So the gray skies have arrived and il pleut dans mon coeur comme il pleut sur la ville. Up until this point, the weather has been gorgeous in upper Normandie...a few showers here and there but still delightful enough to sit at a sidewalk café once the sun yawned and stretched its arms. It's been like a grandes vacances, but on Monday morning my reality shall ebb and flow some more toward my new morning train/bus schedules with all the workers as they rush from the suburbs to that mystical magical place known as Paris.
It's been amazing, sharing dinners in different homes in the small villages of France. Some of the elders who have lived harmoniously in the petites villes without ever stepping foot into Paris haven't seen an American since La Libération. I arrived in a house last night for a dinner invitation and I thought if nothing else comes of this trip, last night's conversation made it all worthwhile.
When I walked into the home, my head hit the trim of the doorway. I stepped in the kitchen and the refridgerator was chest-high. The stove and sink hit me mid-thigh, and all of the people scattering around to greet me with kisses had to stretch on their tippy toes to reach me. I was a giant. I felt America-sized. I'm not that tall, really, but I had to rub my eyes and make sure I wasn't on candid camera or had fallen down yet another rabbit hole in life. It was fine once we sat down with our apéritifs but it only added to the constant surrealism of the days I spend in France. I swear I could open the screen-less window in my bedroom and a little robin redbreast would perch on my finger and sing just for me.
Anyyay, the woman was almost 80 years old, and she sat down next to me and told me she went to school with my grandma. She played with my hair and touched my face all over, dangled my earrings and studied me. I thought for a second: this must be what famous people feel like. It was like she just couldn't believe I was sitting in her living room. She had crocheted a beautiful piece for me almost a decade ago upon my first arrival in France, which sits on my dresser among all my pretty perfume bottles. There had been a divorce since I was last here and the blood lines had seperated and technically, these were no longer members of Ma Famille, but I accepted the invitation anyway because it just seemed like the most diplomatic thing to do.
Midway through the meal, it began. Now, these folks, my elders, were either just beginning their adult lives or trying to enjoy their youth under Nazi occupation. It's not something that is spoken of very often, French civilisation was rebuilt and restored to its origins, but the stories start to unfold when my rare appearance presents the opportunity to discuss.
So do you know how your grandmother met your grandfather in Petit Couronne?
It usually begins as a simple love story but each time it is told there are new developments, a repressed memory resurfaces, or the story changes itself altogether.
Yes, my grandfather stormed the shores of Normandy with US Army paratroopers and combatted the land to this little town where my French grandma was living. The town had been ransacked by bombs, there are tales woven of entire families gone the next day, either taken away to concentration camps or their houses bombed. There are tales of questioning on the streets by the Nazis, of escape routes to Vichy, of sheer pandemonium that is very painfully and scarcely unveiled by the elders.
But then the Americans arrived into town. They were staying in a grande maison, and the mother of the woman sitting next to me last night at the dinner table used to go down to gather cigarettes from the American soldiers for her son who had been imprisoned. In return, she did all their laundry, including my Grandpa's. That painted a picture for me...this woman next to me in her late teens, hanging American GI uniforms and undies and socks to dry in her childhood home's backyard.
The stories are all so rich, scattered and nearly lost, and I couldn't do them any justice right now in these unsung words, but the tears that were shed last night around the table and the statement made me feel hopeful with that one staple of French culture, that they really really appreciate the glory of life, how to live it, their own patriotisme, and that simple yet overlooked expression that the Religion of Love, not WAR, is really the only solution.
Nope, I couldn't do the stories any justice, but that I'm really glad I learned French and was able to experience them as closely as possible. Maybe if the whole world all did the same thing, just simply sit down every night for a two hour meal with family and friends and talk and share and laugh and cry, then we wouldn't be so lost in our current motivations.
Bon weekend à tous!
wooo baby this café is strong
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