Scenes from the longest way home

The fishing pond

This is a countryside across which Monet traveled and set up his easel to paint the fields and the stands of trees, the village and the church of Vétheuil. An easy ride from his home in Giverny, on the other bank of the Seine, just a bit farther along the Seine towards Normandy.

This evening, my object was to ride and take advantage of a rare moment without rain, but I took my camera. Just in case.

It was lovely, riding along in the dimming evening light. Quiet but for the laughter and the voices carrying across the water of the nearby "base de loisirs" in the clear summer air, chilly for early August, but the sounds of vacationers enjoying themselves regardless of the need for fleece jackets and sweaters, and a campfire by the little lake brought a little summer back. So does riding my bicycle along roads I normally travel by car, or scarcely ever take, as close as they are to home, the same roads Monet took, when they were probably nothing more than lanes.

It was the very same light that brought Money here to paint, and urges me to bring my camera wherever I go. I could well have taken many more photographs, but I will leave them for another time. I keep telling myself I will paint again.

Right after I finish renovating the house.

....

My own personal strike

The road home across the fields

Bastille Day weekend. We left on the motorcycle for Dordogne and rode for hours down past Chartres, across the wheat fields of the Beauce past Châteaudun and Vendôme to Blois, on to Tour and to the highway south towards Bordeaux. We'd get off in Angoulême and take the "routes" through the villages: Sainte Catherine, La Rochebeaucourt, Vertillac, Ribérac and on to Mussidan. We passed the aires d'autoroutes, with their stations services announcing 1.60 euros a liter for 95 octane gasoline.

I do my best mental math passing stations services. 1.60 euros at the current exchange rate is $1.42. It hasn't changed much since July 11. A gallon is about 3.79 liters.

1.60 euros a liter translates into 1.42(1.60 x 3.79) = $8.61 per gallon.

OK, so we get universal, single payer health care that is the best in the world, and probably some other stuff, but I remember when it was about 1 euro a liter, and the euro was trading at more or less parity with the dollar.

Those days are long (about 9 years) passed.

I rode along behind my husband, glad we had taken the motorcycle at about 6 liters/100 km, versus the BMW wagon at more like 10 or 11 liters/100 km, and my heart felt heavy for a generation entering a world where it is normal to pay what I treasured for a week's groceries while in college on a couple liters of gasoline. How, I wondered, were they going to do it? How many, I asked myself, watching the Charente pass alongside our motorcycle, would be staying home this summer, owing to the cost of a tank of gas?

I felt indescribably sad.

When I got home, I took my bike out of the garage, newly equipped with an easily removable front basket and saddlebags to let me take it on errands, and told my car, even my motorcycle, that we'd not be seeing so much of one another; I'd be using my bike for as many kilometers of necessary transportation as possible. On a daily basis, if it came to that, all the way into Mantes, or 14 km one way, or up to the post office and supermarket, about 5 kilometers from home. I'd also had it outfitted with a small device that tells me how many kilometers I have traveled, my current speed, my average speed, and the time of day. I can reset it. I don't bother. I like watching the kilometers add up. 100 for the month of July. That's a good 12 liters of gasoline, and at 1.60 euros or so the liter, that's more than 16 euros saved.

My own private strike.

I like to imagine the liter bottles lining up toward the horizon out beyond my handle bars, and with the basket and saddle bags, here is a list from a recent shopping trip of everything I could carry home:

2 1 liter bottles of eau gazeuse

1 1.5 liter bottle of Coca-Cola

1 1 liter bottle of milk (demi-écrémé, or a little lighter than whole milk... that's a joke)

12 saucisses and merguez

6 chicken breasts

1 package of 6 "minis" pain de campagne

12 free-range eggs

2 avocados

3 pears

1 bunch of organic bananas

1 kg pommes de terres nouvelles

1 bag of arugula

1 bags of hard candy (for my husband, who after more than 20 years smoke-free, still wants to smoke)

1 box of cereal

1 package of galettes de sarasin

1 pack of 6 slices of ham

Cheese

Since it's only 4.5 km home, I take the longest way possible and ride as fast as I can.

But, there was more than my own private strike. There have been months of a frightening lack of motivation to move, and something about turning 50 soon has been leading me back into my past, like when I was in high school and then college in New York City, and all I had for transportation was my Peugeot uO10 bike.

Mine was blue, and God how I loved that bicycle. It was the first thing I ever bought with my own money, from my first job, waiting tables at Bergson's Ice Cream & Sandwich Shop in the mall where I grew up, and I probably paid about the same thing they are going for today.

I rode it to work, I rode it for pleasure. I raced trucks just like in the movies, and I felt the thrill and the pride of using my own body's energy to move like the wind. It lasted until one summer, when I left it in the storage area at St. A's at Columbia, and returned to find the frame bent. Someone had taken it out and had an accident and never confessed they'd ruined my bike. It was pronounced beyond repair.

I never threw it away. Like my old skis, it's at my mother's home, purgatory for things I loved but couldn't justify paying to have shipped in the container here, along with my son's worldly possessions -- all except his baby and toddler years toys --, my books, and a bunch of IKEA furniture I need to have my head examined for paying to ship.

I'd ride my bike again, I decided, just like when I was 16, and 24.

My bike now is a Marin San Rafael. One of the first splurges I permitted myself once I was working again as an architect, when Sam was in elementary school. He got one, too. I justified it by the hills in Greenwich, but Sam never proved to be anything near an avid bicycle rider. He distrusted his bicycle and its brakes, and we scarcely used them, but they came here, and I have ridden mine, on and off, over the 9 years since we arrived. Less than I ever thought I would. First of all, my husband has a tank he can't ride more than a few kilometers without dying (not motivating), and second, we live far away enough from anything to make riding one's bicycle to get to it a chore. Unless you see it in health and philosophical terms.

Which I do.

Riding up to the curb by our house the other evening, my bike loaded with the weekend's groceries and winded from taking the long way home, I came across my neighbor, just home from their family vacation in Corsica, coming out of his house. Usually, he would cross the street to "faire la bise", but I think something about my physical state kept him on his side of the street. Feeling rather proud of myself (he runs regularly, which is more than I can say for myself these days), I explained what I was doing, my private strike.

"Ah, c'est bien quelque chose qu'on ferait aux States," he said, with a touch of playful admiration, just playful enough to be construed as ironique, or teasing, but just admiring enough to pass for -- admiring. I chose to accept the latter.

It's funny how anything that wouldn't necessarily cross one's own mind must belong to another nation, if the mind it does cross has anything to do with another -- nation.

Like my brother-in-law français once remarked during a dinner party, when my husband and I were glad to be separated by several friends, with more than a touch of astonishment and bewilderment of my marriage, "everything takes on international proportions in your relationship."

....

Fia and the frogs

Fia, on her first birthday Friday

"Mom?" came Sam's voice from upstairs.

"Yes, Sam?"

"I think Fia has a frog in her mouth."

I was up and off the sofa and out the living room door in a frog's heartbeat. She was in the garden, next to the fish-pond-in-an-old-fountain, and watched me approach.

"Fia, crache-moi ça."

She looked at me, mouth suspiciously tightly closed, and hesitated, glanced down and looked back at me, mouth still shut tight as an oyster. Anyone who knows dogs knows that this is not how they great someone they love, unless they happen to have a frog in their mouths. Ordinarily, there is a pink tongue hanging out, and a lot of eager breathing.

"Crache," I ordered in such a way as to make it abundantly clear that I knew that she had a frog in there and that she had no alternative but to release it. Immediately.

And she did, being a very obedient dog -- who understands the command "spit that thing out of your mouth right this second", this not being the first time I have had to instruct her to release a frog from her gueule --, and out plopped an intact, breathing and blinking medium-size, emerald green frog, landing on his belly in the grass in a perfectly ordinary frog posture, looking little worse for the experience.

"Fia," I shook my head and stared at her, wordlessly communicating all the displeasure I felt alongside a sort of enchantment. I picked the frog up, felt its a tad overly warm belly beat against my palm, and then set it on a lily pad.

It had disappeared into the water in the time it took me to step inside for my camera, but by then, Sam had appeared.

"You ready to leave soon?" he asked. We were going to the train station. I nodded.

"There was a frog in her mouth," I told him.

"Yeah," he said. "She was lying next to it before, and then I saw her pick it up."

"I guess that's what you have to do when you don't have fingers and a palm in which to carry your little friends," I said.

It certainly is a lot stuffier and hotter in there, though, than it is in a hand, or even in a boy's trouser pocket.

Next, I am going to teach her how to release them back into the pond-in-the-old-fountain. Frog capture and retrieval system, to protect them from the much less delicate cats.

....

Verdigris

Un peu verte sur gris-noir

You see, F.M.? Here is one that stayed green on the raft that the pot of Japanese Horsetail has become for the frogs.

I scared it, and the littler one, away feeding the fish a short time ago. But, I watched it, and it stayed the same color.

....

Gray on gray

Gray frog with beige stripe

You see? It is no coincidence. Right down to her (let us say) skin matching the color of the dirt and the bottoms of the Japanese Horsetail stalks (Fia ate the green tops off during her recent anxiety-causing grossesse nerveuse) and the stripe up her back to her nose and her tummy matching the bit off straw-colored grass mixed in where she is sitting on this gray summer day.

She could sit anywhere. She chose this particular place, where she feels safe.

The intelligence of nature.

....

Wild thing

There are those who just somehow seem to know how to make themselves disappear into the scenery. By instinct, or by design, they know who they are, and where they are best unseen.

These are the unhistrionic frogs. They might even be considered the shy frogs. Perhaps, the wise frogs.

There are the green ones. They know green. Green is their color. They wear it in leaves, whether of the suspended or of the floating kind, in feathery aquatic plants, in watery grasses and moss, or simply in one another.

Green

And then there are, perhaps my personal favorite for their marked lack of beauty and uncanny ability to find the plants that only Fia could make for them, the ones with no stalks, no leaves, nothing left of any color whatsoever, like themselves, the gray ones, who resemble spotted stones and chose backgrounds perfectly suited to their lack of color.

They are the unusual ones. They usually lie on the edges of the old stone farm sink my husband found in the bottom garden shortly after he moved into the house and hauled up to put in the fountain, complete with angels, which he removed and sunk to the depths of his new fish-pond-in-a-converted fountain (for photos, see the bottom slideshow in this post, "A la bourre"), until Fia got to the Japanese Horsetail in a fit of anxiety in her recent "grossesse nerveuse". Once she had finished with it, all that remained were the lower stalks, black, the dirt and the roots.

Perfect for the gray frogs.

Gray

And then, there are the ones who don't care. Who will flaunt it. Who can pose and work the camera. Who can wear the really bright colors and carry them off, while you know you look best in tailored or draped styles in black, brown, beiges and grays, and navy blue: a gray frog, recently blond.

Who will walk on the wild side.

Wild thing, you make my heart sing.

....

The natural order of things

Frog in a water lily flower

I see them along the bricks edging the fishpond-in-an-old-fountain, and on the moss mounded on the old stone farm sink. I see them clutching the edges of the water lily leaves, or sitting atop them, but until today, I had never seen one actually sitting inside the flower itself, resting lightly on the yellow pistils and stamens. This is a small frog of great vision and imagination; he sees possibilities where others see only pink.

Many days have passed this year when I have not written, and not even felt tempted to write. I have a short list of probable explanations:

1. Hours spent in the garden working without stop from February 27 through June 1.
2. Various computer malfunctions relating mostly to power supply and motherboard issues.
3. Numerous family dysfunctions relating mostly to inflated expectations in a blended family situation.
4. Hours spent working on my volunteer position as president of a non-profit association that runs a publicly funded daycare center with a social mission.
5. Fear of exposing my private reflections, having taken on a public role, and wondering if the fear is reasonable, or as inflated as my blended family expectations.

And the winner is, fear of exposing my private reflections, having taken on a public role, and wondering if the fear is reasonable, or as inflated as my blended family expectations!

Fear, as they tell you, makes for being stuck, and now that I have begun, I realize there are a million places, almost only places where I live in some level of perpetual fear: fear of another argument about what is really necessary in our home renovation (stuck), fear of another argument about how good is good enough in our home renovation (stuck), fear of spending money when I earn none (stuck), fear of heading out for a jog and finding that my back spasms and I can't suck in enough breath, having been inactive apart from gardening for -- oh -- a year (stuck), fear that I have been a terrible parent and a worse life partner, fear that fear that I have irreparable personality issues, fear that I really have no talent for anything and that I will be caught out, fear that for everything I have learned, I have learned nothing.

The only thing I don't fear is taking on a challenge, like becoming president of an association with an operating budget of 650,000 € and 13 employees, or ordering and installing a new motherboard for my laptop.

My husband would suggest, kindly, that this sounds just a little bit like depression, which is just so depressing (and confusing), really.

"Tu as besoin d'un projet. Le problème c'est que quand tu en as, tu vas à fond, mais quand tu n'en as pas, tu es comme ça." "Ca" meaning depressed. "Ca" meaning untethered and aimless.

"C'est pas vrai," I retort, but it's true. At least it seems true. So, what does it mean?

Projects make you feel like your life has purpose and structure, when they might really be a mask for their total absence. I long for two things. The first is to be able to feel as though I am sitting on a mountain top, or a very high hilltop, anyway, with a clear view out over the surrounding countryside, the countryside being "the meaning and purpose of life". The second is to be Solomon Grundy: Born on a Monday, Christened on Tuesday, Married on Wednesday Took ill on Thursday, Grew worse on Friday, Died on Saturday, Buried on Sunday. That was the end of Solomon Grundy.

I'd settle for the Sesame Street version of his week, too. At least there is order and purpose, activity and diligence, reductionist simplicity in it, even if at the end of the week he's still half dirty.

Anyway, I tell myself that when my computer is functioning properly again, which should be as soon as I install my reconditioned motherboard when it arrives, I will get my drawings for the house ready. We shall see.

That failing, I'd be my frogs. They don't have to feel guilty when they are between projects and doing nothing, or avoiding projects altogether. They can sit in the water lilies.

....