Simple Pleasures

Very old olive trees in St-Remy

Okay, I'm going to make a list of things I totally respond to and, no, it's not a long list.

• A picnic of fresh bread, cheeses, and wine laid out in some herbaceous countryside where one can sit in the sun, listen to the cicadas, and take in the warmth and fresh air.
• Olives, of course.  Lots of olives.
• Sunshine and blue skies.
• The scent of lavender.
• Outdoor markets with more fresh bread, more fresh cheeses, and bins of more olives all set out by people who love their work and wouldn't want to be doing anything else.
• The feeling that life is good, as a result of the above.

Such simple pleasures, yet it seems as if there's only one place that takes them to heart and knows how to do them to perfection.  And that is France.  At any rate, I find myself picking up book after book about France--its style, its wonders, its peculiarities.  I do love it there.  I tried spending some winter weeks there nearly ten years ago hoping to come away able to speak the language after taking daily classes.  But my brain became saturated very quickly and by the time I got home again, I put away all thoughts of speaking French.  (Should have learned it before I was eleven, I told myself, not at sixty-something.)

Arles

At any rate, I find myself favoring books about France.  Right now, as it happens, I'm in the process of reading two.  One is Pardon My French, How a Grumpy American Fell in Love with France, by Allen Johnson.  The other is The Only Street in Paris, Life on the Rue des Martyrs by Elaine Sciolino.

Looking through my bookshelf, I find several I can recommend:

Polly Platt, French or Foe, Getting the Most Out of Visiting, Living, and Working in France.  (Lots of good practical info.  For instance, it's important to understand that the French rank both wit and liberty HIGH on their lists.)

The English actress, Carol Drinkwater who's lived in Provence for years, has written several including, 1) The Olive Farm, A Memoir of Life, Love, and Olive Oil in the South of France, and 2) The Olive Season, Amour, A New Life, and Olives, Too ...!

Of course, there's Peter Mayle, the Englishman, with his now-classic, A Year in Provence, plus Toujours Provence.  I think I've also read all of his fiction set in France--all light, fun reading.

Avignon

Then there's:

Sarah Turnbull, Almost French, Love and a New Life in Paris (about what makes the French tick).

Ellie Nielsen, Buying a Piece of Paris, A Memoir.  (An Australian family buy an apartment.)

And food books:

Luke Barr, Provence, 1970, M.F.K.Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste. 

David Lebovitz, The Sweet Life in Paris, Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious--and Perplexing--City.  (With recipes.)

Karen Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, How Our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snacking, and Discovered 10 Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters.  (Should be required reading.)


Of a different nature, there's A Life of Her Own, the Transformation of a Countrywoman in Twentieth-Century France, by Emilie Carles (1900-1979) who was born into a peasant community in the high Alps and tells about, as the jacket says, "a world that has largely disappeared ... and the one that has emerged to take its place."  For me, a keeper.

As is Simone de Beauvoir's (1908-1986) four-volume autobiography:  1) Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 2) The Prime of Life, 3) Force of Circumstance, and 4) All Said and Done.  (Note:  sometimes the third volume is divided into two separate books: 1) After the War and 2) Hard Times.)

Then, another American author, the wife of a Frenchman and mother of two children who tease her about her accent, has a book about French words, Words in a French Life, Lessons in Love and Language from the South of France, by Kristin Espinasse.

Near the square in the city of Nice.  Check out that blue sky!

While we're sticking with non-fiction books, I'm going to add Marcel Pagnol's reminiscences about his childhood in Marseilles and the Provençal countryside--My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle.  (Both books are published in one volume unless you're buying French editions.)  (You may remember the exquisite movies by the same name.)  So I've just gone down to my bookstore and ordered a copy.

(Though it's a work of fiction and these others aren't, one current book I do not recommend is The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George which has a good premise--prescribing books for people's ailments--but is predictable and cliched.)

So, with July coming up, I'm devoting this posting to France.  There is, of course, July 14th, Bastille Day.  But I also want to mention July 1st, the hundredth birthday of one of my favorite actresses:  Olivia de Havilland who has lived in Paris more than half her life. 

A Gallery of Photos: A Little Farther Afield This Time

When an old friend visited recently from another part of the country, not having been in New England for many years, we took a couple of excursions to reacquaint her with this part of Vermont.  Remember:  Vermont's claim to charm is all about its success in offering its own particular anachronistic look and feel.  Down-home stuff.  1940's.  There are no bill boards along the highways. There are plenty of dirt roads to say nothing of winding two-lane by-ways over hill and dale.  It's the sort of place where you drive by white steepled churches, country general stores, cows, plus a good number of brooks which earn the adjective, "babbling."  Of course, it was those very babblers that overflowed during Hurricane Irene a few years back, bringing on disastrous flooding.  Otherwise, yes, they're delightful.

1.  Bennington.  The Old First Church and Robert Frost's Grave

The Old First Church

The Frost Family Gravestone.  (You can see the pennies people have put there.)

His name is at the top, along with "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

2.  Manchester.  The Equinox Inn.  Or I guess it's now called "The Equinox, a Luxury Collection Golf Resort and Spa."

Established in 1853, the Equinox Inn is next to the Old Marsh Tavern (1763).  We stopped here mid-day for a glass of white wine before carrying on.

3.  Weston (population 566).  The Vermont Country Store, the Weston Village Store, and the Craft Building

The Vermont Country Store calls itself the "Purveyors of the Practical and Hard-to-Find."

The old wood stove is still cranked up on winter days.  (If something works, don't haul in one of those modern gadgets!)

Dating from 1946, the store prides itself on its old-time merchandise.

The Weston Village Store (across the street) and its whirligigs.

This gorgeous building with its artistic shingle-work has been a firehouse, a machine shop, a studio for craftspeople, and now houses the red Concord coach used as a bandwagon by the Weston Cornet Band from 1880-1930, one of only two in existence.

4.  The village of Grafton with its Grafton Inn and old White Church

The Grafton Inn (rockers and all), once called the Old Tavern at Grafton. 

Life in a Vermont village.

The quintessential New England church--this, Grafton's "White Church."

A Gallery of May Photos: Around Here

May is a gorgeous month ... though the shift to greenery and blossoms can come as a bit of a surprise--winter lasts such a long time.  But then winter's soon forgotten and we immerse ourselves in warm,  pretty days.  Here are a few happy reminders of what May has been like around here.

Mother's Day brunch treat

Farm stand pots

With a glimpse of the Connecticut River in the background

(Next time:  photos from excursions around Southern Vermont.)

How About ... ?

• When opening envelopes that contain monthly bills, how about not being given a lot of extraneous slips of paper that you just have to toss, lamenting the waste.
• When asking a man a question about something, how about not having him go into a long spiel about how the thing was made--with talk about gaskets, fuel lines, etc. 
• When getting catalogs in the mail, how about not receiving them so far in advance that it's still (let's say) spring when you get the late-summer/early-fall version.
• How about having the opportunity to get/use a Simple Computer, not one with thousands of options that you have no intention of ever looking at.  So, an ala carte version.
• Ditto the selection (and therefore the cost) of cable TV channels. I never watch sports. Okay, maybe once every four years, I might pay attention to some of the winter Olympics, but that's all.  But I pay a price as if I watch sports by the hour.  As it is, I don't even watch many channels.  Only a very few. So why not give me an ala carte option and let me select the channels I want to watch and then cut out the rest so that my monthly bill will be considerably less!
• When talking with someone (usually in sales or service), how about not having them answer the question they think you're going to ask, but actually paying attention to the question you ARE asking.
• Or, if they don't know the answer, how about not having them beat around the bush with the obvious.  ("If your indicator light comes on and you don't know if it's for a flat tire or low tire pressure, just go to the nearest gas station and ask them.")  (Well, of course, but that implies that gas stations of that nature still exist, not simply the sort where you go in and buy a bag of chips.  If you were to ask a car-related question, you can imagine the look you'd get from the person behind the cash register.)
• How about having the town's regular old car wash back in service, not the new self-serve kind that you have to figure how to use and then hope you don't get stuck inside because you accidentally did something involving the wrong button.
• Well, you get the picture.

An Experiment

Some months ago when I became particularly disgruntled with both the national and world scenes, I decided to turn to things that gave me energy rather than depleted it.  Consciously not pay attention to the shenanigans going on or fill myself with a mindset that would just twist me up like a wet dish cloth.  So I opened cook books for inspiring (and simple) dishes to make.  I bought yarn and knit a winter scarf for a friend.  I decided to consider some future home/garden improvements.  Maybe a new bathroom floor ... a paint job in a bedroom ... a labyrinth in the garden.  I also worked on cleaning out old files, doing research on prospective blog projects, reading more poetry ... and ... trying my hand at writing haiku.

Haiku, as you know, is a Japanese-style poem of three lines using only seventeen syllables--five in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the last.  I'd never written haiku, so this would be an experiment.  But I also wanted to have fun with it and not get too fussy by feeling I absolutely had to adhere to the five-seven-five structure.  If I deviated a bit here and there, well then, I deviated.

     January 2016

     Now, with winter,
     Ice-crusted apples still on the tree
     Fall to the ground


     Looking Out into the Garden After a Winter Storm

     As if in a bath
     Of bubbles, the Buddha sits
     Half covered in snow


     A Winter Afternoon

     A full-bodied red
     Like Homer's wine-dark sea
     Fills my Riedel glass


     Looking Out the Train Window in Late February
     Along the Mohawk River

     Ducks at river's edge
     Gather beside last ice chunks
     To sun in silence


     April No-Fool

     Gloomy but warmish
     April wisps into being
     Whoop-dee-do!  Welcome!

     April 28th

     Pink white blue purple
     Violets carpet the grass.
     For red, a cardinal


     How Emily Carr, the Canadian Artist,
     Compares Old Age to Fruit on a Tree

     Ripe is good, yes, ripe
     Just not so rotten you fall
    And land with a squish

Ancestor Stuff, or My Genealogy Jag

No, I'm not going to talk about some antecedent who memorized a thousand verses from the Bible ... or a great aunt with seventeen cats. But I am going to admit that one recent evening when I'd finished my book and there was nothing on TV, I picked up my laptop and started exploring, and for some reason that I can't now remember (and that doesn't matter, anyway), I keyed in the name of my paternal grandfather and his city (Baltimore).  Lo and behold, what should I find but a link that turned out to show a full length photo of him dating from the 1880s when he was in his late teens.  Dressed to the nines and looking pretty natty.  The odd thing was that I had never seen a picture of him before.  Well, a snapshot around 1900 but hat and bushy mustache pretty well hid his features.

Okay, I was hooked.  I'd already done a lot of genealogical research some years ago, but I decided to see if I could fill in some gaps.  And I have to say, I'm finding it all very interesting.  Maybe that's because I'm part historian, part researcher, as well as someone curious to know why those relatives left Virginia in 1808 and moved to Tennessee, or was that x-times great grandmother really related to that Confederate general, or did that particular great great great grandfather fight in that battle described in our national anthem?

I'm also impressed anew that each generation doubles the number of ancestors from the generation before so that if you go back ten generations (the 17th century for me) we each have 1,024 direct ancestors.  And, if you go back to the Norman Conquest, I've read that we have more than a billion. Of course, there weren't even that many people on the planet then. Hmmm...  so how does that work?  A piece about it suggests that part of the answer, at least, lies in cousins marrying cousins (which happened more frequently "back then").

So here I am now checking dates in early Virginia, traveling overland to California in 1846, learning who fought for the north and who for the south. And I found a 2-times-great grandmother who, after she died at age twenty-six, had a clipper ship built and named for her that took some of the first Gold Rush folks around the Horn to San Francisco, carried a cargo of tea from China to England, and brought back a boatload of Irish immigrants to Philly.  I'm even getting a book out of the library on clipper ships of that era--which I wouldn't have thought to look at otherwise.

Well, it's one of those intriguing, elucidating things to do.  After awhile, though, you get the sense that with so many antecedents, everyone has to be related to everyone!

A Splendid Trilogy

I just finished reading (re-reading, actually) three books that Conrad Richter (1890-1968) wrote as a trilogy--The Trees, The Fields, The Town--set from the late 18th century to the mid-19th.  The story centers around one family who left their home in Pennsylvania when the game gave out and made their way into the wilderness west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River to Shawnee and Delaware land where all you could see was a sea of trees, an"ocean of leaves"--so many that the sun never seemed to shine but the game was plentiful.  Here they settled, living in a cabin they built themselves, making do with only a few cooking pots, some quilts, an axe, and a rifle.  They ate a lot of bear meat and venison and a bit of johnny cake and wheat bread when they could trade furs for meal.

As The Trees (published 1940) continues, the landscape gradually changed as farmers and tradespeople appeared and began the process of not merely chopping down "the little fellows" for cabin logs but "the big butts" (trees) so that the settlers could be more than "woodsies" (itinerant hunters) and put in "potato vines, roasting ears and flax growing there in the sun."  It was only then, when the never-ending woods began to be cleared, that the sun did in fact begin to shine as more and more people began shifting the landscape, including making pathways between houses so that they would not get lost going home in the dark.

In The Fields (1946), as the story-line continues with the same family, people were "fetching labor-saving machinery into the wilderness."  They built a meeting house, church, school, store, grist mill.  They bought looms and raised sheep for wool.  They also noticed that with the trees now cut, the game had gone, replaced by foxes, field birds, possums, mice.  Now known to be part of the state of Ohio, they changed their settlement's name from Moonshine Church to something they thought more befitting--Americus.  They saw even more sun as more trees fell.  And many paths and fields were now free of stumps.

Finally, in The Town (1950), in which one member of the family said their town "was getting too big for its britches," there was milling, blacksmithing, wheel-wrighting, a soap works, cotton factory, newspaper, hotel, plus societies now telling business owners what they could and couldn't do ... and various committees such as the one that approved building a new church since the steeple on their current one wasn't tall enough.  Someone else wanted to dig up the graveyard and put in a bank.  The bucket method of putting out fires was abandoned when they sent off for a fire engine ... which was soon replaced by an even newer variety.  Houses were built on the square--later to be turned into shops.  A canal was built, a rail line.  Any trees to be found now had to be planted.

I first read these books for an American Lit class in college and never forgot them, finding them works of total integrity and history at its best:  approachable, engaging, intimate.  Conrad Richter did his research, coming up with the archaic slang and speech of that era, stories of the Revolution and the wilderness folks. He is an excellent writer--lyrical, gentle despite his description of tough subjects, and magical by letting you feel as if you were living in those very times. For me, these beautiful works are unlike anything written today about that era.  (The Town won a Pulitzer in 1951.)

The heart of the books, then, centers around these changes that take place both to the land as well as to the people and the amelioration of their living conditions. As Richter states (and my Lit professor reiterated), hard work and diversity from making contributions and sacrifices gave the people of that day "character."  Even the youngsters then--those who had the forests already cut for them, the houses already built for them, the food already available for them--were thought to be getting by without having to do the work of their forebears.    

There is an interesting aside to all this, however.  Less than a decade after the author's death, the work was bowdlerized (that's my word, but I feel it fits).  A television crew turned it into a mini-series in the 1970's, changed the story-line, the characters' actions and reactions, and incorporated social attitudes of the day to match what I might call the beginnings of this era's "political correctness."  Once re-written, it was re-published as a revised edition by Ohio University Press.  So, in looking for these books, be sure to ask for the original version--that published by Alfred A. Knopf. 

A last word.  I find this travesty of homogenizing characters and story-line especially ironic since, no more than a few pages from the end [page 410, The Town], in looking back on her life, the main character speaks of the joys of finding diversity in people without attempting to make everyone the same. "In her time in the woods, everybody she knew was egged on to be his own special self.  He could live and think like he wanted to and no two humans you met up with were alike. ... Folks were a joy to talk to then, for all were different."


P.S.  There's something about names that I find compelling.  And Richter's choices for the family members seem intriguing--many of which I dare say he found in his researches.  The men:  Worth, Wyitt, Portius, Resolve, Guerdon, Kinzie, Chancey.  The women:  Jary, Sayward, Genny, Achsa, Ursula/Sulie, Huldah, Sooth, Libby, Dezia, Mercy/Massey. As unique as many of these names are, so is his writing.