Sunday At the Market

       It Sunday morning at the Market in Auvillar, France, and I cannot resist buying roasted chestnuts from a vendor who scoops them hot into a cone he fashions from newspaper. There is no price. One drops coins into a jar. The day is sunny but blustery. Behind the chestnut vendor a brazier glows. Men gather warming their hands.  In the air, the smell of more chestnuts roasting, and I am brought back to the chestnut vendors of my childhood standing on street corners in New York City. Perhaps, Mom, Dad and I have driven through the Lincoln Tunnel, come to see the Christmas show at Radio City, when Dad stops to buy a brown paper bag of sweet, warm roasted chestnuts. We peel and eat, as I am eating now, tasting time. 

Driving to Beaulieu sur Dordogne

Yesterday, driving my rental car, I traveled back roads from Auvillar, a village in south west France to Beaulieu sur Dordogne, a village north and east. I circled roundabouts, two, sometimes, three times in order to read road signs. I took a sharp left, drove for maybe five miles, feeling as if something was wrong. Pulling over, I read my map, doubled back, found my route. I was ready for a morning coffee, so following my son’s suggestion—Mom, get off the road. Have a coffee in a café. It’s the best—I followed signs into the village of Montoc.

            So there I was happily drinking a terrible espresso—believe me Starbucks is better—because I loved this village, loved this sunny terrace and the sibilant sounds of French surrounding me. I wrote in my journal, I day dreamed, when suddenly, I heard words in English, British English. Two women had settled at a table in front of me. A  third approached on the sidewalk, and all three began a lively discussion about bees and a sting.

I’d started out that morning fog and cold, and now at ten-thirty, the sun was strong, and this terrace was filling with men and women who came, as the French said, “to take a coffee.” A man in his forties with dark hair, a lock curling onto his forehead, sat alone a table reading La Depeche; three older men held court a table near the restaurant’s door greeting everyone who entered or left. “Bonjour.” “Ca va?” Volleys of rapid French and laugher.

 A couple crossed the terrace, found a table, she wearing tight jeans, tight tee shirt, a short jacket, he wearing jeans and a leather jacket. They were of a certain age.

            The conversation about bees continued, and I was struck with a realization—no cell phones, no computers, no one speaking with or texting with someone who was absent.  

A gray-haired man, solid and square with an open pleasant face approached the table of three British women. Directing his attention to one, a woman with curly gray hair, small and pleasing features, he wished her a happy birthday, then said, “Is this a birthday coffee? Are you having cognac in it?”

“No, I’m not,” she said.

“You should be, darling,” the man said, rounding the table to join them.

I didn’t want to leave this place where the music of conversation filled the air, where I was looking out at ancient buildings, where behind those buildings the countryside fell away into fields, where in front of those buildings flowers bloomed in pots, geranium and trailing vinca, where no one was plugged in or distracted by electronics. But I had a meeting in Beaulieu, and I needed to find my way.  

En Ce Moment

Late this afternoon in Paris, I accepted a ride with a stranger. As I crossed a street, guide book in hand, I saw a man, dark hair, sturdy looking, smoking and standing just behind a car parked at a corner. I needed directions, so I approached him. He held up a hand, signaling me to wait, while he knocked on the passenger side window of the black car. The window opened. A woman. She, too, must have been in her thirties, dark hair dark eyes, turned toward me as if to say, Who are you? What do you want? They spoke in French. She opened the door, took out her phone, looked at my guide book now in the man’s hands. She entered the name of the street I’d written, rue du bac. “Ooo la, la,” she said. Standing beside her, I read the time, twenty-five minutes, but to walk or to ride? I asked.

“To walk, yes. You must take the bus,” she said.

            I’m a walker. “That will be fine,” I said.

            The man spoke. She spoke. Both in rapid French I could not follow, but I believe, he was the one who suggested driving me, although she, the English speaker suggested I come with them.

 “Oh, no,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

            “We will take you,” she said.

            I shook my head. Waved my index finger like a metronome.

            “I am…,” she paused. “How shall I say? No problem.”

            “It’s not that,” I said. Although, partly it was that. How could I an older woman schooled against taking rides with strangers get in that car, but that’s exactly what I did, climbing into the back seat as the woman set her phone, now a GPS onto the dash. And we were off, driving through the maze of streets in Saint Germaine des Pres, the woman practicing her English, me practicing my French, both of us thoroughly enjoying each other’s company, the young man at the wheel. He was no longer smoking, and now I wondered was that why he stood outside the car? To smoke? My husband would do that. And thinking of my husband, I imagined his voice asking me about the car. What kind was it? As if make and model mattered. Maybe they did. Then, his second thought: "You did what?”           

 I was, as the French would say, en ce moment, in the moment. Call it luck, karma, serendipity or perhaps one person doing a favor for another, I was driving with strangers. It was the hour when work ends and evening begins. The sidewalk cafes were not full, but people sat outside at tables under awnings, sipping beer, coffee or wine. Inside the car, we exchanged stories, where I lived, if I had children. The man was from Portugal, the woman from Brazil. She has a first cousin in Los Angels. She plans to visit England, but her English is not so good any more. I tell her that in England, her English will return.

We pulled up in front of number 77 rue du bac. I offered a five franc note. Each refused, first the woman then man. I thanked them, then entered Dore Dore, a shop, where when I last visited Paris, I’d bought a pair of tights that became my favorite. This year, I bought three pair, telling the proprietors, a woman and her son, I’d been there before. And so we talked about where I was from and then about Romney and Obama, and we all want Obama to win, the French shopkeepers and I.

            Isn’t this what travel is all about, finding that essential part of yourself that connects you to others? And I understand I took a chance. Something terrible could have happened on that ride. Would I take a ride again? I don’t know. Only the moment will tell me. 

A Bird in the House

“Grammy, there’s a bird in the house,” my grand-daughter, thirteen, cries, her voice breaking my sleep. “I was letting Trixie out and the bird flew in.”

            I peel back the covers and slowly, I pull myself from my bed. We are alone in the house. It has been a rough summer, her mom leaving, her dad having hip replacement surgery, this child not knowing where she’ll be living, school starting in days, her dog, her beloved Trixie, attacking and tearing another dog’s ear, growling to protect her food bowl, and tonight the dog has diarrhea, losing control inside a cloth travel crate.

            Barefoot, I pad down the stairs. “There it is Grammy,” my grand-daughter says, pointing high to a skylight in the living room.

“Get her,” I say eyeing the dog. The bird flies low, then disappears. 

 “I don’t know how it got in, Grammy.” My grand-daughter’s voice tremors, and I imagine her fear. Will I yell? Punish her? Tell her she’s stupid for leaving the screen door open. That’s what she’s used to at home. But home is gone. Her mom has left without a forwarding address. This child has been with my husband and me all summer. Mostly, her dad, my son has been here, too. Until his surgery.

The ax hangs above Trixie’s head. She needs to stop attacking other dogs. She needs to stop guarding her food bowl. She needs to stop growling when I put her into her crate. Mostly, Trixie is a loveable, friendly, smart appealing dog. A Catahoula leopard dog, rescued dog from a kill shelter in Tennessee, she was taken from her mother too early, spayed to early. Probably mistreated from birth, this dog has issues. My grand-daughter loves this dog. She needs this dog. Tonight, she’s been up every hour letting Trixie out. Not once has she awakened me, until this bird flew into the house. “It was banging into walls, Grammy,” she says. “I didn’t want it to die.”

Worry springs from her skin, an aura of worry surrounding this lovely girl-child. She is so much me when I was young. So much herself, smart, vibrant, inquisitive. Why has life has dealt her a difficult hand?

Yesterday, we shopped for back to school clothes, shopped although none of us knows where she’ll go to school. We pretended all was well, buying a plaid shirt, a loose fitting off the shoulder sweater, a pair of skinny jeans, rejecting a second pair because they were too expensive. A sign in a window had promised forty percent off. No, not these, a salesperson told me. At home, my grand-daughter went on line. “Look, Grammy, they’re forty percent off on line. And I can get a fifteen percent off coupon.”

The bird flies into the dining room. Opening all three sliding screen doors that lead to a deck, I tell my grand-daughter we’ll just let the bird fly out. We stand in the kitchen. Holding Trixie by her collar, my grand-daughter points. “There it is, Grammy.”

Something small and brown on my kitchen floor. The bird. Probably a sparrow. Injured? Afraid? Stooping down, I gently take the sparrow into my palms. I’ve never felt such warmth and fragility. Never felt a heart beating so wildly. Placing the bird onto the deck, I wonder about my scent. What harm have I done? The bird is still. I back away, step inside. Still, holding Trixie, Nina watches. “Grammy, it flew away.”

The Landscape of a Long Marriage

 The sea is the landscape of my marriage. I live at the end of a dirt road on the southern coast of Maine, the horizon my closest eastern neighbor. Storms blow in from every direction. Light is ever changing, dark to light, dull to luminous.  One night in July a double rainbow arched outside my dining room window. I stepped out onto the deck, the scent of rain mingling with the salty scent of the sea. In both directions colors fell into the dark of the ocean. Beyond the deck, the sea stretched, rippling, rolling, breaking white around rocks.

Every day, I watch the incoming tide fill spaces between boulders, leaving tide pools rich with life, snails, crabs, the occasional starfish. This constant push and pull of the moon on the sea carves out caves and thunder holes where the sea rushes in, foaming and spraying. The sea builds bridges that I cross climbing out to a promontory. In a hurricane the promontory disappears.

            I was twenty-one when I met my husband, drawn to his strength and his power. After more than fifty years of marriage, his strength has waned. Mine has waxed. Our differences are more pronounced. He disengages. I engage. What has kept us together is transformation, my fire redirected, his strength and power redefined. We are wiser, committed, now, to the history we have created with each other, with our children and our grandchildren. So many narratives of a long marriage. I have one, Dick another. Each of my three sons will have his own. But there is another narrative, the story the marriage itself whispers in my ear, as mysterious as the white space on a writer’s page—that abstract yet transcendent place where Dick and I come together. 

Driving With Sue

Sue pointed to the corner where we used to meet. She wore a pair of navy trousers, a short sleeved, buttoned blouse. I wore my usual cropped trousers with a boxy top, an image of funky irreverence. “The mailbox is gone,” she said. We were cruising in her black Lexus sedan, two women in our early seventies, going back to the New Jersey neighborhood where we’d grown up. I’d known Sue since I was twelve, the new kid in town, taking a seat in Mrs. Murphy’s geography class. Sue collected friends like charms on a bracelet. I was happy she’d scooped me up. We lived in similar houses, small capes with one car garages on postage stamp lots, and on that day in May, the houses looked remarkably the same. No McMansions. Yet, I hardly recognized that corner where we used to meet every morning before walking to junior high school, then to high school. I did recognize town, the corner buildings that housed the drug stores, the banks, now selling clothing or smoothies. Someone had turned my father’s camera store into a boutique wine shop and wine bar. Main Street, USA was long gone.

In many ways, Millburn was an idyllic place to grow up, neighborhood streets I roamed at will, the drug store where after school, Sue and I bought ice cream cones, single or double dip, the record store where Saturday mornings, we listened to 45’s before making our selections. Later, when Sue got her Nash Metropolitan, we cruised the streets we used to walk, looking for friends, then crossed what in that town was a northern Mason-Dixon line, Jews south, WASPS north, looking for my boyfriend’s car. He had friends who lived north. I felt that division, but I didn’t ponder it, not then. I won’t now. What interests me is the way that place held onto my adolescence, giving me back my teenage self, an image of a pony tailed teenager holding her books to her chest, meeting Sue at the mailbox that wasn’t there. This was the place of my deepest yearnings, my unbridled passions. My dreams of escape. After college, I didn’t return, marriage my ticket out.

Sue stayed. I think she knew she would. She married a chemist, a demanding man who died young. But not before Sue nursed him through heart surgery, diabetes, amputation, kidney failure and dialysis. Sue confused love with obedience. I never did.

I may have left New Jersey, but I didn’t leave Sue. That same adolescent connection that brought me back to the old neighborhood tied me to Sue. She was the friend who knew me when I was fifteen, full of myself and bubbling with life. Over the years, Sue has helped me move backwards through my life, unraveling threads and trying to understand how I, a middle class Jewish kid from Millburn, New Jersey, became a writer, a teacher, a mother, a grandmother, a friend and dog lover, living on the rocky coast of Maine instead of on a postage stamp lot in Millburn, New Jersey. Driving with Sue, saw an essence of my younger self, that same essence I see, these days, in my three granddaughters, all visiting and going to summer drama camp, coming home, singing and dancing in my kitchen, in my living room, then later, after dinner, swimming naked in the pool, unencumbered, new, forming and formed. 

Cold Mountain

Here in the Blue Ridge, this Monday morning of Memorial Day, where I’m hiking, I am alone. The trail is mostly dirt, gentle up hills, down hills, switch backs, a few steeper climbs. The perfect hike to warm up my hiking legs. The path cuts through a field where tall grasses grow. Wildflowers. Now an opening After hiking through a large field to an open meadow. Leaving the meadow, I sit on moss, pen in hand when I see a hiker approaching. A young man wearing shorts, a white shirt, cap, a small pack on his back, he hums his way along the trail, sees me, or I see him. I say “Hello.”

Hardly pausing he says, in a voice that sings more than it speaks, “Hello, how are you?”

And he’s on his way, humming, again.

A breeze stirs the air. In the pale blue sky, the rumble of an engine. A plane I can’t see. I love these colors, this particular blue of the sky, these leaves on the mountain laurel, on birch and beech. Conifers.

An artist at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts where I’m in residence loves color. Vibrant color that dances and sings. His colors come to him as he paints, and he describes for me a white rabbit, a golden monkey, a dancer spinning inside her red dress. I see only shape and texture. Color, of course.

On the trail again, I pass the hiker who passed me. He’s sitting on a rock beside a stream, lighting a small burner, eating breakfast or lunch at nine forty in the morning. At a trail junction, I notice that my reading glasses are gone. They slipped through space between the waist band of my trousers and the waistband of my pack. Go back? Continue on? I’ll need to come up with a better system for carrying my glasses. This will be the second lost pair of reading glasses in as many hikes.

Now, on the Appalachian Trail, I’m meeting section hikers, a through hiker, a young woman, heading to Maine. I’m thinking about my glasses again, when I hear a voice. “Ma’am, did you drop some glasses.”

The humming hiker. In his hand, my case with the purple swirls.

He goes on. I don’t see him again.