Dear Friends and Family,

 As Christmas draws near and wintertime begins to wrap its arms around the region, the small villages of the Gers countryside become warm with decorations and Christmas markets and families gathering for the holiday season.  Classes end, university students arrive home around the same time of the month, and village lodgings fill up with vacationers who are getting together with distant relatives.

The village church of is across the road from our little apartment. When we sit at our kitchen table we can see directly across the church square.  We are now among those villagers who can witness everything going on in town, who comes and goes and where they are headed.  We watched as city workers put up Christmas lights on every street, and watched as they set a timer for multi-colored spotlights to rotate along the front wall of the church at night.

This year the weather is unseasonably warm, according to the locals.  The sun shines brightly nearly every day and the dense fogs that usually arrive in November and December are far between.

The last foggy day in Saint Clar was a few weeks ago when a thick mist appeared magically at dawn and loitered quietly into the evening.  We sat snugly indoors, coaxing a fire inside the ancient hearth.  As the night drew on, I noticed how faint the village bulbs seemed against the muffling grey of the empty streets.  The colored lights rotating against the bell tower looked distorted.  A man with one arm appeared at the edge of the churchyard and, walking past our windows, disappeared.

The wind picked up and I thought I could hear the hint of a church bell.  Beyond the “new” village church is the ancient tower of the old church, originally built with the rest of the village in the 12^th Century.  When the streets are empty and everything you see is hazy, you are transported.  Perhaps I was hearing the toll of the past that has not quite passed here in Saint Clar.

 

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The other day, Malana and I were standing talking in the market square of Saint Clar in front of one of the village’s two boulangeries.  We were discussing the difference between types of baguette.  We both prefer the pain complet version – the equivalent of whole wheat.  A diminutive man, stern-looking like a Frenchman, turned as he passed us and said, “I think I heard an accent.”  It was Charles Jeffrey, a Canadian who visited this village with his wife on a whim 30 years ago and never left.

Charles invited us to visit him in the very old house in the Place de la Republique that he and his wife had restored in the mid-nineties.  As we walked through the three floors of his elaborate 12^th-Century home we admired his large art collection and taste in fine furniture collected over a lifetime.  Every object was fraught with meaning for him and we became the beneficiaries of many stories, told by a man who has forgotten perhaps more than I ever even knew.  In an inner sanctum where he has his study, we saw pictures of a beautiful Vietnamese-French woman.  This was the woman with whom he had spent most of his life and, though deceased, still occupies his days.  Charles speaks of her fondly and sentimentally.

Charles and his wife had been so smitten with Saint Clar that they purchased a home over a weekend.  They cleaned the place up, evicted the pigeons and began, little by little, to revive a home that sat behind a broad medieval portico in the oldest square in the village.  The massive beams in the enormous attic were more than 25 feet long – each one from an entire tree.  They had been hand cut and hewed, then soaked for years in water to become compact and strong.  I looked closely at the pattern of marks left by craftsmen more than 900 years ago. As I examined the iron brackets and imagined the effort that had gone into the work I was so astonished I reached around and hugged a beam just to feel its girth.   We’ve become friends with Charles.  We’re looking forward to exchanging travel stories with him and listening to his advice on places to visit. 

Dec 15

In addition to tasting, touring, making friends and practicing our French, we are investigating the lay of the land in the southwest of France.  In the past few weeks, we’ve visited a few different departments.

Departements in France are similar to counties in the US, except that each department here is named after one or more geographic features, such as a river or mountain range.  Napoleon instituted them.  It was one of the thousands of administrative inventions arrived at while he was up late, drinking coffee and pacing the halls of Versailles, wondering how quickly he could seduce the princess of Poland.

We live in the Gers, which contains a lot of places that most people in the US and indeed the world have never heard of.  The Gers is bordered by the departments of the Pyrenees-Atlantiques, Hautes-Pyrenees, Haute Garonne, Tarn et Garonne, Lot et Garonne, and Landes.  If some of the names sound the same, it is because those geographic landmarks—such as the Pyrenees Mountains or the Garonne River—cross lots of distance.

We want to travel widely through the departments to be able to tell them apart and see the impressive landscapes up close.  Who doesn’t savor the country roads, lined evenly with soaring Sycamore trees that frame the horizon?  Sometimes I expect to see an old man on a bicycle with a baguette riding alongside them.

The problem with those beautiful, tree-lined country roads became apparent to me after I began facing French drivers.   After having a long lunch full of wine, arguments, heavy duck meat, and a jolt of coffee, they make up for the small winding roads by speeding as fast as they can back to wherever they came from.  When they corner the tight curves of these winding roads, they drift into the oncoming lanes.  They drive as though they are the only cars on the road.  I don’t usually see them coming, but when I do I quickly look for an escape route should one of them drift into my lane.  Alas, the Plane trees have completely sealed my fate – it’s a choice between a metal embrace with a two-hundred-year-old tree and an intimate mélange with the Frenchman in a tin Citroen.

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Speaking of long lunches and a 35-hour limit to the work week…Yesterday Malana and I decided to walk off some of the duck fat and Armagnac, and took a ramble over a few miles of pathways separating the enormous fields surrounding Saint Clar.  It was so warm I needed to shed my shirt and could have been wearing shorts.  Each time we approach a farm hamlet I asked Malana, “Should I put my shirt back on?  I don’t want to scare anybody.”  I’ve been reminded many times over past visits to France how correct the locals are about seasonal clothing — and clothing in general.  I concluded that anyone seeing me might be amused but not scared (by my massive chest? or by my emerging gut?)

I’m usually the one who’s amused when I see Frenchmen walking around in perfectly fine weather wearing three layers.  Just looking at them makes me feel warm.  But they look so good, full of self-respect and fashion sense.  I once asked Robert and Francoise (our Bordelaise friends) whether I was offending anyone by not dressing properly.  “No,” they said.  “It’s okay for you.  Everyone expects Americans to be sloppy.”

The average French person is slender and in great shape.  When I asked svelte Francoise how she keeps so trim she says she doesn’t eat between meals.  I’ve noticed that those amazing cheese courses come last – not as a part of a meal but as dessert – and then just a taste.

I insist on believing, for the time being, that the path to wisdom winds through the forest of excess.  If the path to the toilet, however, winds up waking me up at all hours of the night, then perhaps I’ll get wise to the irritations of overindulgence.

Wishing you a warm, restorative and indulgent Christmas!

 

 

*P.S.  I’m placing my narratives in a blog site — it’s not yet put together because I’m still figuring out how to add photos and whatnot, but the address is: https://francescapeblog.wordpress.com/

 

PPS: The photos in the last email I sent were all screwed up, giving you the impression that perhaps I find the average French man effeminate. I do not. I will try here to attach the correct image of a typical French man: