. The fish are restocked yearly, though I’m guessing that they mostly feed for the local wildlife rather than growing to much size for anglers to try to catch. The dams do something else as well. Something very unexpected. They give us tides.

Normally, visibly rising weather levels in a river over the course of a morning are cause for alarm. Here, it’s the norm and you can hear the change as well as see it. The Lot in front of our house is fairly shallow, at least in places, and the water skips along the tops of river stones worn round but untold volumes of time and flow. It’s a happy, burbling noise, not too loud, but often there waiting for me when I get up in the morning. I pour the coffee and sit in my favorite spot with a proprietorial, approving nod upon seeing how she flows this morning as if I had anything to do with it. As the hours roll by, the jumbled sound of water on rocks disappears as the flow increases and the bed of the river vanishes from sight. Things move faster and mid stream islands sink below the surface. The dam in town is opening the sluices and a new sound drifts up the banks of the running river. 

Voices.

By the time it’s getting embarrassing to still be in bed, but before it’s legal to start poking about for lunch, brightly colored kayaks start to sweep by the house, filled with smiling, chatty river riders. One after another they go and for much of the day we can see them scoot by at a good clip, paddling lazily along, letting the swift current of the Lot do most of the work for them. They have rented these little indestructible boats from a local outdoors organization who busses the boats and riders to the headwaters and then picks them back up after a fun day on the water. It’s really quite lovely to watch and even more fun to join in. It showcases the beauty of the region and brings a nice injection of life to the waterway without overtaxing either. I like hearing people laugh and call to each other as they float along, sometimes expertly looking ahead and planning their route and sometimes sideways, trying to avoid a protruding rock as the paddle ineffectively, flailing and laughing only to bounce off the obstacle in the end. It’s honestly a lot of fun. 

Sometimes the tide is up. Sometimes the tide is low. Having lived for so long on the ocean, it’s odd to me how reassuring it is to glance out the window and mention “Oh, it’s high tide.” to the smirks of my family. It’s the best of both worlds and just like the ocean, I don’t think I’ll ever tire of watching it. Water seems to be a part of me whether it’s watching waves crashing on the rocks or the rolling by of the Lot in front of our little river cottage. We seem to be water people. Just being by it makes us happy, and as far as I can tell, that’s been the whole point all along. 

To this day, I am intensely protective of what workaholics would call “down time” but what I prefer to think of it as “my time”. In the United States, it is hammered into you from early on that relaxing is something best thought about in an abstract “someday” sort of way rather than actually doing any. In many, if not most jobs in the good ole USA taking time to decompress is simultaneously proclaimed as important to your well being but also something that you will absolutely get penalized for actually doing. 

“Finished your work early? Why not go over next week’s projections with Alan in accounting? Overtime coming open you could snag? If you don’t, someone will and, after all,  you didn’t have any real plans for this weekend anyway, right?” 

This way of living isn’t just woven into the fabric of how Americans think, it IS the fabric. Taking a vacation is still allowed of course, but not too long and only during the down season and you better be checking email a few times a day to keep from slipping behind and don’t forget to keep your cell phone volume on. We’ll need to be able to call you if there are any problems with the Galafakus account. What’s the time difference where you are again? 

Heck, we even have a saying for it! “Idleness is the Devil’s Workshop” and though that might sound like a Puritanical blast from the past, it actually only originates in a 1971 attempt to indoctrinate kids into the “nose to the grindstone” culture we are supposed to aspire to. 

Never stop working, kid! Otherwise you’re just helping our competitors AND the Prince of Darkness!

I can’t speak for other parts of the country, but my upbringing is rooted deep in Old New England where work ethic unequivocally tops the virtue tier list. Blame it on the whatever you want: Puritans, the ruggedness of the land that needed clearing or the birth of the Industrial Revolution that dammed up the rivers and created the textiles that clothed so much of the world, but hard work, or rather working hard, is not merely the goal, but the duty. 

“Idle hands are the Devil’s work.”

Augh! That’s another variation! The Devil sure has a lot to do with the inverse of my chore list. I never realized how personalized his services are. Great work ethic, really.

A lot of places in the world that are NOT the United States have a very different view of things work related and get a pretty undeserved bad rap back in the part of the world that is the United States. The utter ridiculousness of the two hour lunch. Having to make appointments for every little thing. The idea of closing your store for one or possibly two days a week. Two whole days?!? Madness! That’s lost profit! 

But the thing is, it’s also so lovely and more human, though it takes some reeducation on my part to get my head around this way of thinking. Here’s an example. We have opened an account at a bank here in France. Getting it set up wasn’t too hard, though they did have some unfamiliar hurdles that we needed to clear first. No big deal. We filled in the paperwork, sent in the copies of identification and the bank created the account. Easy peasy. To get the money out once deposited though was a little tricky and unfamiliar to our old routines. We need to go to a bank branch, talk with a bank official who will then verify that we are who we say, ask us how much money we would like to withdraw and then issue us a special one-use debit card with that amount assigned to it. We then take that card to the bank lobby and put in the card which then spits out the entire amount in one go. The card gets schlooped up by the machine, never to be seen again by us and if we want more money, we need to go through the whole process again. 

It’s not a terrible system, but wasn’t what we considered ideal either. We wanted a regular style bank card like we have back in the States. Was that possible? We were told, “Yes! It is!” 

“Great!” we thought. “Can you just send them to us?” They replied, “No. We don’t do that. You need to come to the bank and get them in person.”

Hardly the end of the world, but at that moment, we were still toiling away back in the US. It was Winter and we wouldn’t be there until July. It would have to wait, and so it did. When we finally made it to our River Cottage on the Lot river, it was time to get those cards. We walked into the back and asked for them. 

“No.” the bank official told us with a smile. “You can’t just get them. You must make an appointment. The next available time is in a week. Would you like me to schedule a rendezvous?”. I don’t know why, but calling it a rendezvous rather than a meeting somehow made this better. We agreed and took out some cash to live off until our rendezvous. The day before the appointed time, we got a phone call. There had been a scheduling problem and the rendezvous needed to be pushed out another week. This was a disappointment and going to start making life potentially tricky. We needed a solution. My wife asked if we could just cancel the appointment and drive to one of the major cities forty-five minutes away to go to a main bank branch instead. The momentary silence on the line indicated thinking. If we made a rendezvous elsewhere, the new bank would no doubt hear about why we couldn’t use our local and that wasn’t good. A quick search through various calendars and another, closer day was found. Could we make that? Yes, we could! A new date was set and we were a little more careful with cash purchases. 

When the date and time finally arrived, we headed to the bank and within moments were seated in a comfortable, private office with a smiling young man in a sharp suit. He would be our banker and just had some things to cover with us and after introductions, we dove in. Over the next hour-plus. Here’s what we learned:

• There are two different types of card accounts we could use with different structures.
• He grew up about a half an hour away from here.
• We would have only one card so we needed to pick whose name went on it.
• He went to school in Toulouse.
• Sadly, the card would not be issued today but rather, next week.
• The fog in our valley sticks to the hilltops but where he’s from, it’s thick right to the ground all morning and sometimes for the entire day.
• There are limits on how much you can deposit and withdraw per week with the card.
• He feels that the local Occitan language will be gone in a generation, which makes him sad. 
• The main branch of the Bank might be able to hurry things along and he’d ask them for us.
• The department store we’ve been using in Espalion is extremely reputable, fair and stands by their products. 
• Also, he learned some English when he was traveling in New Zealand but feels that French is still one of the hardest languages to learn. 

I won’t say that we spent only half the time on banking stuff, but it was probably pushing that, and here’s the thing… It was delightful. We were treated just as well as any other customer and though we were there for a specific reason, there was no way that we were going to be there for that ONLY. An important step in getting our banking done was getting to know each other. Nothing deep, but on a common level and that’s wonderful. 

“Ah!” I hear you say. “But it’s also about money! The bank has a vested interest in keeping you happy or else they may lose the account!”

Perhaps so. But I’m convinced that it’s not that entirely or even mostly because I’ve danced this dance before here in the land of Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité. Not long after our rendezvous at the bank, our brand new internet connection at the house crapped out and stayed out.  Something was seriously up and beyond my abilities to get to behave. We reported the outage, did all the rebooting that you are supposed to do and got nowhere. In all, it took about three or four days before we could get help, during which time our children got to discover what it was like to live in the 80’s. We all bore it well, but were pretty excited when the day of the repair finally rolled around. Our house is a bit in the middle of nowhere so a wait for things like this is expectable. As luck would have it, a solid fifteen minutes before the technician arrived, the problem fixed itself. 

PING! It just… worked again. Technology, man… It has a sense of humor and we are all the butt of the joke. 

When the van pulled up out front, I walked out to greet him and explain the situation, which was hilarious because, as I said, I have about twelve words of French. It was the middle of a very hot day and he was all smiles and insisted on checking the unit, just to be thorough. He was definitely surprised to meet Americans out here in rural France and was in a chatty mood. After poking the router a few times and testing the signal he was essentially done, but I remembered a key piece to all this. I offered him a drink. Being the middle of the day, it was just flavored water but it was accepted with a big smile and more chatting which my wife could mostly understand while I stood there drinking my own glass and cluelessly nodding. The conversation ranged over why we were here, how good a socialist system was in caring for its people and local college options for our son. He had done perhaps five minutes of work and spent easily twenty more chit-chatting. It was early enough in the day that he definitely had other calls to make but this time had been allotted to our repair and since it was done early, it gave us time to sort out the world and enjoy a cold, peach flavored water on a hot day. It was great. After he left, my wife explained some of the conversation and that he was happy with our “progress”.

“What do you mean?”

She smiled. “The offered drink! He said that it was the right thing to have done and very French of you. He was impressed.”

I earned French Points from a Frenchman and I have to say, I’m very proud of that.

There’s a little dance that happens in France (and other places too, but France is where we are and their dance is what we’re learning). You need to say “Bonjour” to nearly everyone. Always. Unless it’s afternoon and then it’s “Bonsoir”. It’s expected that you will take the time for pleasantries. Actually, more than pleasantries. You are expected to engage everyone on an equal level, banker, technician, farmer or doctor and that means that though work will absolutely get done, it will categorically not infringe the social discourse. It’s a very different way of living and one that I think is delightful, if less efficient. Efficiency is cold. It takes no prisoners and drives everything into an inescapable tube going full throttle. It’s a trap. Here at least, high efficiency and side hustles are pushed back. TIme to talk and drink is just as high a priority as getting official things done. The two hour lunch, the shops closed all day Sunday and probably Monday too. It’s all more human and for me and harkens back to my childhood a bit when business was more local. 

To be sure, things are changing for the faster here as well, but it’s taking more time and things like strong labor unions and four to six weeks paid vacation provides a bulwark against the calls for faster, cheaper, longer, more, more more. In the end, I don’t think the American style work ethic will ever truly take hold here and that’s a huge bullet dodged. It is a large part of why we are here. Do good work but at a pace that gives you August to do with as you please with your family. That’s the way to live. It will be a long time until I can successfully talk with my neighbors, banker and random delivery people, but that’s fine. It gives me some homework to do, and for some reason, A fresh baked croissant, a lovely glass of wine or black coffee and a view of the Lot river quietly rolling through the pastoral French countryside makes that not so hard to bear. I have work to do. Just at my own pace. 

If my general lack of enthusiasm over learning Spanish wouldn’t have been enough to doom my grades from the outset, I quickly realized that my level of discomfort with the individual who taught it was. I won’t get into the weedy details but I’ll simply say that it was enough to sufficiently motivate me to swallow hard and then transfer to Latin before the add/drop period elapsed. In the end, I wound up with three years of Latin in high school, although one was a repeat of Latin II in an effort to erase that “D” that I had earned the first time around. Latin taught me a lot, actually, though the language itself might not have been what stuck. I can recall that “Gallia est in Europa” and that “Gallia est divisa in partes tres”  and that the Latin for “apartment block” is “insulae” but beyond that, it mostly vaporized away as soon as the test was over. What I did learn was that the people who were in Latin tended to be the oddballs, which I very much resonated with, that I stood the best chance with a language that was spelled the way it sounds, and most importantly, that foreign languages and I went together like ice cream and bagels. We didn’t. 

For whatever reason, learning a language is stupidly difficult for my easily distracted brain. I have to drill vocabulary endlessly or it vanishes away like a moth in a cyclone, never to be seen again. We won’t even venture into discussing my hideous grammar. I didn’t actually abandon learning another language, but decided in my adult years to focus on what little strengths I had in this arena and took on German. After several years and three different, very patient tutors, I can nearly talk to people in the grocery store and have a 50/50 shot at finding the nearest Hauptbahnhof. It’s mostly spelled the way it looks and the linguistic surprises are minimal. I like that.

Suffice to say, French intimidates the beegeebees out of me.

A minefield of silent letters, vowels with a variety of jaunty hats to wear and the straight-up not pronouncing it anything like how it’s spelled awaits me. I’m looking at you, “eau”. My dear wife, who does speak French at a conversational level, is forever having to spell out where we’re going so I can tap it into the car’s GPS. I listen to her talk with the locals and cling like a drowning man to a scrap of wood, hunting for a word I might know and then trying to infer context. I use my cognates in a giant game of Memory, reaching back for Latin root words in an effort of taking a wild stab at random nouns. In the end, I understand perhaps every twentieth word, and that works for now. During my working year, I lack both the time and extra brain power to study French in any meaningful way. During the Summers, there is just so much to do and the weather is fine and mostly, I don’t wanna, which leads me to where I am now. Now, I’m a homeowner in France and I’m lucky if I can remember the name of the next village, never mind what you call a rake or a hammer. Some of it is starting to stick, but the words are haphazard and not especially useful when you bump into a neighbor. The word “impacteur” doesn’t come up a lot, though when you need it, you need it, and I mention it way more than anyone outside of the building trades should. But still there it is, taking up valuable real estate in my brain when I would happily evict it so I can give that spot to something more useful like “gas station” or “lunch” or “another drink would be lovely, thank you”. 

I’ll get there.

In the end, I know that I’ll have to start making myself vocabulary lists on little flashcards again like I did for my stint with both Latin and German, though I think for my own sanity I’ll do them up phonetically so as to avoid some of the linguistic pitfalls that abound in France. I’ll butcher things horribly for years to come, but the fun part is the realization that, health providing, I have those years to butcher it. I had expected a good bit of verbal isolation when I signed up for this adventure and honestly I’m fine with that and still quite excited. Additionally, I also anticipated that there would be the odd English speaking tourist with whom I could give directions or remark on the fineness of the day to, from time to time, and in that respect, I was correct. The surprise I had coming to me were the others. Not my family. The OTHER, others. As it turns out, there are quite a few of them in this little pocket of France and now that introductions have happened, we go walking with them on Thursdays. 

Next up…

The ExPats.

Growing up, I spent many a happy day in the car with one parent or another, running off to do errands on a summer, Saturday morning. I can remember the sun dappling through the leaves of huge overhanging ancient oaks and the few remaining elms as we whizzed down a country road to go to a garden supply shop and maybe feed the ducks. It all had an echo to it. We passed old, half forgotten farm houses and collapsing barns bordered with tiny family cemeteries with no one left to tend them. It was peaceful and bucolic in an epoch changing sort of way. The time of the New England farm was at its end and the places where sturdy farmers toiled were being reclaimed by the trees while fields once rich with livestock, quickly disappeared under fresh canopies of young birch and pine. As time marched along, the few remaining holdout farms threw in the towel and instead of corn or hay, subdivisions and strip malls sprang up as the favored crop. And who can blame them? Farming is backbreaking work with little financial reward while the land itself can be worth millions if sold. Throw on top of that the capricious weather, fluctuation in market prices and the health of livestock and eventually, the love of farming often isn’t enough anymore. So they sell up. What other way is there? 

Living in the 70’s and 80’s, you could still just barely feel the last gasp of old era as you bumped along down a back road. Glimpses of rusting, long ago parked farm equipment in the corner of what was left of a field or two, huge matching maple trees at a gap by the road denoting what was once the front walk to a large, wooden farm house, now only a half filled cellar hole, ruffling the curtains of time, letting you see what once was. I cherished those fleeting views into the past, but over my life they have become very hard to find. Roads get widened and straightened. The trees get cut down for being too close to the now speeding traffic. The field is gouged clean of its topsoil to be sold in  fifty pound bags and a shopping plaza or self storage facility is splatted on top of what is now acres of freshly spread asphalt. It’s not pretty. To be sure, old, beautiful places still exist back in New England, but to live there will cost you dearly. Beautiful views seem only to be for the wealthy these days. 

Here in France, the past is always part of your view. I won’t say that the French are immune to the siren’s song of big box stores and endless parking lots, but they do seem to have a natural aversion to turning over good farmland or pretty views to such endeavors. As I fly along well kept but perilously narrow country roads here in the Cantal, I go by so much that I haven’t seen in so long. Ancient farms with grey stone walls and matching grey stone roves abound, clinging to terraced hillsides like barnacles on a rocky shore. Fields thick with wheat waiting for harvest sit atop the hilltops, the wind blowing swirling patterns as it dances along, while the steep meadows leading to the valleys below are dotted with brown cows and goats happily munching beneath the odd tree. All of this patchwork is separated by swaths of trees dividing neighbor’s farms, cutting the wind and providing timber when needed. And that timber is indeed used. Harvesting is carefully met out and timber trucks are seen from time to time bringing long, straight trunks to the mill, All seems in balance. In the end, it’s the variety in the uses of the land and how it’s sustained that pulls at me here. I’ll be honest, there is development happening in the fields here as well. I saw it yesterday as we drove through the high country, far above the valley floor, but what were they constructing? A new barn, land stabilization behind an old house, what looks to be a solar farm or some other public endeavor, a new, modest sized house on the periphery of a tiny hamlet. 

The Germans (naturally) have an amazing word when speaking of an era. It’s called Zeitgeist, or “time ghost”. Normally, zeitgeist is used to describe the distillation of the moment we are living in, but the word “ghost” has heavy implications. It is something that can fade away or change into something completely different, much as it has back where I come from. Here in the Cantal of France there are ghosts as well but also many old and venerable pockets of time still waiting, curled into the bosom of the land. Walls are repaired and fields replanted. Roves built on new houses but in the method of their great grandfathers. Modernity comes here too, but it must fit within the perilously narrow roads and share that space with an oncoming tractor pulling massive rolls of hay. This is the Old Way’s place and it must be respected. I quite love it, flies and all. I don’t squint and imagine to see the past here because it’s not really there at all. It’s just the way it is. Or perhaps I should say that the past is there, but far more ancient. You can go looking for that too, if you wish. It’s just a walk up an terraced hillside away, but bring your camera or sketchbook because it will stop you in your tracks when you see it. 

To start with, there is simply the planning of it all. Once upon a time, there was an abundance of travel offices filled with knowledgeable individuals who would listen to your travel goals, talk about budgets and then tell you about various package deals approximating your requests. If this wasn’t your vision they could do bespoke as well, but inevitably, it cost more and unless the travel agent was a truly seasoned veteran you could watch them start to get uneasy when the vagaries of travel requirement to off the track places began to stack up, and make no mistake, “off the track” is where the amazing stuff happens. In a pre-internet world, this sort of experience  relied on brochures of indeterminate age and potentially dubious accuracy that were ordered through far off travel offices in other countries. It could require actual intercontinental phone calls to verify that the family run hotel or gîte was in fact reservable and still standing, which came with its own foreign language based issues. Unless you are a polyglot, the farther you head into the hinterlands the fewer people you find who can understand you. Imagine that it is your job to send a family of excited and enthusiastic would-be travelers to some remote village in Sicily to trace family roots or something and you aren’t one-hundred percent sure that the animated individual at the hotel you just got off the phone with in some mountain top hamlet is actually expecting them all on the twenty-third or if he thinks that you were just inquiring for your own edification. No wonder they looked nervous when you didn’t want the package holiday. 

Happily, things are a good deal easier now, though there is definitely part of me that misses the wild west aspect of it all every once in a while. Like so many things in life, it made for super stressful moments when you’d get there and discover that your reservation never went through and the next hotel available is a twenty minute car ride away, but it absolutely made for better storytelling later. The passage of time erodes the anxiety and years later, over dinner, you recount the whole thing to guests with laughter and wonder. Adversity makes life rich, I’m convinced. The trick is to make the adversity bougie enough that it doesn’t mentally scar you. It’s a balancing act. 

Enter the rise of the internet and now so much of the mystery is gone to reservations and such. If it doesn’t hit my credit card, then I know it didn’t go through. The tiny towns have websites explaining the local attractions. Google Maps lets me drive most places to see where I can park and the bus and train schedules are there waiting to be perused. That’s not to say that everything will go as smooth as butter on toast, but it’s definitely easier to fill the gaps. That happens with the help of humans. Though the day of the travel agent is, if not gone, then heavily waned, there are still people out there who help and this is a good chunk of why we travel. Visual experiences and delicious foods are great, but the people you can meet are what makes the memories. The getting here part is not important. It’s a long list of car rides, planes and trains sometimes, but the being here part is the magic. Let’s start with the adventure.

The Cottage on the River…

In our little house out on an island off the coast of Maine, summer Mondays are something special. Everyone here is a school-goer. Our children,  J.O. and Lulu are still in high school and Action Girl and I both teach, so… summer vacation! First and foremost, what it means is no alarms to startle us awake and get us blearlily grabbing for pants and socks as we stagger through a house wondering if the coffee is ready or if I messed up the timer yet again and have to wait for the black bean-water that makes life worth living at five in the morning. It means no wondering what to pack for lunches for four people or trying to remember if there was something important to remember while a cold brain sputters slowly to life. My wife and I have both worked jobs in the past that started late and so, lived alarm clock free before, and I can tell you, it’s absolutely the best existence possible. No question. We all love it. But where we live that can take some odd turns when it comes to Summer break. We live in a tourist spot.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a tourist spot for a very, very good reason. It’s something very special and keeping it a secret from the rest of the world is never going to work. It’s also not super hard to get to, though it does involve a ferry and a not so inexpensive ticket coupled with in town parking prices on the mainland that can make any holidaymaker wince. It’s something that attracts a lot of folk who are also done for the summer, or at least, determined to have some fun, even if it means making a high speed pass at it all before rushing back to the office. We get a lot of high speed tourists. 

The thing is… we’re not all that interesting.  The island is just that. It’s an island, and though it has in its past boasted a wide variety of thrills aimed at 1800’s summertime heat refugees from exotic places like Boston and New York, those times have long gone. The shooting gallery, carouselle, and opera house that once were here for the entertainment of far off travelers are long gone, all burned to the ground for insurance money or turned from sturdy wood to dust and rusted nails by the unrelenting sea air and rain, replaced with smallish cottages and the occasional ridiculously oversized trophy house. It’s a neighborhood with a moat. 

The visitors still come, though. They rent golf carts from the two operators on the island and circle its roads like crazed, rudderless sharks. Our little beaches get packed on hot days, though the water remains freezing and swimmers, scarce or standing ankle deep in the surf, blue lipped and teeth chattering. They photograph piles of rocks built by other golf cart warriors and add a pile of their own while the local kids wait for a chance to knock them all down again. In short, they go to see the interesting things we have, and who can blame them? I try not to, anyway. The island gets busy with strangers and we start to hide. During those days when the crowds get hard to deal with, we hunker down at our home and try to avoid our one, little grocery store and the maelstrom of visitors who congregate there. Our home is our hiding spot, but today, we have an ally. The Fog.

Driving around in an open vehicle though blankets of mist is a hard sell on vacation, as is going to the ocean side when there’s nothing to really see. The sun struggles to light up the world here, but I can see actual plumes of fog rolling down the street like giant dust bunnies, freshly escaped from under some giant’s bed.  Everything is shrouded in muffling, cool, clammy dampness. 

It’s a reprieve well welcomed. I’ll take it. 

Soon, the summertime crowds will start to swell and even a day of thick fog won’t stop their flow. Cottages will have been booked and reservations made and they’ll come hell or high water. We won’t be the only ones to enjoy an alarmclockless Monday morning, and that’s fine. It’s their right too. But for now, I’ll revel in the quiet. I’ve seen only locals walk past my windows this morning and heard the muffled crunch of gravel under their feet rather than the whine and scree of rented gocarts. Action Girl has now joined me on the couch, along with our cat, Pickles, and the kids snooze on. There’s coffee to drink and perhaps crepes to make later. It’s a wonderful morning to enjoy the fog outside and not battle the mist in an early morning brain.