Inside life

 

Today being gray, I stayed in bed a bit longer, watching the rain and ruing the loss of my early walk.  I don't mind walking in the rain, but the morning seemed built for other things...later, I thought, I will put on my raincoat and go collect Alexander for the afternoon.   Good thought:  immediately the rain and wind picked up, or rather shot down, bringing a torrent over the garden and terrace.

In bed, I made a list or two, one practical and one fantastic, checked my phone for messages, then read another story in a book I had bought through the Friends of the Library sale, just re-opened in a new Covid way.

I should explain that for months, the town library had been closed...in your towns, too, I am sure...until summer, when they'd found a way to have us order books online and pick them up outside safely.  It helped me a little, but really I am more of a browser, and so I didn't use the welcome service much.  Then, last week, the Friends of the Library sent a message saying that they had found a way to reinvent their store, semi-virtually, and sent pages of titles they had for sale...all very inexpensive and all supporting the library, of course.  Many were new or scarcely read; lots were interesting.  I scrolled through and picked out more than a few, including Margaret Drabble's stories, which have become my bedside reading.  When they notified me that my order was ready, I went to the back of the library, where a window in a glass wall had been installed, and at the mention of my name out came a bag with my books.  I was proud of them and of me for getting these next weeks' reads.

You will notice on top of the pile above a book which came from John May himself, upstairs, a history of his family which begins at the beginning of time, just about, and which I have been reading chapter by chapter each afternoon, absorbing the chronicle of not only his family odyssey, but everyone's.  It is a fascinating book, part history, part fiction...both well-told.  I am glad to read it slowly.

As it happens, about the time John's gift arrived, I'd also picked up Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice Toklas, which somehow I'd missed the whole of in college.  But my Paris obsession now required it.  I alternated his with hers, enjoying the juxtaposition of language, history and intention.  I was sorry to finish Gertrude and Alice as quickly as I did, so I turned to a biography of Stein done by a woman I sort of knew.  Like a balloon deflating, I plowed through a while, then put it down.  Having been lifted by the prose of the two before, the pedanticism of this one made me wonder why I had spent 40 years in academia reading such.  It was well-researched and informative...I will give it that...and someday wanting information in its drier format I might pick it up again.

Meanwhile I have my Friends' books to enjoy.

This morning's read was a Drabble story about a woman, an actress, I think, although her occuption  wasn't much part of the plot...wait, perhaps it was, now I think of it, the whole motive of the piece...hmm.  Anyway, she fell in love with a house, a Dower House attached to a titled family pile crumbling over the centuries, wasted by the unwieldy marriages of two lines of sort-of nobles who couldn't, frankly, get it together.  But that's not the story itself, which, as I said, is about a woman falling in love with an old house, disrepair and all.  She doesn't particularly want to fix it up; she likes the melancholy, as she admits, in which the house and lands enclose her.  In the end, she has had the illumination to marry one or the other of the men on whom it has been entailed; she isn't sure whether she wants to marry the men or marry the men for the place.

Yes, well.  I could understand that, even though I probably would not follow her example if put to the test.  A house inhabits one as much as one inhabits it.  I know that from long experience with the places I have lived.

A place can call to you, not only from outside, but from inside, its call a murmur as well as a haunting. The choice today to be an inside day was a call from place, weather notwithstanding.

After reading, I went into the kitchen to do the next best thing:  cooking.  Yesterday, I had gone to the New Hope Market, a little place along the back road to Hillsborough and places north that has breakfast, lunch and produce from local farms.  I meant to pick up eggs and butter and whatever roots would make a good soup, but on the glassed shelves I found lovely zucchini and tiny eggplants and grabbed them as well.  So soup began and the roasted finds with a little tomato from my neighbor Betsy's garden and some basil that has so far withstood bugs and cool nights; alas the parsley has not.  

                                            

From the stove and oven now come inside-warm aromas.  I think I have just enough time 

to make Alexander something chocolate for his afternoon treat.  

Or read another chapter of The Mays of  Alamann's Creek.

The imaginary traveler

Here's what bothers me the most about these Covid-19 days, going on and on without resolution or salvation (or, in this city-state-country, sanity): the inability to grab a ride to the airport and head for somewhere interesting.  We have been holed up so long, keeping busy with the mundane work and make-work that fill the day, not to mention tiring, desperate negotiations of space when we do venture out for a bit of air.  Travel seems like a lost dream that haunts me.

It's not that I don't have plenty to do.  But these days Paris and Provence seem to have taken over the dream waves.  The romanticism of the place grows as farther I get from the possibility of return any time soon. I pick up articles and books on French life, fiction and non-, and download French movies, especially those with my favorite actors...Juliette Binoche, Patrick Bruel, Fannie Ardant, Catherine Deneuve, Sandrine Bonnaire, Gerard Depardieu.  I lean in, listening hard to their spoken French more than watching the translated words at the bottom of the screen, though I miss more than I catch.  In the air, French songs even Alexander will dance to.

On Prime, I found a teacher who laid out the verb faire (to make or do...the French think of them as the same verb) in idioms I could actually use, should I arrive on the Blvd. Raspail wanting to take a walk or do some shopping.  I've copied them down, each day memorizing another of the two-page list.  Tu fais la tete a moi?  Je le regard...

Pathetically, I leave my Paris guide book on the table so as a book or film flashes a scene at me, I can open the map and pinpoint it exactly, perhaps even remembering when I, too, walked over that very pont.  Yesterday, the latest issue of France Today tauted a neighborhood in the 19th arrondisement that I hadn't heard about, though apparently it's becoming trendy.  I made a note to find an apartment there for a month or so, somewhere close to the tiny streets of burgeoning art galleries and ateliers, convenient outdoor cafes, and small hidden prizes among les bistrots. I see Saint Chappelle is in easy walking distance for concerts.  Ah!  bon, there is an open-air market, where I can get everything I need, even if I leave on the next plane without bothering to take a suitcase.  

photo:  France Today

When the French decide I am responsible enough to resume visitation, I promise myself to be the first one off the Paris Star from London.  (Maybe I should fly to Heathrow now to be ready ...will they let me in?) 

 I promise to wear a mask everywhere and slide far enough away around crowds.  I will pick a morning when everyone is at a boule tournament to visit the Jacquemart-Andre and, though I love lunching in that elegant salon, will picnic all by myself in a quiet copse of that little garden attached to a little museum on a street I can't remember right now, except it was down the rue from the Carnavalet.

Is all this fantasy healthy, I wonder? And yet I can feel it in my bones, particularly today when a sort of wanderlust has sacked my energy.  Though I have kept the ordinary going...cooking market vegetables, tearing out and re-hemming a difficulty in what ought to be a simple child's quilt, making list upon list to do another day, watching Alexander learn with his virtual schoolmates...here is this blog post about Paris.  It could easily have been about Menerbe.

Outside my window, the leaves of the tulip poplar drop yellow, one by one.  I think of the plane trees along the boulevards about to do the same.  It's not a difficult leap to make, imagined or en realite'.

One of Those Days

In the film The Best Marigold Hotel, one of the characters, a high court judge in London, drags himself along to a retirement party for a colleague.  One day soon he will be next, he grumps to a fellow judge, who reminds him that he's heard that before.  But no sooner does he enter the room than a shock to the heart overtakes him, and he backs away through the crowd.  "This is the day," he announces to the crowd at large.  "This is the day."

This is the day for me, as well...not to retire (supposedly I did that a decade ago) but to get on with a journey I have been, like the judge, threatening (here read hoping) to make for some time.  Sometimes it doesn't even take a TIA to know when the time comes.

So, I thought a few weeks ago, it's time I went to Paris.  Really time.  I wondered what I'd been waiting for, though the answer came quickly enough.  But a look at the calendar and a bit of foresight into the future told me that what is usually a scarce commodity around here...time...had broken open its tightly held trove and offered me a gift.  I grabbed it, running to make a plane reservation, then a week later, more pensively, to find a place to stay.  Friends in London, when I told them, signed on for part of my journey, so I will be stopping there on the way so that we can take the Eurostar together to the City of Light.

Mon vieil ami d'ecole, Will and, we are hoping, Dorothy will spend a few days visiting friends there and, if I know (and trust) Will, walking me around the city recounting les histoires des toutes des pierres dans les boulevards and les rues.  Having spent a goodly number of years taking students on the best European tours of their lives (he's known as a legend in the trade of studies abroad), he has learned a thing or two about le terrain, but, more important, he remembers everything.  His mind, like that of his old mentor (whom I fortunately later married), un professeur extraordinaire, is a veritable trap of data, history, and tales with a fine sense of life and humor.

I still remember our trip through London nine years ago, especially along the Thames in Southwark, Shakespeare's old haunts. Then I was traveling with both of them, trailing along while they traded dissertations on everything from Renaissance theater to the Clink and its attendant streetwalkers.

For many reasons, seeing Paris first with Will along for the ride makes me smile just thinking of l'aventure a venir.

[Pardonnez moi, all you French majors and maitres:  I can't figure out how to make cedillas and accents, neither grave nor acute, not to mention carets, on this site...but s'il vous plait, just assume there is a chance I know they should be there...like that one in plait...]

Which aside brings me to the time spent since I made that last reservation...learning, encore, all the French I have forgotten since school.  I know...it's pretty much a cliche', dredging up high school language lessons from fifty years ago.  I won't know how I've done til I get there, of course, but so far so good.  As long as I am speaking or reading simple subjects and verbs, I'm sure I'll be fine.  But the French films I've been watching nearly every night, just so I can listen to la langue real, have taught me another lesson.  Aside from picking up the occasional idiom, when I shut off the subtitles I'm able to recognize only a word or two every sentence or two.  Quel dommage.  

Fortunately, there are great contemporary books about all sorts of aspects of Paris, all of which I have been absorbing like a sponge. Along with the requisite guide book, I think I will tuck David Lebowitz's The Sweet Life in Paris and Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon in my travel bag to relive once my feet are on their ground.

Alors, on continue d'apprendre.  I've still got another week.  Wish me bonne chance!
__________________________________________________________

At this moment, more interesting than French grammar, there are fifty or more robins in my ailanthus bushes, a female cardinal among them.  They're fluttering wildly through the neighbors' ailanthus, too, feasting on the berries with which for a short time spring decorates those otherwise unremarkable plantings.  Ailanthus are way too prolific here, because they'll grow whether you care for them or not, and so everyone's predecessor put them in among the trees and rocks to fill in, knowing they keep their leaves all year whatever the weather.

For that reason they're a lesson in the reliability of sturdiness over the all too short summer's lease, and fill the yard with wandering tendrils (growing as long as you will allow them to lengthen) when all else fails.  But like me the robins are taking advantage of the moment and have set themselves to pick clean the red pearls that are the ailanthus' fleeting glory.  I can't blame them,  We are in the tail of the great northeastern storm that is bringing our temperatures into the twenties tonight, despite the fact that we have had weeks of sixty and seventy degrees, spoiling us for spring.  Fortunately it's only some spurts of high winds, helping to prune the dead branches from the trees and giving the sun a little run for its money.  We dig our scarves and gloves out of storage and carry on.

Besides, there's Paris to look forward to.

___________________________________________________________ 

Wait!  Don't close that page yet...



This weekend (March 17-18), the 7th Pamlico Writers Conference opens in Washington, North Carolina.  On the program Saturday afternoon will be my session on Journals as the Ultimate Sourcebook for writers. Both my workshop and the whole conference are open to anyone interested in writing or writers of any level. Join us if you can.  You can enroll at the door, or on their website.  For more information, go to https://pamlicowritersgroup.wildapricot.org/event-2260134.