What I've got

An apartment in Montélimar that I rented from pictures.

A house full of boxes of varying degrees of emptiness and fullness.

A lot of stuff.

Many, many toys.

Four more days to pack it all up - just this weekend and next weekend.

Genuine concern that I won't be able to do it all it four days.

I've been giving away as much as I can - drive by my house this weekend and you'll see stuff on the sidewalk all the time. Whatever I put out there disappears within minutes, occasionally with a softly spoken "thanks" on the other side of the gate.

In the end

You could've predicted this, you might have predicted this. You could say should but should is just so irritating.

Instead, you wait patiently for the fallout. How could there not be any? The risks you take, the tales you tell, they all lead you to exactly this spot.

A beautiful umbrella, that's really all you've got. You hold on to it and hope this is another one of those times when a storm is only a drop of water.

In the morning, some morning, this will only be a painted memory.

When will you get good at this?

Or we could call it this: some things cannot be helped.

You can be well-informed, years of documentation gathered and archived and filed away for future reference (yeah, right). You can know, without a doubt, exactly what you are doing, what it will do to you, and what it will cost you, damages both familiar and shocking.

It would be helpful, perhaps, if you could identify that part of yourself that makes you so willing to put yourself in harm's way.

Or maybe not. Maybe resolution will come another way. Maybe harm will be a friend one day. Maybe you'll be able to remember the silent battles you lost to harm with the gentleness of acceptance, honor the casualties instead of mourning them, recognizing them as parts of yourself you were meant to leave behind.

Until then, however, harm has no other name.

Where I`m headed

Or we could also call this how to box up a life.

Montélimar is where I′m headed. I don`t know much about it other than what Google and Wikipedia have told me. It′s not a palindrome city though, and I′ll be very interested to discover just what kind of city it is. It feels sort of strange to say city for a place with a population of 40,000, but town doesn′t work either. It′s in a part of the country that I have never visited before.

I have an apartment there for the boys and me, an apartment, like the region, that I′ve only seen in pictures.

So, how do you box up a life?

You take stock, you sort, you only take what you treasure, everything that is no longer useful you give away or throw away. You leave the breakables to the professionals, as well as the driving. You cross the country, leaving landscape you know, and look for yourself on the map.

The other post about feet

Putting your foot in your mouth, it would seem, is not an expression that is directly translatable into French. As with most expressions, there is usually something similar or at least something that means more or less the same. And I know this.

But sometimes I forget or get lazy or start speaking too quickly or whatever.

The French equivalent of putting your foot in your mouth is mettre les pieds dans le plat. To put your feet in the dish, although originally plat referred to low still waters and not food.

So at a dinner party recently, when I mentioned that I had a habit of putting my foot in my mouth, the guy sitting next to me looked at me with the oddest expression on his face. Clearly trying to gauge how flexible I would have to be in order to have such a habit or how clean I would have to keep my feet in order to have such a habit. He looked a little disappointed when he realized that I only put my feet in dishes and/or low still waters.

Begin again

Alright then, I will.

This will be a month of beginnings and endings, more than I can count.

I will change jobs, I will move to a different region. I will say goodbye to the end of the life I have had in Laval for the past eleven years.

I will learn the second language of the south, heat. That should be interesting, given how I feel about heat. I will live in another small city, discover it and explore it in my usual way - one cafe, wine bar, restaurant, bakery at a time.

I will hold my breath when I arrive, waiting to see how I will be welcomed there.