Breathe differently

Yesterday there were 11,603 emails in my gmail inbox, 5,081 of them unread, of which 72 are from Brooks Brothers, who have been sending me increasingly hysterical, now twice-daily, notifications about their sale. Usually it is more trouble to delete an email than to skim past it, but clearly this has to change. It is a kind of passive digital hoarding. Yesterday, the younger daughter kept me company and offered opinions as I emptied out dresser drawers and purged clothes. I let her have my Beached at Bellevue’s t-shirt from our friends’ party at a Hell’s Kitchen restaurant in the fun 90s. And now I am diving into the wreck, with you and my old cat to keep me company, to declutter my inbox.

Wholier than thou

After opting out of the culture it has come to us anyway. We’re getting a Whole Foods. I am both overjoyed and rueful.

The younger daughter will be thrilled. She loves the health and beauty section. The older daughter enjoys the prepared foods and we might be able to find her flageolet beans at $20 an ounce.

This is a kid who in an interview for camp, where she is being assured there will be lots of food for picky eaters, asks, “Do you have vegetables?” (And this being America, the answer is yes, in the form of raw broccoli florets in the salad bar, like at school. Americans, as a people, see vegetables as something that are best liquified and disguised as fruit juice rather than something anyone would go out of their way to eat.) This is a kid who happily eats quinoa. We are very much part of the target market for Whole Foods.

What I am told is that when a big-time store like Whole Foods comes to a city like ours, they don’t ask what sites are available, they simply figure out where they want to be and the city makes the site available. They have chosen a location that means the end of a two-story office building I photographed about a year ago. A building with a name that is painted on the glass in gold, outlined in black. A building occupied by beauty parlors, but which suggests smoke-filled  accounting offices, with heavy, teal-colored adding machines.

It is exactly the kind of building I am always looking for, part of the city that time forgot dreamscape, in a city that is waking up and throwing the covers to the floor. Meanwhile, the Bad Wal-Mart will abandon its site for a building that is going up as we speak, the Enormous Wal-Mart.

Last weekend, I went out to Earth Fare, because we needed yellow lentils to make a Nigel Slater recipe. You can use red lentils, which are not quite as hard to find, but the yellow ones provide the nutty earthiness, which can accordingly be found at Earth Fare, which compared to the supermarkets near us might as well be Portland. It is much like Whole Foods, but too long of a drive to do often. The coming Whole Foods will be very centrally located. I can refrain from Earth Fare, but the Whole Foods will be hard to avoid.

I buy rainbow carrots, a piece of French cheese and the most right-on milk I can find.

My husband asks me to pick up charcoal and has a really negative reaction to what I end up getting, which is some kind of green briquette that is made out of coconut shells. It never occurred to me that these might impart a coconut flavor but I end up googling it (they don’t). But he is still affronted by them.

Fine, I say, I’ll take them back.

No, he says, that is a waste of time to drive all the way out there, for what, $14?

$7, I say.

Well $14 was about the most ridiculous amount I could think of, expletive deleted, revisits concept of charcoal made out of coconut shells.

It’s no trouble, I say. I’ll have to go back to for the deposit on the milk bottle.

***

I revisit the doomed building. There are a few hair places that still look operational. I stalk around it, peering into windows. To my surprise, the building door is ajar. I go in. There is a man cleaning out his office and a silent, angry woman with him, who won’t speak to me, saying she is just a client. His office is two small rooms and just heaps of papers. He seems unsurprised by my presence. He has only been there a couple of years. There are two imitation paintings on the wall, flowers, a harbor, and a half-full two-liter bottle of off-brand soda. It’s an accountancy office but no teal adding machine, just hideous grey fluorescence and paper.

In the corridor window of another… business?, are some hand-lettered signs. This is one of them. Have these been written in light of the eviction or do they just reflect the irony that catches up with all of us at some point?

Farewell, building, with your punning hair salons, your sadness, your philosophers.

Whole Foods, our people, have found us. Aren’t you relieved to be rescued? We have six times as many legumes as the supermarket and we bring you locally sourced biltong. Have we arrived just in time? Or is it too late?

Tread softly, Whole Foods. Just leave out a basket of rainbow carrots, a sourdough baguette, ethical shampoo, a selection of artisanal cheeses, some lavender-infused chocolate and wait for me to come creeping back in.

Please excuse my English

Juxtaposition

In the arrivals hall, men hold digital slates and cards with names. Look for your name. Oh, the garage is small. We enter London’s morning from the west. A Lucozade sign fizzes with neon effervescence. In a field by a roundabout a pony grazes under CCTV.

Each scene is puzzling and tightly packed, like a clue in a cryptic crossword. In the field, under surveillance, at home, headless, backwards, endless, initially, oddly. We carve and slice the words to revise our understanding of what is being said. The clue is always at the end or the beginning.

Remember this road? The grey barleycorn brick houses that would look so nice on a brochure if you crop out the eight lanes of traffic in the front yard. The Hogarth Roundabout, the Hanger Lane gyratory, traffic words from morning radio reports. Exhaust, exhausted. Many B&Bs along this way, thick blackout drapes, one hopes, double-glazing.

The air is thick with pollution.  A compact car is driven by an older man in a maroon sweater. Two passengers sleep with heads on pillows pressing against the windows. Long car journeys with boiled eggs and Thermoses of tea or coffee. Everything pushed together.

On the Edgware Road, a man in a leather coat withdraws money from an ATM while two minders literally watch his back. Children ride ponies in Kensington Gardens. Look at the trees, mature plantings, so much texture, so many shades of green, so many shapes of leaves.

Remember that flat we looked at to buy that might have been a bordello? The windowless rooms, something sinister about it. We are in the street where the guidebook said the magical museum of childhood would be. I remember pushing the stroller, looking at the number on the page and the enticing description of the carousel that was no longer there. The museum had closed. I’d never heard of such a thing. More cheap rooms to let, bed and breakfast, fake School of English, visa scams.

On Baker Street a beefy Russian-looking guy in his late 50s with longish hair, linen blazer: “Darling,” he says into his mobile, “I want you to give me some good news.” Who would hang out on Baker Street with all the buses and traffic rushing by?

Reversals

The Older Daughter has an English accent. “Did you adopt her in London?” a child asked me recently.

To solve the clues in a cryptic crossword, you have to read them the right way. It helps if you speak cricket and know the names of rivers. Once the answer reveals itself it’s hard to believe you hadn’t seen it all along. A clue gives the appearance of being a cohesive thought. The answer is defined by a word or words at the end or beginning. You have to work out which part is the definition, which the clue, and what type of  clue it is. It is important to read each word independently of the others. The sentence is trying to push your thinking one way, but you have to resist and remember, it’s not really a sentence. You don’t understand what you’re reading yet, like being in a foreign country, where you don’t actually know exactly what you’re seeing.

Containers

There are more puzzles to solve on the tube: A man with a script for the Retiring Prime Wardens Succession Dinner. I read over his shoulder. It spells out the events to come, to take place in a hall, enacting centuries of protocol. He wears a cheap suit and gets off at London Bridge. The Guild of What? Prison wardens? Fishmongers? Cabbies?

A group of Italian girls enter the carriage, excited chatter, tourists, youth hostel. One girl with a flattened nose wears a tight tee-shirt that reads, “Bad decisions make good stories.” A souvenir to commemorate one already taken or part of her travel agenda? How good is her English?

Another mystery: those green sheds. They’re cafes for cabbies. One near us let us in once for tea.

“Oh,” our driver says, “don’t tell anyone. There’ll be an uprising. They don’t know what to moan about next. Oh, the price of diesel. Oh, the last passenger I had put his feet on the seats.”

Moaning disguised as small talk in lift in Russell Square tube station:

“It’s slightly warm in here.”

“Just a bit.”

Homophones

I buy a book of cryptic crosswords for the train to France. In France, it’s all a bit cryptic. If your grasp of your own language is tested by the crossword puzzle, you are now reduced to scrabbling for scraps of meaning. A friend who now lives in Paris says, “Five years on, I’m still Tarzan.”

A sign for Abyss Piscines and the piscine, standing up on its end, looks from a distance like the niche for a saint or a virgin, abbess, station of the cross.

The Older Daughter invents words, like “ettigency,” but is also very literal. She struggles with idioms and hidden meanings, but she is unafraid to try French. She learns to ask kids at the pool to jump in with her, to sauter avec moi. Hide and seek in French, we learn, is cache-cache. But the girls are courageous about the cold water. Not brave. In French, brave means tough.

“When I grow up,” says the Older Daughter,  “I want to hang out on a farm with animals, like Shirley Temple.”

Designer of abattoirs granted MP line crookedly (6, 7). That’s a bad one, but you get the idea.

Pieds sensible are not sensible shoes, but delicate feet. I understand this is about chiropody (podiatry) but choose to find the humor in the mistranslation and the belief that others will jump to the same initial mistake. Also, the shoes are sensible and the lady looking in the window has on sensible shoes, which makes it funny, in case that needed to be explained.

A river of language, navigation, deviation. Interdit! Attention! To what? Of what? Beware of the something.

Ah, I say, tapping my pen on the puzzle, not refuse, like won’t, but refuse, like trash.

The Younger Daughter dreams you need a language license and in her dream one of the children we are with trades his language for another. He gets a bad exchange rate and ends up with only half a vocabulary.

Some things transcend language: A woman at the train station comes out of the bathroom with the back of her skirt tucked into her large white underpants.

Foreign

Dinner at the farmhouse in the vineyard. At the end of one long table is an English party of parents, grown children and their friends and partners, at the other the multilingual Dutch group staying on the caravan site. We are in the middle, with a couple from New Zealand—Liz and Jean. Jim? JEEN—and another couple from England, who create a very awkward break in the introductions when they arrive so that the slightly sunburned and apologetic girlfriend of one of the English sons is cut off just as she is about to introduce herself. English people can be mortified by introducing themselves. That end of the table are making an effort. She tries once more to go through with this humiliation, as one must in a foreign country, but the late-arriving English woman, missing the cues, is now being convivial and unwittingly casts them adrift, freeing them from the responsibility to speak to the rest of the table.

The Older Daughter talks to the Dutch party and uses some odd phrases of her own devising. I start to explain, but the man she is talking to looks over and says to me, “I understand.”

Cat outta Leytonstone

He was a cat out of Leytonstone. We found him through the classifieds in the London Loot and I brought him home in an apple box on the tube.

Until recently, we would joke that he was the honey badger of cats. He don’t care. He could fix you with a belligerent stare that said Feed me or That’s my spot, Dog. He was black and white and comical. He had a big head and in his prime he weighed over a stone, about 16 pounds, but when we took him to the vet yesterday he was just under 7 and there was a mass on his spleen and so we did what we had to do.

It is the first day of spring, after unseasonable biting cold, the air is soft and you can feel the warmth of the sun. This seems unfair that he has made it through the winter and missed out on the first evening he could have sat out on the deck.

He was really old. We were in our 20s when we got him. He sniffed the Moses basket with the baby. The girls staggered under his weight as they carried him around and posed for photographs. The older daughter fell asleep holding him in her arms the night before he died, after we had told them we thought his end was near. I came back from tennis and found them both asleep on the living room floor. She was still on the beanbag and he had gone back to his spot on the rug, lying in this facedown posture he had adopted as part of his decline. The thing about pets is that you sign up for this. That kitten or puppy you bring home will get old and die. They teach us about death, I tell the younger daughter after school, before we go home.

The ground around our house is stony and filled with roots. It is an effort just to plant a bulb, the tip of the trowel immediately hitting a dense network of fibers. A box with a cat would be impossible. You would have to dig a deep hole, because of the wildlife, and you might make a good start and hit a rock and have to start all over again. It would take all weekend and be grotesque, like a scene from a National Lampoon movie.

We chose the group cremation and scattering of ashes in the woods or farm of a man who was in the vet’s office that day, who we glimpsed through the door, who wore a fawn colored corduroy coat.

I will not bore you with the charming details of his life, his fear of a certain 70s pop song or his love of chèvre, his last meal, and asparagus; the way he liked to lie on my chest; how kind he was to the second cat or the time he got his head stuck in a can and I thought we were being burgled. It was good of you to read this far, even if you were only skipping ahead to the punch line, the realization that animals are brave because they have no choice.

The 8th day of the week

Freed from the rigors of organized anything, the younger daughter spent the last two weeks of her summer vacation left to her own devices. In the end, she filled her time writing and reading and blogging.

Some of the writing was in text form: where did u put my book? i cant find it. O nevermind.

When you are at work and your child is texting you because they are bored, but you on the other hand are quite busy, ding, doing work, ding, ding, you need to break their flow by assigning tasks.

Wow, that was A LOT of laundry to fold.

I practiced my flute.

When are you coming home?

But here’s the other thing, it’s good to hear from her. It’s nice that of all the other people she is communicating with I am still one of them. My parents would call me at college, tracking me down through the dorm hall phone or the house phone I shared with four other people, one phone on a wooden crate. All you could do on it was talk. Other people milled around you, with their cigarette smoke and their momentary aspect of being orphans and therefore somehow pure. Our house phone probably didn’t even have call waiting, certainly not voice mail. Can you imagine all the messages in all the college houses? Dearest Child, are you there? Are you at the library? It could take a while to reach a person. My father’s sardonic voice: We haven’t heard from you in two months. This would now be an impossibility. We wrote each other letters. Two months. Ding. Ding. Ding.

My knee itches.

She started writing an eerie sci-fi-esque story. She emailed me links to the Google docs. She read my blog post about when she wanted a suit, laughed uproariously and gratifyingly, and wrote a reply entitled “I Win.” She started her own blog. She sent me a link to her friend from London’s blog. They started a blog together.

In the end, I asked her if she could design her own summer, not including the vacation and/or travel that we would undertake as a family, what would it involve?

She would take a week to decompress, clean out her desk and pack up her school clothes. She would do swim team. She would do art classes, jewelry-making perhaps. She would be better about calling up friends and being more proactive socially. She would read and blog.

What would you do?

I would do the same. And I would exercise, play tennis. Finish that quilt.

School starts again. (We have a strange school calendar in Alabama.) We eat dinner on the porch and I go in to load the dishwasher, leaving my husband and the younger daughter in conversation.

I am in the kitchen when she tears inside. It is about the cat. He’s in the woods. I follow her outside. He is somewhere in the thicket behind our house. We call to him and he cries. The light is in the final stages of failing. We shine the flashlight beam into the thicket.

Meow.

Why won’t he come to us? We’re here, here. We call to him but his cries are fainter. We push into different parts of the thicket. He seems to be going further in.

Anguish. There are coyotes, bobcats, hawks, snakes. No sound. He is very old. A cat who was once deemed obese and had to come to the weigh-in clinic is now underweight. (It’s a thyroid condition.)

What can we do? The cat treats, the flashlights, our love are all feeble. We send the girls inside and take stock. If something got him, my husband reasons, they would have done it quickly. He is old, but he’s not sick. He did not crawl into the woods to die. Not tonight.

And as we are realizing the futility of the continued search, where picking up the dish of food we hoped would lure him back is an obeisance to fate, he emerges through the brush, a twig between his toes. You were worried? Two months and no call? Not my problem. Your problem.

I look at him tonight, miraculously returned to us, this ancient, beloved pet who predates the girls, whose life span overlaps that of the Wertis, wending his way through the kitchen with an accusatory look in his eye that says feed me in spite of the food in his dish, not even side food, but actual food.

Look at him, I say. That whole thing of going missing must have something to teach us, but what?

Do not chase after your cat in a thicket, my husband says.

The salt of the earth

The Amish community sits on either side of an awful highway. It is a road that says don’t leave that for this.

Along the strip are Chevrolet dealerships and China Buffets and payday loan, pawn your title places. Vinyl signs with ugly fonts glare in the heat of the day. Tinsel glitters from the car lots. We roll through this flat land, no trees, no relief. Here and there are old signs that have some character, like an enormous yellow muffler, but mostly it is Shoe Caravan, this-n-that crap for your home and Captain D’s Seafood.

It is a moat of modern life, the kind of thing the elders might contrive to keep folks on the farm.

We are looking for the general store, the portal, where you can find the map that says which houses sell what. It is 100°F, a heavy heat that drains your energy and a brightness that blurs your vision.

At the country store, a man washes his horse in the buggy port.

Down the road, behind the store and around the corner, we go back in time. The only roadway signs are now small white ones with black capital letters that identify the products for sale. Green peanuts, onions, okra, pies, harnesses. The first house we stop at sells furniture and produce. The houses are set in clusters of buildings, workshops and barns. Two farms may abut each other so that there is an almost urban proximity to the two houses and then acres of green. A friend later explained that the second house was for the parents when they retired, leaving the farm to the child most likely to succeed.

There has been drought. The ground is dusty and the dirt swirls around us as we pull into the yard. Turkeys squawk in the shade. Outside the house is a little hut with baskets of tomatoes and peppers, a sign for okra and a display case of bead necklaces, some patterned, some random, the crafts of the less skilled, children, or in the case of another house we go to, of a blind man, meant solely for visitors.

A woman comes out of the house. She wears a dark, long-sleeved dress, white bonnet and round, tinted glasses with metal frames that look like soldering, the earpiece curling out under one earlobe. Her accent is not heavy but the cadence of her speech and her accent are unfamiliar. A girl follows her out, and is then sent to find a child to pick more okra.

In the furniture workshop are two small children with their father. What you don’t see with the long dresses are the feet: bare, dirty, broad and muscular. The father is short, with curly blond hair cut in a Dutch boy bob and bangs—like the boy on the paint can—and a springy, uncut beard. The boy and the baby play with the pile of shavings. The father makes tables and chairs and a high chair that turns into a rocking horse when placed lengthwise on the floor one way and turns over to become a desk and chair.

He communicates more with smiles and gestures. He brackets his sentences so that we are guessing at the middles, like feeling our way along the wall of a dark corridor. He likes this, but would be happy to give up this. He gestures at a shelf of commercial stains. He could be 25 or 35. He has at least four children and he got the house.

When an older sister picks up her crying small sister, I see the baby’s long white bloomers. Their authenticity is more of  a surprise than had she been wearing Dora the Explorer pull-ups. The clotheslines are hung with rows of big-to-small white bloomers or dark blue long-sleeved shirts.

At the next house a girl pumps water in the front yard, making a flash of silver against the energetic, silhouette of her figure as she throws herself into her work. There is no electricity, they do not drive cars. The children are educated from first to eighth grade. They learn German first, then English.

“Imagine if they had turned their hand to wine-making,” I said.

The other shoppers/visitors: a black woman looking for collards. In her backseat, four small children press their faces against the window to see the Amish children. A white woman with some kind of slatted basket that needs repairs talks to the farmer at a table of produce, potholders and Indian corn necklaces. If you lived locally this would be your farmers market and your  alternative to Lowes for outdoor furniture.

We go from house to house and buy more produce.

An Amish man walks along the road carrying a gun.

Those of us who grew up reading and/or watching The Little House on the Prairie will remember wondering what Laura would have made of the modern world. And through my futuristically chauvinistic benevolence, I felt a twinge of conscience. Maybe they would have benefited from Thinsulate and radio, but then they wouldn’t have captured our imagination or enjoyed what they had otherwise, the maple syrup snow, Pa’s fiddle.

The next day I heard a radio diary of a trip to Mali where the mud used to build houses and the mosque is harvested at the end of the drought season. People were torn between a desire for modernization and regret for the loss of their traditions. The builder says the mud houses are much cooler in the heat and the people who live in them are healthier than those in concrete houses yet most aspire to a concrete house.

At one rather busier, more diversified shop they were selling car air fresheners to smell of things from nature, like kudzu or cut grass, but they didn’t; they smelled of air freshener. If you want to smell kudzu, drive a buggy. The freshly shelled beans are put in ziploc bags and there a few rustic little pots stamped China on the underside. Even so, I did not get the feeling that after we all departed, they were putting on their T-shirts and flip-flops and watching TV.

The Amish have been settled here since 1944 and the religion dates back to the 17th century. Where do they draw the line at technology? What must it be like to see us over the years, parking our cars in the driveway, our changing, immodest fashions? I found an ABC TV series about Amish teens and rumspringa, the year of “running wild” and deciding whether to become Amish or to leave their families and join the modern world. One of the boys had rigged his buggy with an iPod and speakers. The music he chose was 1980s heavy metal, as if he couldn’t bear to bring himself totally up to date. At the end of the year he decided to stay, content to ride to sound of his own horse.

The younger daughter likes the way the children have jobs and the older children look after the younger ones. The older daughter would be in her last year of school. They would enjoy the time spent out of doors. If we were to join the Amish, we would have no skills and a lot of catching up to do, as if our whole lives had been rumspringa.

Two days later summer is obliterated by a cold, dark, steady rain for Labor Day. I take the girls and a friend to the movies at our outdoor, town-styled mall that has no place to buy an apple or a pint of milk, no newsagent or chemist, only adornment, entertainment and dining. We arrive early and amuse ourselves as the only customers in Sephora, smelling funnel cake shampoo and Justin Bieber perfume. The message of the movie is one the Amish would appreciate, that you should spend the time you have now with your family over other pursuits. It is hard to imagine them now, in their simple houses with the rain pelting down and the fall coming, though I like to think I could give this all up if I had to.

Pardon our progress

Excuse me, ma’am, where would one find the center of town? Is it that this is the center of town?

Well, you could say it was this, the woman said. She was selling tomatoes and other produce. She smiled ruefully. The church and the historic district are down there, across the road, she added.

One had suspected this might be the case, but one’s husband had been saying, ask, ask, and so one did.

She had nothing to apologize for. There was an oval plaza, shaded by trees, with a fountain, banks, pharmacy, bread shop, tabac. We were at the tail end of our trip, when we were winding down, only buying travel food and a newspaper.

Our man’s balcony

In the historic district, we ventured down a short passage into a courtyard. A man, English, called down to us from his ancient stone balcony and told us about his renovation, how the whole side of the cloister had to be reinforced.

Were we looking? A friend of his had a fixer upper for 100 grand, four doors down. It was tempting in a very abstract way. We saw that it would need quite a lot of work. There were a lot of for sale signs. A LOT. The entire ville was a vendre. It was hard enough to keep track of simple work being done on the house we live in now, five minutes away from where we had been living. Imagine doing this time zones away in another language.

The narrow cobbled streets ran between mansions with massive wooden carved doors, the broad plate glass window of hair salon was fitted into the ground floor of one. A toddler ran around while his mother watched from the doorway of what looked like a kitchen.

We carried on up the street and saw another courtyard. Inside the ground floor flat some construction work was being done. There were signs insisting on hard hats and yet the door to the work site had been left open and there was no one around. Whitewashed walls were drying  around an enormous stone fireplace and behind it was another room, walls also drying. But look at the ceiling and the beams. Let’s leave the old paintwork as it is. The entire ceiling is filled with heraldic motifs. Talk about original features and old world charm… Even if it turned out to be a bit of 19th century affectation. In NYC this might mean that you had a picture molding or a broom closet that was formerly a dumbwaiter.

What, we had wondered throughout the trip, would America be like in another 500 or a thousand years? The French have been working at this a long time, improving what they had and passing along the knowledge. Would our wine be this good? The produce? The bread? The cheese? And in America, that’s not even the point. We are after something different. A future that sees improvement in a wholly different way, improvement of that which we have only begun to imagine. Improvements which beget technology which enable faster, easier, cheaper, the elusive “better.”

Yet our technology is unevenly applied. One airline has a very sophisticated baggage app that can tell you exactly where your bag is at every stage of the trip, even if it has been put on the wrong flight, whereas when I signed my children over to another airline as unaccompanied minors, they were using carbon paper (“press hard, this needs to make six copies!”) that airline personnel could initial at key points in the journey. We are a demanding people. I want the app tracker thing installed in the plastic drinks wristlet they snap onto the girls’ wrists. The younger daughter’s friend has made such a bracelet for herself out of a bookstore giftcard because the card was already chipped with her home address and mother’s cell phone.

We are innovative.

We will continue to chemically modify and “enhance” the things we consume, so that we can have zero-calorie sweetness that is 600 times as sweet as sugar, or indestructible tomatoes or herbicidal wheat, unless we are forced by disasters to live in an entirely different way. Once you have tasted the fruit of progress, even if it tastes vaguely of bleach, there is no going back.

One night we drove across the vineyards and up a road towards a great stone house. On the approach the windows were either bricked in or shuttered and it showed no sign that it was inhabited, but we knew that it was, being both a B & B and an active winery.

As soon as we made the turn, the building came to life: cars were parked under carefully sculpted trees, dogs loped around, and a wine tasting was in full swing. Smells of rosemary, apple and pastry wafted out of the kitchen. One of the wines on offer was from a domaine that has been run by the same family and has existed since the 1500s. “Starting when I was 8, my father would take me to the cave to taste, to start learning,” said the winemaker, when we are seated at the table for dinner. She pours a taste of rosé for my daughter.

Shortly after we return to the US, I have a dream where I am involved in inventing a new snack for the car. It is a series of salads that come in little pouches. They have appealingly designed packages that are white foil with the names of the lettuces printed in bold graphics. Somehow the leaves have been infused with the dressings and flavorings thus leaving the surfaces dry so that your hands don’t become oily.

In 500 years, will the wrappers of my miracle, handsfree salad, be caught in the dried vines of the old arbor? Will my 8-year-old descendants be brought into the food lab to taste flavors of memory, something that reminds you of a place that once was, of barefoot summers, like the puff of a synthetic dandelion dancing through the biodome.

On the edge

We get an early start at the farmer’s market. Okra, scarce at $4 a pound last week, is now $2 in abundance. Tomatoes are plentiful and cheap. They are even giving away sandwiches. There is a make-your-own table set up with sliced tomatoes, bags of white bread, squeeze mayo, salt and pepper shakers. One of the Amish farmers is there in a brown dress and starched white apron and cap.

Last week a shopper whispered to me over the squash, “What does Amish Vegetables mean? Does that mean they were grown by the Amish, or is it Something Else?”

From there, we have to collect our younger daughter from a sleepover east of town in time to get out to the pig farm to the west, where we have ordered free range pork. The friend lives out in this vast, swanky development with big stone houses and a golf course, where the nice Wal-Mart is. We arrive early so we drive past the entrance to see what comes next. We pass through more subdivisions, still being advertised on billboards, until we hit a no through access sign, which is where I take the photo, above.

Look carefully and you can see the subdivision pushing up against the edges. At the end of that street is an old farmhouse with a porch. A porch these days is merely decorative. Why would anyone want to sit outside? What would you do? A mother and daughter are working in the yard. All else around them is modern and landscaped. No other people visible. No cars. Emptiness.

Some houses in the subdivisions are still under construction. At the friend’s one, the landscaping is mature; a waterfall cascades down the main entrance way, weeping willows skim the surface of aerated ponds, golfers abound, but out here they are still laying down pipe work in the red dirt. There is a stretch of semis and then a more expensive development. One house has three stories of bay windows, another is a medieval-style castle, with arched windows winding up the keep, but mostly they are unremarkable, big, brick houses with enormous roofs, set closely together.

The little village we went to in the South of France was building a subdivision the last time we were there. It was down the road, walking distance, from the cave cooperative and where the communal recycling station shimmered in a pool of shattered glass. We noticed it the day we were out on our walk, the time the farmer mistook us for Belgians. They were just at the foundation stage, but you could see the shape of the houses and the change to come. Small, but each would provide more space, privacy and light than was available within the village proper, built inside medieval walls.

Within the walls was the church, the bell tower of which was used to broadcast midday and late afternoon news «allo, allo, come see the taureau in the piscine», or something to that effect, and tiny streets of terraced houses, the hard echo of television on ancient stone, the sound of meals being eaten or prepared behind shutters or curtains of wooden beads, the jittery song of a budgie. We’d say hello to the old ladies, wearing aprons over dresses, setting out bowls of cat food on the street as we passed through on our way to the bakery or to the small grocery store which sold rotisserie chickens and a small selection of produce, but not milk. For fresh milk, one must go to the Hyper-U. The back walls of the fortification are long gone and so the village opens onto a road where the school and the tambourin field are and devolves into vineyards and up hills where the hunters will be on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Because it is more interesting, more my idea of how France should be, should I wish them to stay inside the walls? Who I am, an American, to talk to them about a sense of history, or tradition, or sense of place? But who will stay in the walled village if they have these convenient little houses to move into? And if they move yet a little further into the fields, they can have bigger houses, bigger yards, swimming pools. And if they are living out there, it might be too long of a walk back into the village, so they will drive.

In 10 years, perhaps it will all be English people or vacationing Americans, the fools, loading their plates into toy-sized dishwashers and climbing the tiny stone staircases and banging on about authenticity while secretly wishing there was proper air conditioning and a bit more space.

As in France, so it is in Alabama. People want what people want. We stop at the edge of the no-access road and consider the silos amid this new crop of structures. For one friend, living in such a development, she will tell you the flies can be a problem. Cows, while picturesque, attract them. The farm where we collect our heirloom, free-range, organic pork, is the holdout, the family having sold a great swathe of land to a developer. Now they face across the road from a little grid of terraced houses. One of the tenants has told the farmer’s wife, “You got to do something about the pigs! They smell!”

Meanwhile back at the suburban ranch, we want to grow our own vegtables. An urban backyard chicken coop craze sweeps the nation. Schools create outdoor classrooms. We are going back to the land. Everyone is a farmer, even, maybe, me. I am hoping to grow Brussels sprouts for Christmas.

We go to the feed & seed for vegetable seeds, to Lowe’s for fencing, to Justice to spend allowance, to the groovy converted mill for bread and to spend allowance. We go to the bad Wal-Mart for ziploc freezer bags for the pork.

The bacon from the farm is well worth the drive and the extra dollar per pound. We get the girls to eat BLTs. Yes, that’s mayonnaise and, yes, you do have to have it with lettuce. We’re a long way from gizzards, though gizzards, at least for now, are not such a long way from us.

Looking for trouble

"I got ears, ya know. I hear things."

“Look back for trouble, look ahead for worry, look up for faith,” says the church signboard.

I am on the return leg of a 2-and-a-half hour drive. I came down on the interstate. Any I thoughts I have while driving are fleeting. There is no way to record them, it’s like dreaming and failing to write down the idea you won’t remember on waking. I am taking the scenic route home.

Along the Heart of Dixie highway are farm stalls and yard sales. A couple sits outside of an abandoned gas station with clothing rails, furniture and baskets of produce. Is this the recession or is it always like this on a Saturday?

At the Bama Motel, a filthy, road-blown sign promises “Clean rooms.”

On the drive down, I had been mulling over this idea of looking back and how I have always lived in a perpetual sense of nostalgia. As a child, the end of summer, the journey home, the end of the school year, each was a period of loss until new life and more fleeting moments inevitably crowded in and took hold.

Last weekend, a radio documentary about girls and summer camp brought a sudden rush of tears to my eyes. None of their friends back home would understand what they had been through, they said. I was caught off guard by that surge of emotion it tripped in me.

Is it trouble or sadness you see looking back? I have always liked sad songs, Frank Mills, Streets of Laredo, but my younger daughter would cover her ears if I sang them at bedtime when she was little.

Another town, another sign: “Jesus was the ultimate Scarface.” Wow, I think, bold move. Interesting idea! Way to engage young people.

No, stupid. Read it properly: Sacrifice.

When you drive you exist in a suspended state, between origin and destination. If you were to follow the advice of the sign about trouble, worry and faith, you would need to live without either, just the certainty you were on the right road. Heretofore, driving was a skill I only used sporadically, a vacation skill, like speaking French badly. I am not yet fluent, but approaching conversational.

The highway unfurls, through an intoxicating greenness of farmland. It also makes abrupt turns. I follow it successfully around courthouses town after town, but it ditches me at a four-way stop and according to the next sign I am headed west on a road I keep hoping it will turn back into, but have a sinking feeling will deliver me to the interstate.

At Dollar General the ladies at the checkout tell me I went wrong at Oneonta. Just go back to the light and go left, they say. And I do. And I don’t freak out. Back on Heart of Dixie, up and down the ribbon of road as it winds through small towns, past Golden Rule barbecues, more yard sales. Songs play alphabetically off the iPod. I drive. I drive. I drive. Close to home, I pass through a town that advertises cage fighting.

Growing up we had a car. That was unusual. A luxury. We were not rich. It seemed then that nobody was. Some people had country houses. Some wore Absorba T-shirts from Chocolate Soup. Some people lived in buildings with doormen, some up a flight of stairs with linoleum hallways. Our car had its own apartment on Christopher Street in a tall, skinny garage with an elevator, where it had its own life without us during the week.

I did not get my license until I was 25. I was up against something like the Football Test from the movie Diner. “You need to be able to do this,” said my then fiance/now husband. My learner’s permit that I kept renewing did not count, apparently. I indulged him. I ran into my best friend from kindergarten at the DMV. She was just getting hers, too, so she could drive at the Hamptons. We filled out the forms. “They can have everything but my brain,” she said, ticking the organ donor box.

Watching kids dive at the end of swim season party I noticed how one of the girls was able to launch herself so that she was suspended in midair before the descent. Beautiful, fleeting, joyful, sad.

Bags unpacked, recovered from jet lag, local currency in wallet, you slip the hotel key into your pocket. The open road unwinds before you or the pool water sparkles below. Choose your metaphor.

When I set out to write this post, I thought it was going to be about photography. Maybe roller skates. Or driver’s ed, my instructor urging me onto the FDR with little rhymes, the gruesome movies the State of New York made us watch. But you just have to make the leap, start the journey as best you can and hope for a clean finish.

Pays de Bama

Chilton County peachesThis morning we had the remainder of a basket of peaches from the weekend. They were ripe and ready to be eaten; some had been bruised and dented and their time was nigh. I put them in a dish with some eggs, sugar, cream and a glug of sherry, and made a crustless tart. It was a “French France” kind of thing to do. You have these counters laden with beautiful produce you couldn’t resist buying at the market — striped bio tomatoes from the hippie organic gardeners, round courgettes, peaches, nectarines, olives, a slice of this, a little packet of that — but it’s hot and there are flies and food does not last so in addition to les salades one must also do a little cookery.

You have the bits of cheese, the bag of baguettes in varying degrees of freshness. Thing is, the recetes of the maison are in French and they are someone else’s cookbooks, so you must do what you can without making yourself too crazy. There are certain basic good things that can be done without planning or trying too hard, such as sauteing sweet onions and baking things with cream. The bread becomes bruschetta, panzanella, bread pudding, croutons.

But for us this summer, the peaches are from Chilton County and we are not in France, but Alabama.

A land of contrasts.

If you drive two blocks to west, you will come to a major crossroads which has a mall with competing flagship regional department stores — one with Khiels and a decent costume jewelry department, the other with a Mac counter and a good shoe department. Across the street is “the bad Wal-Mart,” (this is not a reaction against Wal-Mart; the good Wal-Mart is to the south, the nice Wal-Mart west); the down-market supermarket (where we do our big weekly shop, because it is cheaper and, ironically, has the best cheese selection, go figure); a pay-day-loan/sell-your-gold-jewelry-for cash outlet and a gun shop.

The other corners are occupied by chain restaurants selling American food (bland, salty, sweet, overcooked) in an institutionalized version of cozy and possibly harking back to European old countryness and down-home, respectively. This intersection attracts hordes of pigeons and one day I saw a hawk swoop down and grab one.

You might think, well, both the South and the South of France are hot, but that’s about all they have in common. Okay, we don’t have any Roman ruins, or weekend markets in the real full-on market sense, and there is, sadly, not a tradition of local wine making, but you can do the seasonal produce thing; we have farmers markets and even farmers.

Last summer, arriving to the horror of supermarket cheese, chicken injected with water and broth, and bread with high fructose corn syrup, we kept looking for things we wanted to eat. We found local chevre, a bounty of okra, melons, tomatoes, Vidalia sweets (onions) and corn (which you can’t really get in France, because they grow it as agricultural feed not really for people),  and then we found the farmer who would age grass-feed beef for us and from whom we now buy chicken and eggs, collecting them from a storefront church.

Last fall, as we went to collect our meat from the deer processing place, and my daughters ran off to see the pony and the goat, I thought this is the kind of experience that if we were having it in rural France would be picturesque and the kind of thing vacationing columnists would brag about in The Guardian/NY Times travel section, but because it is in semi-rural Alabama, not so much. The urban readership would not be charmed by the taxidermised bird/raccoon/bobcat/bear/bass diorama or the rack of pamphlets decrying divorce and abortion, nor that our grass-fed, organic meat all bore the message, “Smile, Jesus loves you.”

But I doubt that if my French were of a higher standard that the friendly tomato farmer we met at the outskirts of the tiny French village we went to, who thought we were Belgian (!), would necessarily share my viewpoint on all  topics.

And really, as you do in the kitchen of your holiday house in French France, you make do with what you have. When you shop, you sample what looks good. Sometimes you end up with a breaded cutlet of pig’s foot, or, whoops, cheval hachette. Sometimes, in Alabama, it will be birthday cake flavored ice cream. And, if a nice glass of red wine and some really good aged goat cheese from Vermont allow you to forget where you are, go vote. Where else would you have a ballot that offers you a propane amendment?