This is the first photo that I took upon our arrival in our little house-sitting cottage in Bossabut, France. We spent three weeks in the French countryside in the “department” of Creuse (translated to English “The Hollow” and my heart still hurts every time I look at this photo. A good hurt. A hurt of longing and beauty.
House-sitting for our friends was hard work. They don’t have air conditioning, nor window screens and we were beset by heat, finnicky appliances, rickety furniture, lack of indoor light, ticks, spiders, flies and hornets…just to name a few challenges. So while this photo looks dreamy, there’s a lot about country life that isn’t! Despite this, I found my happy place. I don’t even know where to begin when listing the beauty of this place …but I think access and immersion within a language that 12-year-old Julia learned has a lot to do with it. French simmered in my subconsious all these years and getting to finally use it and be in the country of the language’s birth was incredibly profound for me.
Speaking French brought me back to a simpler time. I remember my adolescence, and what it feels like to have everything stretched out in front of you with more future than past, and more potential than regrets. When my greatest concern was whether my jeans fit right and whether I’d get an A on the next math quiz. When I was younger than my children now are and would be. In short, it makes me a soft, sappy, sentimental heap of hormones and nerve endings. And it feels good to be so raw and so roughly…just..myself. To remember who I am — that life may have dealt me many a blow, but I am still the same person and she is a dreamy, clumsy, nerdy, starry-eyed 12 year old with hope in her chest.
Being plucked out of frenetic, buzzy, Washington DC and plunked into the cold stone walls of an ancient French cottage, that temporary removal from reality into the fugue state of another gave a deeply needed jolt of awareness. We watered our friend’s garden, we picked her plums, her courgettes (zucchini) and her figs, and gathered her hens’ eggs. We lugged watering cans full of water and we trod around 95 degree heat in rainboots and shorts. We lived amongst hydrangeas, perched on a hillside, and coddled a Maine Coon named Nouchka and fed a farm cat named Flamèche. I made sourdough. We had Limousin lamb. The house always smelled like firewood, and it was always either too hot or too cold.
We were never fully comfortable. And it was good.
