For the next two weeks I am taking a detour from the Hudson Valley and kayaking as I will be in our family house in the southwest of France. I’ll be posting these when I find a café with a wireless connection.
When I arrived in Estampes it was night, so I could not see the fields of corn or sunflower that line the narrow road. I felt the sway of the car as we took tight turns, went up and down through a valley in this area of the southwest of France where the high ridges of the Pyrennes stretch, like fingers, into this farm country. As we drove that final leg into the village—the final minutes before arriving at the house producing a surge of excitement, the excitement of summer, of vacation, of childhood—wild pigs appeared on the road. A mother and seven young, disoriented in the abrupt light of the car. They scattered, regrouped, vanished over the hillside. In all of my years of coming to Estampes—I was first brought here in 1964, aged three—I have never seen wild pigs, sanglier. I thought: it must be good luck to see wild pigs.
Estampes is my mother’s village in Gascony. I sleep in the bed she was born in (though there is a new mattress!). When I step through the door, the smell of damp and a touch of something else greets me. It’s the lingering smell of garlic. Or goosefat. The house holds its smells. It also holds its memories of my great great grandfather, who was the school teacher in this village of 120, all farmers. It holds the memory of various old aunts who are names only to me. Madame Castay who lived in a wheel chair, who dragged her basin to the pump every day to get her water. The pump that has since been stolen.
It is easy in this house to let the loss overwhelm me: loss of things—that pump, but also furniture, plates and glasses taken in a robbery in 2003—and, loss of people. My parents. Stanis, our neighbor. All of those aunts, who I did not know, but whose photographs and portraits hang on the walls. They are solid women, often unsmiling. And there are several portraits of the pauvre Fernand, the son of the local doctor who died too young in his 20s.
But on this trip what delights me are the improvements. My sister Becky and her husband Olivier have set the local builders in motion. The outside crumbling wall is now reinforced (the construction is like that of an adobe house of the southwest). And the living room has a new covering that leaves the room bare, gray, but with hopes of a cleaner future.
When I finally tumble into bed what stuns me is the dark and quiet. There’s not a light on anywhere nearby, or the sound of a car. Nothing. It’s almost tomb like. Then, the call of an owl (what sort I can not tell you). That I know for sure is good luck.
In the morning it is the sound of a donkey braying that wakes me. Soon, I’m up to find Odette, our neighbor, with her rabbits and sheep in the barn next door. She looks strong, the lines of her face deeper at 82, but she’s still, as the French say, “lest.” She can get around easily. Odette is a second mother to me, and we share information from the past year as only family might. We laugh, and we cry.
Then I’m off with Becky to walk the cracked roads, where grass erupts in the middle. She is gathering blackberries for a pie while I’m trying to figure out the birds that wing by overhead. Birding in a new location is always disorienting. At home I know what birds I will find on my morning walk. But the odd thing about birding in France is that the birds are familiar—many the same species. But also not. There are the Tits—Blue, Coal and Great—that look like our chickadee. There are Buzzards that soar overhead like the hawks at home. But then some birds are the same: Doves and Magpies, and some unfortunate species as well, the Starling stealing our figs from the tree, and the House Sparrow.
As we head uphill, I spy a flock of white Cattle Egret standing proud next to a donkey or two. The Egret is new to this area. But so too is the donkey. And it’s not just this one donkey—everyone seems to have gone out and bought a donkey or two. When I was growing up, farmers in Estampes only grazed milk cows.
Every day, I would walk with Odette morning and evening as she took her cows to pasture. We’d meander down the quiet main road in town. On the left, was the Dubourg’s house. Sometimes one of the three kids would come out to shyly say hello—a kiss on both cheeks—or Madame Dubourg herself would emerge, as neat and tidy as her immaculate house itself. On the other side of the road was Mary Louise, a woman who had a daughter by a man who passed through town. She raised the child by herself, gardening to feed her, and taking in laundry to pay the few bills. She would wash our jeans in the river Boues and return them to us, stiff and clean. In these days before telephones were common in the village, we would stop to chat briefly, to share news, exclaim over the weather. But the cows didn’t stop so we’d hustle to catch up with our charges.
In the early days, Odette would leave her mother, Henriette, with a dog to guard the cows. Henriette would sit in the shade of a tree, and when a cow strayed from the field, she’d send the dog to bring it back in. Those were the same years that Odette’s husband Stanis milked the cows by hand. Then came the electric fence, the electric milker. Now those cows are gone. As are the pigs. Odette tends a few sheep as well as her rabbits, and chickens. It is hard not to see loss in this. But now there are donkeys, waking me in the morning.
The rest of the day unfolds like many before it: lunch outside in the courtyard, a nap, some reading, a bike ride into Mielan to buy the paper, some bread, then writing this short missive from Estampes. When I finish writing, I will chase off the starlings and pluck a few figs for myself.