Letters from France: How I Moved to France and Found True Love

How I Moved to France and Found True Love. The Long Run. Outside: A Cautionary Tale. I flip my little gem over and over, examining its angles, trying to distill the colors of the memoir I may have just finished. Where are the J. Crew catalogue writers when you need them, with their canaries, lagoons, and mimosas? What were the last five years about, exactly, and how to title them?

A maid in the B and B on the other side of the church parking lot pushes the dove blue shutters against the limestone wall, opens the window, and shakes the duvet outside. Did you know that French employees are guaranteed forty-five paid sick days a year, no questions asked? If that were me, I’d be sick on this sunny Monday morning in December, and go outside for my health. It’s a beautiful day here in Monpazier.

I refocus on the computer screen on this side of my garret window, on the blue desk that is not mine. I would never paint my desk this color. Still, I have a roof, a window, a desk, and an imagination that comes with me everywhere. My imagination isn’t at all like this desk, a false rendering of cornflower blue, which is not how cornflowers are at all. They are not a pretend-we-are-in Provence-blue. Cornflowers were the flowers at my wedding: weddings, when a bride brings her identity to the marriage, I remember. Oh, right, back to the work at hand. Finding a title for the memoir.

Memoir: I should give the writing, and the memories a breather, says my friend, the expert. Nobody has seen it. I wonder, is it long enough? Are the stories compelling? Underneath it all, am I enough? Then, and now? Why, of course I am! That is the point of the book. That’s the love part: mon amie, myself, and I. You, too.

That’ s how I ended up in France, following questions, learning lessons in Remedial Life, and confronting all kinds of craziness in Troubleshooting. It has been a long, enlightening run. I'm glad I'm here.

See, there goes that man with the cane, whose upper body is bent away from his lower half. How did that happen? Does he sleep bent like that, or is he only that way when he stands? I'm ready to share my looking around and into France. See, we are all interesting.

Agenda, 2016:

• Learn the next thing, how to push a story out into the world.

• Jump for joy! I am an American writer and photographer living in France!

• Photograph everything: improve vision, see poetry in the everyday.

• Note that this southwest corner of France, sometimes called Occitania, or Gascony, has nurtured humans since prehistoric times. If the cave dwellers at Lascaux were secure enough to paint what they saw outside, it should work for me, too.

• Recount the observations of a truffle hunter and other Gauls, like: “The English may have principles, but the French solve problems.”

• Ask important questions, like, does the Holy Roman Church know that these French people have willy-nilly been calling good folks “saints”, and then naming villages after them, like St. Pompom?

• Eat happy food. Do not become enslaved to the artisan baker in the process.

• Marvel at people acting like themselves.

• Ponder the funny things folks around here say, like, “you Americans seem to have a real thing for honesty.”

So, from the Dordogne department of France, under a pale blue sky like hatched quail eggs, with a memoir behind, and an agenda in front, I wish you much happiness in 2016.

Emily

Monpazier

December 2015

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