Saturday, July 2, 2011

The Garden of France

I first saw the landscape pictured above in July of 1964, when I was nine years old.  My French grandparents had retired from the suburbs of Paris to a little house on the edge of a small market town in the ancient province of Saintonge.  My parents, brothers and I lived in Westchester County, New York and although it was my fourth trip to France, I had never experienced the countryside, la France profonde, before.  It was to become part of a lifelong awakening to beauty, to meaning and to love.

We had driven down from Paris through the cool damp night to Saint Herie.  My bed that first summer was the comfy sofa in the large country-style living room.  I slept late, as I usually did in those days, and no one disturbed me until around eleven o'clock.  As I raised my sleepy head to the window above the sofa, I saw three or four children standing along the hedge by the road.  Apparently word of the arrival of les enfants americains had preceded us.  I went outside but I was too shy, too tongue-tied in French to speak.  One of the children was a girl with a pixie haircut, enormous brown eyes and a wide impish grin.  Her name was Catherine and her arm was stretched out to me.  In her palm were three shiny plums, just picked from the tree in her garden.  "Tu veux des prunes, Alienor?" she asked.  I had never tasted a plum before and I wasn't sure I would like it.  But I must have accepted the plums, and the friendship Catherine was offering with them, because 47 years on we are still friends.  In France, food is often a conduit to the most important things in life.

4 comments:

  1. Congratulations! What a vivid remembering, what a wonderful picture of this little girl waking up and see on the other side of the road these strange, unknown children, angels of another world... And it seems like a plum has been your personal madeleine...

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  2. I was also going to say,"shades of Proust."

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  3. Beautiful, Florence. Congratulations. I knew there was always a writer inside of you!

    I'd love to share this with our friends, may I forward them your email?

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  4. Thank you, Giovi, Laura & Kath. Your praise means a lot to me! xo

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