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.

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.

It felt like home

For a very brief moment.

I was driving to work this morning. I stopped at a red light. I was digging through my bag for my sunglasses and then I looked up. You know I grew up in Illinois, right? So, to my left was a huge truck with bales of hay. To my right was a pick-up truck, one of those really big ones I've only seen in the States. Big and black and shiny, like the man who owns it really takes care of it. I smiled, it was odd to see those things in downtown Laval, France.

People are like that too, aren't they? You hear a voice and it's a sound that makes you feel like you've come home. And it's a sound you'd recognize anywhere, forever, no matter how long it's been since you last heard it.

Or they say something, something only they would say, and it feels so familiar, so them - even if they've never said it before, and so grounding that some part of you sighs in relief. That magnet moment when you are touched by where you are known and who knows you.

Urban myth revealed to be true

The Ikea in Rennes actually exists.

I went there this weekend.

Of course, I went with a very specific (and short) list of things I wanted (2).

Of course, I spent the double of what I had intended to and came home with items (5) that were not on my list.

On the upside, I'm very pleased with everything I bought.

On the downside, heavy dining room tables are best assembled in good (read: strong) company, not alone. I put it together without much difficulty, although I did realize that I need a new philips screwdriver, but turning it right side up was a huge (read: heavy) pain in the ass.

Lost piece and peace

France and I used to have a good relationship. I liked her, she liked me. We got along well. I realize now, of course, (isn't that always the way?) that our relationship worked so well because I had molded myself around her. Which, as any foreigner knows, you have to do - at least to a certain extent - otherwise, well, you know.

Problem is, I molded a little bit too much. So now I've got to unmold (hard work, by the way) and then renegotiate our relationship.

I'm not too concerned, she's more flexible than she appears, and, hopefully, so am I.

In the meantime, St. Anthony.

L'état de l'attente

Waiting. The waiting state. As opposed to the desperate longing state. Maybe a bridge to a state of grace. We'll see.

I can't do yoga. I haven't really been able to do yoga for 2 weeks. I did something to my left wrist, funked it up a little, ignored it and did yoga anyway for a week. Bad idea. It moved beyond funky into not really utilisable. Which sucks because yoga's become something I love doing. So I'm forced to wait.

Oddly, or interestingly, enough, that's not the only thing I'm forced to wait for these days.

If I were a highly evolved person, I'd see the wisdom in all this waiting. I'd see the gift of clarity in all this limbo. Like Julie, I'd see that events and timing and plans are much more gracefully laid out when I'm not operating under the illusion that I'm the one eventing and timing and planning what will be my new world. I'd see that having to wait makes you take responsibility for what you get. That it makes sure you've got your eyes wide open so you see what you get when you get it. So you don't wake up in the middle of it and wonder where it came from.

How do you wait?

Also the way to do it

a.k.a. forces at work

Apparently I wasn't meant to go to Vannes this weekend.

That's right. No chocolats, no macarons. Which both seem ridiculous when you sit them next to the fact that I didn't get to see the boys and haven't seen them in 9 days. And won't for another 3. A weekend completely devoid of sweetness. Good thing I drank vats of champagne friday evening - I must have been cosmically aware that my sorrows would need to be glazed over. That said, the champagne would've been better saturday night because really, hangovers don't glaze much of anything.

Anyway.

It was 11 a.m. saturday morning. I had just left Laval and was headed for the highway. Then a weird red light (weird because I had never seen that light before) came on in my car. It wasn't for fuel levels or oil even. Just this really menacing red light. I pulled off and turned down a small, dusty country road. I turned on my hazards and popped the hood and tried to imagine what I could do with anything under that hood. Aside from check the oil, not much, it turns out. About 30 seconds later, a car drives by. The car stops, a young man gets out and says, "Ma'am, do you need some help?" I explain about the menacing red light and the mysterious universe under the hood. He goes back to his car and gets a BIG tool box. I ask him if he knows anything about cars. He says he's a mechanic. He does some stuff under the hood and then calls an auto supply shop and asks if they have a part and they do and then he drives me to get the part, which cost me 15€. Then we go back to the car and he changes the part (the temperature guage or something like that which indicates to the ventilator thing when the motor is too hot and it needs to turn on or something like that) and he says 'Have a nice day, Ma'am,' and goes on his way.

Despite the fact that it was fixed I still couldn't go, it had gotten way overheated. So I went back home and felt hungover and sorry for myself (those go REALLY well together).

I'm better now.

How I know I'm in my 30's

I don't go bar hopping. I go chateau hopping.

Yesterday I went to dinner at one chateau and slept at another. Both with four turrets.

I also drank cognac. It wasn't the first time but it had been a long time and I had forgotten how much it tastes like what I've always imagined caramel colored lighter fluid would taste like.

My ideas about cognac may have something to do with why I don't have my very own chateau.

What's in your database?

Yesterday I spent the day teaching English to some people who work for a large company in the north of the department. In a town I'd never been to, never even heard of actually. I got the information on the class about a week ago, over the phone, but just the basics, names of the participants, levels, what they wanted to work on and where the company is located.

But all week long I haven't been able to remember the name of that town. In your native language you have a whole ocean of possible names of places. Like if I told you my grandmothers lived in Raeford and Astoria or that one of Beth's grandmother's lived in Rockford, these names would sound perfectly reasonable to you, even if you'd never heard of them before.

But in a foreign language, there's nothing for names to hook on to. Nothing that sounds kind of similar or that you heard someone mention 15 years ago.

So I spent the week calling that town, Gorron, everything that starts with G and ends with N. Goulon, Goudon, Goudron, Gordon, Gobon. The third one means blacktop or tar, which would be an unfortunate name for a town.

Now that I've been to Gorron, population 3000, and seen (only the outside) its bright pink tatoo shop, I'll never make that mistake again.

How my bed got into my bedroom

So, I've got a new bed. I ordered it a few weeks ago.

Last wednesday at 8:00 a.m. my doorbell rang. I wasn't dressed yet but my sleeping attire wasn't shockingly slutty so I walked out and unlocked the gate. There was a man and his truck was behind him blocking the street. He said he was there to deliver my bed. Yeah! I shouted and then said, "Where's your partner?" He said he didn't have one, the bed wouldn't be that heavy. I must have looked doubtful or surprised because he reassured me, no problem. "Even up to the second floor (first for Europeans)?" His turn to look surprised. What did I mean upstairs? I explained that leaving it in my dining room wouldn't do much good and I certainly couldn't carry it upstairs myself.

So, I tried to be his partner. We tried to get the box spring up the staircase. And got stuck halfway there. We twisted and turned and acknowledged defeat.

Please understand, the pit is nothing like the cellar and I really wanted my new bed. In my room.

I left him holding the box spring in the entry and went in search of help - the strong masculine variety. I found a neighbor's son, 20, tall and strong looking and, most importantly, willing to help. Of course I was asking for help and gesticulating madly under his window so, really, what choice did he have?

Mover man and his new partner tried the box spring - staircase thing. Same results. At which point I'm thinking, St. Anthony, finder of lost things, you'll be required to find my sanity if I end up sleeping on a bed in the dining room.

The window was the only other option. As mover man started to move into impatience-I've-got-a-schedule-to-keep-land, I raced to the garage to get the ladder. We (mover man and I) climbed the ladder together with the box spring in hand and lifted it up just high enough for neighbor's son to grab the plastic wrapping and hold it while I climbed down the ladder and raced up the stairs, climbed onto the radiator to reach over the wrought iron scrolly things and grabbed the plastic and held it while mover man pushed higher, neighbor's son and I pulled as he pushed then we held on while mover man let go and raced up the stairs to take my place.

And then the fun began. They were both on the window sill with one foot on the radiator and had to flip the box spring to get it through the window (from the scrolly thing to the top of the window is 155 centimeters and the box spring is 140 centimeters wide). It took them about 5 minutes.

The mattress, on the other hand, made it up the stairs.

Aren't people cool sometimes?

It was a normal day yesterday. A normal tuesday after a three day weekend. I worked in the morning and picked the boys up for lunch.

The house I live in is on a small street with sidewalks on both sides and parking places on both sides, parallel to the sidewalk. It's a one-way street in downtown Laval that runs north to south, one block east of the river.

I parked my car in one of the spots near the house, but next to the opposite sidewalk. Boy1 got out street side, looked both ways, and crossed. I got out on the sidewalk, undid Boy2's seatbelt and left the door open for him to get out. I went to the trunk to get out my briefcase and the bright yellow plastic crate I carry all my school stuff in. Yes, it's heavy and impractical but I haven't found a better solution. Suggestions are welcome.

I closed the trunk and Boy2 and I crossed the street together. We went inside and I fixed lunch. We ate pasta with sausage and tomato cream sauce and leftover chocolate torte with chocolate whipped cream, in case you're interested. Then the boys played and I cleaned up the kitchen and read a little and then it was time to go. We had spent about a hour and 15 minutes at home. We walked outside, I closed and locked the big iron gate and we all crossed the street. There was my car, as it had been left. Which was with the driver's side door wide open onto the sidewalk. It took up most of the sidewalk, there was barely enough room for someone to walk. I don't live on a busy street but I can be fairly certain that at least 20 people walked by my car and left it like that. No one took anything. And there's a lot to take in my car. Not of much value necessarily, but still. Three MAC lipsticks, a wooden finger rosary, three grocery store tokens, a thermos, 12 packets of kleenex, an umbrella that says merde, il pleut on it(a promotional gift from the radio station that interviews me sometimes), a winnie-the-pooh umbrella, 3 textbooks, and 3 clean cake pans, all in plain view of anyone who walked by.

Restores your faith in humanity, doesn't it?

So, do you want to hear some more about the spa?

I got there saturday right after lunch. I checked into my room, stared at the sea for a while and then went to the spa desk. Where I was served an herbal infusion while I waited 5 minutes for my massage therapist to arrive. She led me into a hot room, filled with candles. I undressed and got on the table, which was covered with heated towels that smelled like honeysuckle. The rest is kind of a blur. I know it involved warm scented oil and what felt like 50 hot hard snakes slithering over my skin for the next 90 minutes. Amazing.

I had a essential oil facial after that. And then I went back to my room and stared back out at the sea for a while.

I'm actually surpised I came back.

As of last night, Boy2 has the stomach flu and I'm knee-deep in vomit covered laundry. Timing is funny.

Misc

I'm not a slacker. Really. That's not why I haven't been posting. I haven't been posting because my time is now spent on 15 hours of teaching spread out all over the place, the dining room floor which is half-way scraped, finishing up some phone lessons for my old job, and shuttling the kids to and from school and karate and whatever else. Cooking and cleaning are in there somewhere. And I actually managed to make a delicious apple tart with honey and fresh thyme this weekend. There's one piece left and Boy1 made me promise tonight when I kissed him goodnight that I would not eat it.

I'm not complaining, just saying. When my time starts to get limited, my computer usage is restricted to watching last week's episodes of Heroes and Grey's Anatomy.

Don't take it personally.

It would seem that I rock

This photo is not to show you how well I can decorate cakes or how nice an eggless birthday cake can look. I would've taken a better photo. It is only to show you how little it takes to impress a nearly 4-year old boy.

It's Boy2's birthday this weekend and today is his birthday party with school friends. (I'm sane, I only allowed him to invite 3 friends.)

For the past year he's been telling me he wanted a spiderman birthday cake. I found a bakery that would make one, I even found a purely chemical one at the grocery store. But then the egg allergy thing came up. So nothing was possible at the bakeries. They looked at me like I was crazy to put the words 'cake' and 'eggless' in the same sentence. And the chemical one had just too many petrol derivatives to be fed to small children.

So, I was left to my own devices. I told Boy2 I wouldn't be able to make a real spiderman cake but that I would do my best. When I showed it to him he said, 'Spiderman's web? You rock Mama.'

In case you've been wondering

What glamourous things I've been doing the past week.

Well, let me tell you.

It's mostly been about scraping that ************ floor and nursing my family and self back to health. We all came down with something that seems, at first, like a simple cold, but, in fact, is much worse.

So basically, no glamour at all. Except for:

1. There is a currently a very confused wasp in our bedroom. It's 9:00 p.m., it's very dark out, it's about 50° outside, and she flew in while I was closing the shutters. Why would she do that?

2. Boy1 peed three times before going to bed tonight.

3. I went on a school field trip today with Boy1's class. I spent the morning in the swimming pool being splashed by 27 2nd graders, most of whom had green snot running down their noses into the pool.