The doctor is real in

I’ve been canning this week. On the way home from last week’s writing retreat, I did both the farmers’ market and stopped at Horrock’s Market, and returned with 5 lbs of blueberries, a large bag of softball-sized tomatoes, 48 pickling cucumbers (selling at 8 cents each), and about five pounds of peaches, plus numerous other bits of produce not bound for the water bath canner that used to be my father’s and grandmother’s. It’s not a huge haul this year, all things considered, and I am buying all the produce rather than growing a lot of it (turns out being away from the garden this year wasn’t great for business). And I don’t need these things. We have plenty of pickles and fruit butter left from previous years, and of course I live in 21st-century America and have lots of ways to procure these items for currency if I don’t make them. But since 2020, since moving to this house, since slowing down, since starting the garden, the summer ritual of chopping and peeling and fussing with the water bath has become an important part of marking the seasons. In the fall I’ll get apples this year, to make apple butter, and I will spend the entire long evening of cooking thinking of the time we made it in college, living in that townhouse for the first time, picking the apples and peeling and cutting and cooking and listening to music and laughing. How many of those friends did I see this year? How many of their children did I meet? How many holiday cards did I get, and texts, and emails? It has been a good year.

In Montpellier I went to the market on Saturdays when I was in town (and to the inside market frequently on the way home from work). It was the first time that the market seemed more appealing than the supermarket, both a level-up for me and a reflection on how sparse the supermarket options were for me in the old, pedestrian heart of the city. When I did go to the supermarket I had to pass a store that reminded me of the Maison Empereur in Marseille, though much smaller – mostly kitchen equipment. But that same feel of a nineteenth-century general store, because both stores are in fact that old. I finally went in and managed to resist doing anything beyond touching all the bakeware. But there were canning jars in there, I knew. And by the end, by mid-June when I was struggling so hard with leaving and feeling like I was really home in Montpellier, not so much because of the vibe of the city but because of the people, it was all I could do to keep myself from buying some, and bushels of dark red-orange apricots from the market and making jam for everyone. If I’d had another two weeks I might have done it. That’s how I knew I was really sunk, that returning to Michigan would be rough.

So I am thinking of that, as I sort the blueberries to throw in the crock for blueberry butter, or peel the tomatoes to turn into freezer boxes of marinara. Sometimes I’m watching the French news while I work, because I’ve discovered that I can get the rebroadcasts here, and I am tracking the heat wave notifications and the wildfires and vaguely worried about my people. Sometimes I am listening to the folk music on our local radio. Sometimes it’s just silent, the words only in my head. I try to remember that in June, when I was mourning my departure and the end of the best apricots in the world, I was consoling myself with the thought of returning in time for blueberry season in Michigan.

Last year, when I went on my pre-sabbatical retreat, I made a point to read books about sabbatical, about rest, about encountering the world. This year, I wanted to find another book like that, a text about somehow taking the world in. It seemed like the moment to attack a book that I have had sitting around for a while, Real Estate by Deborah Levy, the third in her installment of what she calls a ‘living autobiography,’ a memoir written more-or-less while it is happening. Like the canning, I’ve found her books since covid started, and I knew this one would be the sort of reflection and contemplation that I wanted while on my own in South Haven for a couple days.

What I didn’t know was that it would give me a Gertrude Stein quote that was exactly what I’ve been looking for, for so long:

Everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there. … Of course sometimes people discover their own country as if it were the other… but in general that other country that you need to be free is in the other country not the country where you really belong.

Levy tells me that this quote is from Stein’s Paris, France, so that book is now wending its way through the library loan system to me. But when I read it, I felt like Charlie Brown in A Charlie Brown Christmas, shouting “THAT’S IT” back at Lucy, bowling her over and over and over when she diagnoses him with pentaphobia. THAT’S IT. THAT’S WHAT I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR, AND FEELING, AND EXPERIENCING, FOR YEARS. That. Is. It. I am not a Professional Writer (though I do write as part of my profession), but the fact that I keep writing here is symptomatic of what I want, how I move through my other country. Alone, pulled in, but very much connected, separate but more myself while I am there. Observing and constantly drafting posts in my head, to share. Sharing from a place of separateness, and forever craving that separateness when I am back in America. It’s not the same as when I was in Amsterdam, a real tourist, language- and culture-barriered. It’s something else. Even if I’m only there for a few weeks in a normal year.

We start school again tomorrow, sabbatical officially over, and with it comes some sort of countdown to a next trip. Even if I don’t know when it will be. So I’ll leave you with the pickles, a late-summer plum kuchen, and a gratuitous shot of of a June haul from the market, with the apricots that (to me) are worth the price of a plane ticket.

The end is where we start from

Well, that’s that, I guess. Last year I started what I saw as the real part of my sabbatical, once summer teaching & student research were done, by going to the lake for a few days. I’m back here again for the end of things, with school starting in a week. When I was here last year, I did a lot of reading, I did a lot of planning, I thought a lot about what I wanted sabbatical to be. One of the things I thought about was making sure that I allowed time and space for things to come up, for changes to my schedule, to not get everything done that was on my list (and realistically I didn’t think I’d actually write seven papers this year!). I wondered if I’d suffer from the lack of structured time, something that bit me in grad school in the semesters when I wasn’t a TA.

I’ve written more all year than I have in a long time, so the highlights of how things went are in the archives. There’s travel I didn’t get down yet, from the fall and the spring. Luxembourg and Nancy and Strasbourg. Paris at Christmas, and Paris again right before the Olympics. What it felt like to watch those Olympics. Montpellier, which I’ve talked about and yet not talked about. It was a hard landing back in Michigan for a number of reasons, including a basement flood (thanks, Hurricane Beryl), and it took me weeks to feel ok about being here.

But I guess that’s not sabbatical, and I didn’t write much about that. Because this isn’t a place where I detail what I do at work. I could take it by the numbers, 2 papers out and a third submitted, several more pushed down the takeoff ramp (and yet the number I want to write this year is twelve). I have read 158 scientific papers since May 2023 (when sabbatical started officially), and 54 books-for-fun. Both of those numbers are really high for me. I gave four invited talks, and three conference presentations, and my students gave another three posters at off-campus meetings. I got funding to do my travel and also my work. I’ve been thinking about how this year it finally feels like things are coming together, professionally, and maybe that’s sabbatical or maybe that’s just how long it takes to feel like I know what I’m doing or maybe it’s just that we are now 4 years removed from 2020 and that mega disruption that rerouted my research, along with everyone’s.

And then there was the space this year gave me to just be. Maybe it just takes ten years to realize that you’ve passed from trainee to colleague with someone, or maybe it takes fifteen. Both of those things happened this year. Maybe it takes twenty years to lie in bed reading a story to your friends’ kids and have a strange out-of-body experience about it. This was the year that I’ve known Host Mom for just as long after Host Dad died than before that mark, and I don’t understand how that is possible.

“If you can make it work, take a whole year,” everyone said, talking to me about sabbatical. If you can make it work, because while one semester can be taken at full salary, two required me to plan for a major reduction for the year. And I could make it work, and I did, and I am grateful for everything that lined up to make that happen, and proud of myself for the leap of faith, because in the end funding that I wasn’t hoping for or counting on came through.

I also made it work with lists on lists on lists, the master list I compiled last year in South Haven, the handwritten tables with each project listed out with its next steps, the new planner and new organizing system that is working for me so far. So although on the one hand it seems silly to spend the money to drive to a beach resort town in August just to sit in a public library and make a to-do list, I know it was the right thing to do. Because the next challenge is to get back to work without losing myself, without losing all this momentum, while resolving the tug I feel in five directions at once.

When do I go back to France? I don’t know. “[Other former student] is coming to celebrate her 40th birthday here,” Host Mom told me, “and next year you could do that too.” Or maybe I said that last part. But maybe that will happen. “[Conference] is in Barcelona next year,” said my colleagues, and maybe that will happen too. In the meantime, I am glad the lake is here, so I can walk out to just where I can touch bottom and bob up and down in the waves, staring out towards Wisconsin and pretending that it is Portugal, pretending that if I squint hard enough I can see my other life out there somewhere in space or in time. And maybe I can.

Lumieres du sud

After I got back from Cahors, it was the beginning of June, and I had four weeks left in Montpellier. We had finished the labwork that I came for, it was increasingly clear that the data were not going to arrive before my departure, I had been to the conference, I had given my seminar, I had taught my two-day workshop. I started a new project with former-boss-now-colleague, and spent some time working out the strangeness of working together in this new, more balanced dynamic, ten years after we last worked on anything together.

And more than anything, I sunk into my Montpellier life. I didn’t write because this blog sits out where folks can see it, readers who know the characters out in the real world. I didn’t write because I wanted to keep things to myself, also. The end of my trip seemed increasingly like running at a wall, one that I couldn’t avoid.

The past tense here is unavoidable. I am back in the States now. I hate to write ‘home,’ because I also left home, and every time it feels more like I am being pulled in two, every time coming closer to the moment where I will have to choose, and I know what I will choose when it comes to it. I haven’t had a leavetaking this hard in several years, one that ended with me sobbing in the customs line in Detroit. I just hope the moment of choice can hold off for a while longer.

But that is something else that I don’t want to write about. (In fact, I wrote about it before I left, back in February.)

So here are some photos of the last few weeks (Montpellier, Lattes, St Guilhem le Desert). There was traveling, too, in and out of the city, and I may come back and write more about it.

But for now, have these photos, as I settle back in to my life here, where everything is bathed in a very different light.

Something old, something new

I haven’t been writing much here, for a variety of reasons I guess. This often happens when I am just sort of living here, because the day-to-day of the lab just sort of is. I walk to work each day, I work, we eat lunch outside, things get done, I walk home, I have a snack, I eat dinner while watching the news, I poke at the computer or the knitting or a book until bedtime, wash-rinse-repeat. The days are ticking away, and we’re into the last few weeks. I’m not happy about it.

Another reason that I haven’t been writing much is that I keep feeling like my posts will wind up being just a linkfest back to older posts, sometimes much older posts. Two weeks ago I spent the week at a conference, here in Montpellier. But I’ve been to that same conference before, including when it was in Montpellier, at the same darn aquarium. My talk went really well, and I enjoyed myself overall – but the best part was connecting with a friend I’d lost touch with for a long time. The friend who invited me to do this, and did this for me, who I last saw here. Last time I wrote about going to visit Charles de Gaulle, but that was part of a visit to Dijon, and truly how many more things can I say about going home to Dijon? Just to once again say that it is home, that that kitchen table is one of the places that feels most comfortable to me.

One of my collaborators is leaving for vacation soon, so today we had our team lunch, and I was reminded of lunches in Roscoff with my then-boss-now-colleague, because she was there today, just across the table, and my goodness, how long have we known each other and worked together? (Are there stories about that, deep in the blog? Yep! Will I be linking to them? Nope!) How did I come to work here, the door that opened all the following ones? I remember it as a cold email, composed in French (and at length) without telling my dissertation advisor in advance, basically just asking if I could come learn things? And she said yes? And my advisor was ok with it. Mercifully the email thread seems to be lost to time.

Anyway, these are the kinds of things that have been happening. I’ve been reflecting on how I have not actually spent that much time here, in the grand scheme of my life, but how spreading it out across more than half of that life has made it deeper and more meaningful, how I’ve made real connections, how I’ve “steered my ship well,” to translate a phrase that a friend used recently.

But, in addition to all these seasons going round, there’s been some genuine newness. The first weekend of the month features 1-euro tickets on the regional trains in the Languedoc, and so even though I was exhausted after the conference, I headed out. The first stop was Montauban, a city near Toulouse that I honestly only stopped in because of the train schedules. But it was well worth a wander, a visit to the Musee Ingres (the birthplace of the artist), and lunch on a square of brick arcades.

The real goal of the trip was Cahors, a small medieval city tucked into a bend in the Lot river. The cathedral was particularly special, although there were plenty of old buildings to see from many eras. The day was chilly, and I walked and walked, and ate too much goat cheese and discovered a regional aperitif, le fenelon (like kir, but red wine and creme de noix along with the creme de cassis).

But the real jewel of the trip was after dinner, wandering full of wine and food to the medieval bridge that is the main attraction in the city. A 700-year-old bridge that you can just … walk across. Stand on. Look upon, and look out from. The sunset was unreal, the swallows were hunting for insects, the breeze was perfect, the roar of the rapids under the bridge drowned out the techno music coming from the rooftop of the youth hostel. But that music was perfect too. As I stood there, the music is what made it not just an old thing, a tourist trap, but what turned it into a real, living part of the landscape. There were no artists, no reenactors, no buskers. Just young people drinking and dancing next to this 700-year-old bridge, just another part of our collective lives. In a few weeks I’ll be in the zoo that is Paris in July, and it’s harder to grab those moments there.

The full set of photos from the weekend are here.

Fighting on the Beaches

I was fifteen when I first went to Normandy. It was that first trip to Paris, and it was a school trip of Americans, which meant that they took us all to the beaches. We were old enough to see them, to understand, to be impressed. For some of us, it had been our grandfathers who fought there (though not me).

That day mostly lives in my memory (and in familial lore) as the day our bus got hit by a tractor, one of … four? six? … buses of high school band students and chaperones (grouped into sets of 7 kids + 1 parent) hit by a tractor somewhere between Paris and Bayeux. We didn’t get to see the Bayeux tapestry (which would be a trip for another decade).

But we got to Arromanches. I don’t remember much. I remember the black-and-white film we watched at the museum, the first time I had really known the scale of the landings, the planning that went into it. That was the year I was taking Modern European History, but we hadn’t gotten to WWII yet. Sitting there, near Gold Beach, watching footage, I began to understand for the first time. I hadn’t seen Saving Private Ryan, out just a couple years before. I hadn’t wanted to, and I wasn’t old enough. I still haven’t seen it. But the footage was something else.

I remember wandering the beaches. I remember seeing the German bunkers for the first time. I remember which of my classmates thought it would be hilarious to take inappropriate pictures with the guns, well out of the eyes of the band directors, who I am sure would have had None Of It. (Where was their chaperone? who knows.) I remember going to the American cemetery afterwards, in the rain. There was a rainbow. I remember we were there for Taps. It was my first time in a military cemetery, the crosses upon crosses, interspersed with some Stars of David. And we went to Point du Hoc. The gorse was flowering, yellow on the green with the grey-blue of the sky and the sand stretched out below us.

The rest of that trip was spent in Paris (well, as long as you count EuroDisney and Versailles as Paris), and spent playing music, but that one day? That one day they took out of our schedule because it was important to show us where this happened, before the cliffs erode and the bunkers fall apart and the concrete harbor returns slowly to the sea.

I’ve been back to the beaches once, and the Caen peace memorial, and to the American cemetery near Verdun (for WWI, which is actually larger than the Normandy one). Two weeks ago I was in the Haut Marne, seeing the home that Charles de Gaulle lived in and his grave and the truly giant Croix de Lorraine that he had built from Brittany granite, so that people would remember him after his death. The museum for DeGaulle, of which an entire floor is the story of the war, the fighting of the Free French in North Africa at Bir Hakeim. Maybe that hit differently this time because I now know that my grandfather narrowly avoided being shipped to North Africa and dying with his regiment, winding up instead in the Pacific theatre (from which he came home, or I would not be here). Maybe it hit differently just because I am twenty-some years older, because 9/11 has happened, because the world has changed dramatically since April 2001.

The 80th anniversary of the landings is tomorrow, and the ceremony has been going on all week, will be going on all summer to commemorate the year that France was liberated. It has been on the news, the retrospectives, and perspectives, making me cry each night.

I don’t have pictures of that trip to Normandy, which was so long ago that they are pasted in a scrapbook back in Michigan, so instead I’ll leave you with some photos of DeGaulle: the Free French, the grave, the poster from 1968.

Bleu et blanc et soleil

I write a lot about my dual life here, usually when I’m arriving or departing. The fact of feeling like I always belong in more than one place. Appearing and disappearing in small doses that add up to a few years, but spread out over more than half my life, spread out across my schooling and graduating and more schooling and more graduating, across my growing up and growing older. Watching the people I love, on both sides of the ocean, grow up and grow older and be born and move through their lives, move out of their lives. Those small doses have taught me more than a few consecutive years would have.

I was in Marseille again this week, and thinking about the list of things that I learned to do here, or things I used to be afraid of or dislike or just was confused by, that I have come around on. A lot of it has been around food. Raw tomatoes. First on sandwiches because you can’t order a sandwich at a boulangerie and expect them to take the tomatoes off, you just can’t. Then discovering a whole tomato fresh from the market displayed on a salad plate with such excitement and not being able to turn it away. Milk on my cereal. Anchovies. Wine. Fish with their heads still attached. For a while it felt like every trip was something new that I had refused to eat before. Blue cheese. Tea. Salad dressing. A round of cheese for dessert, or for breakfast. Some of this was just my growing-up, but it happened here.

There’s been other stuff, too. Cafes used to confuse and intimidate me. Learning how to punch my ticket for the train (which I haven’t done this time, not once, because everything is on the app, and I miss the ch-chunk of the box). This time I’ve taken up shopping at the market around the corner from my apartment, and I’m now the proud owner of an Opinel pocket knife (thanks, friend!) so that I too can cut my apples at the lunch table rather than biting into them like an American.

Marseille was a time warp this weekend. Friday, back in my office from the fall, but not at my desk because someone new has moved in there. Some of the people I had lunch with I’ve known for nearly ten years now, as improbable as that is. Saturday, a picnic with old friends and newer ones, as we move through the milestones of our lives together. And the city moving through its life, too – after the picnic was done I walked to the newly-opened Fort St Nicolas, overlooking the city. It is being opened to the public after 360 years of, well, not being opened to the public, except that I remember seeing it once, nine years ago, a Journee de la Patrimoine, with one of my co-picnickers. And some things haven’t changed; I may own sunglasses now and a big straw hat and be better about sunscreen, but the omnipresent sun in the city gave me a sunburn anyway, wore me out and reminded me why Marseille is not a permanent landing pad.

I left on Sunday feeling melancholy, as I always do. I don’t know when I’ll be back. But it is home, despite everything and because of everything, and back I will go, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Summon the heroes

I could write a book about me and the Olympics, probably. The fact that I can rattle off where they have been, summer and winter, back to before I was born. The amount of time my brother and I spent reenacting them when we were small. The hours and hours I have spent watching them. Waiting for the torch relay to run past back in 1996. I’m more of a Winter Olympics than a Summer, because of the skating of course. And it was the 1992 Albertville games that are responsible for that, the first Olympics I have any memory of, followed quickly by Barcelona that same summer. (Though the first clear memories are of Lillehammer in 1994, and I can still rattle off that skating podium and that Oksana Baiul skated to Swan Lake in a pink fur-trimmed dress.)

Anyway, I have a real thing for the Olympics.

I have another memory, of a photo that I took in Paris in June of 2003, right after the city declared its candidacy for the 2012 games. A purple “Paris 2012” banner on the city hall. Those games went to London (and I watched the opening ceremony at a friend’s house while sanding a cooler’s worth of ping pong balls for a science experiment). But in many ways I feel like I have been watching the candidacy for the 2024 games since that summer 21 years ago.

They say the country isn’t all that excited about the JO (Jeux Olympiques), and based on lunchtime conversations I don’t know that they are wrong. But I am here, and I am excited. I’ll be several weeks gone by the time the opening ceremony happens on the Seine on the 26th, and I’m both relieved to be out of the hassle and terribly sad about it. I have been watching the news reports, both in America and in France, for years, watching Paris (and Marseille) get ready to host.

All that said, this week was as close as I will get to the 2024 games. When I found out that the Olympic Flame was embarking on the historic tall ship Le Belem and arriving in Marseille on May 8 (the start of a five-day weekend here), I decided that I had to go see it. It is the kind of event that would have been far better on TV, in terms of the actual view, but I couldn’t miss this. And I don’t regret the time or the expense or the sunburn for a second.

When I got out of the train station in Marseille, far too early (6:39 departure from Montpellier to get me there before 9), the air smelled like I was home, a mix of jasmine and the sea that reminded me of early mornings in Marseille at the lab, before the sun burns too hot. I couldn’t stop smiling. It felt weird to be there, and weird to be so happy to be there as well. The whole city was vibrating, even so early in the morning. An hour later, when I was heading back to the hotel to deposit my water bottle (turned away at the security checkpoint), I was reminded of the other parts of Marseille, the jasmine covered up by scooter exhaust, dodging people, a sketchy deal going on literally two feet in front of me stopping foot traffic. But that first hour was magic.

In fact, the whole day was somewhat magical. I had a coffee and croissant on the port after getting through the security checkpoint on the second try. The crowds were already there, even though the events hadn’t really started. Then I joined the flood of people heading towards the Corniche to watch the Belem enter Marseille harbor. Thousands of people, probably, all jostling for space on the railing overlooking the sea. Queues for the Pharo gardens, where people were picnicking for nine hours before the evening’s festivities. Small boats floated in the rade waiting to join the maritime parade. We stood in the sun and waited…and waited…and waited for the ship. When it finally arrived, 90 minutes later, it was led by a fireboat shooting jets of water as a welcome, and followed by hundreds of boats – more ships, smaller sailboats, the ferries to the Ile de Frioul, even teams of rowers.

By the time the evening rolled around I didn’t want to get back in to the secure zone around the port – the lines were loooong and I was fighting heat exhaustion and couldn’t handle the idea of waiting in line in the sun to then fight my way to somewhere I could see the evening show. So I wound up watching the entry of the Belem into the port from behind a tall security fence, tucked in the shadow of a parked truck. Not very glamorous, and I couldn’t see the actual lighting of the flame. But I saw the ship enter, and I saw the fireworks, and I saw the flyover of the military planes, drawing the Olympic rings in the sky. I choked up as we sang the Marseillaise, and afterwards, at the crepe place I like on the Cours Etienne d’Orves, I saw the rainbow that arced over the city in celebration.

It was amazing to see the city like this, packed, celebratory, everyone headed to the same place, everyone surprisingly chill about the security lines and the traffic patterns and the noise. This was the good part of Marseille, and even though I don’t live there anymore, and even though the city and I have our differences (starting with the sun), it was just something else, something truly once-in-a-lifetime to be there and to experience.

(Photos from that day are here.)

After all that, and after a long weekend that will need to get its own post, Monday was the day that the torch arrived in Montpellier. I was able to get out of work early enough to see the relay run by the Place de Perou. After Wednesday, the torch relay itself felt somewhat anticlimactic, and yet since I never saw the flame itself in Marseille it seemed important to be there.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t say that I am totally obsessed with this year’s mascotts, les phryges. They’re Phrygian caps! With eyes! That do sports! I have to watch myself to make sure I don’t come home with too much gear from these games, that I won’t even see. But for now I will leave you with my emblematic picture of my JO weekend.

Got a bridge to sell you

Back home in Michigan, this weekend was graduation. I am always sad afterwards, but this time I got to be sad during the event too, missing all sorts of stuff and yelling at the livestream as my students walked across the stage. In 2020 I watched ‘graduation’ from my bedroom, the president signing diplomas on-camera, wearing my regalia even though no one could see me, as a way of coping with what we were not having. This time my excuse for not being there is more exciting, but I still hated having to watch from far away.

Anyway, yesterday, instead of sitting in the hot sun on the uncomfortable plastic chairs for too long (the part of this that I’m not sorry to have missed), I was out in the Gard, the departement immediately east of Montpellier. We’ve had bad weather for weeks, rain in buckets, and the sun finally reappeared on Friday. The midwestern girl in me will never think that constant sun is better than the lift I get when it’s sunny again, and Friday & Saturday you could tell that everyone had been cooped up for a long time. The terraces were full, the trails were full, there was music everywhere. (This afternoon the clouds and wind came back and it’s cold again, for another day or two.) After all the rain we’ve had, the poppies on the sides of the road are truly spectacular, red gems scattered here and there, and then planted among the vines, and then just fields and fields overrun with them. I haven’t been here for a poppy season in eight years, and it is everything I hoped for.

My friends took me to see the Cascades de Sautadet, and couldnt’ stop being surprised at just how much water was running through the river. It was easy to see why the limestone banks are so worn, into strange shapes. The whole thing was overlooked by a town labeled “Among the Most Beautiful Villages in France,” and I have to say, yesterday it definitely qualified.

The last stop for the day was the Pont du Gard, the Roman aqueduct that is on a tourism top-ten list of things to see in France and yet somehow I’d never been. (“Somehow” is the fact that it’s almost impossible to do without a car.) The aqueduct is in fact just as impressive as advertised, despite the huge crowds of mostly not-French tourists. I can only imagine how much of a zoo the place is in the summer.

This afternoon the wind and clouds came back, just in time for a very short work week before a nice long weekend. More adventures ahead.

Pictures from the day are here.

Le Languedoc par temps de pluie

It’s been slow here, in part because it’s been cold. After a first weekend where I nearly died of the heat, we’ve fallen into a couple of weeks of cold & wet that I am very unprepared for, in terms of what I packed. The heat has been off at work for a month and today was one of those days where the building was colder than the outside. I have been staying put, mostly. Reading and going to the market and eating cheese and feeling like I live here now, because I guess I do, but also feeling like the time in Marseille and the time in Montpellier are blending together into one long year. It’s finals week at home, which is making the end of sabbatical feel very close, but I know I also still have a few months to wrap things up.

Anyway, this weekend it was raining but I had plans anyway. Back in 2016, at this time of year, I went to Perpignan, on the Spanish border. I remember being on the train as it went through the coastal marshes, full of flamingoes and storks and other wading birds. And suddenly the train was rushing past a massive red-brick fortress, so close to the train. On the way home I tried to take a picture but it came out mostly blurry. I looked it up online: the Forteresse de Salses. And now, eight years later, when I was looking for trips out of Montpellier I remembered it. There is a train station in town, so I was able to go, even without a car.

Salses is where the Spanish border used to be, before the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees. That put it at a critical juncture, tucked next to the old Roman road between the mountains and the sea. The fort is 16th century, Spanish, very different from the seemingly endless list of Vauban forts I have visited elsewhere in the country. It rarely rains in the region – except Saturday, when the weather was so gloomy the mountains were nowhere to be seen.

The next stop for the day was Narbonne, the next major city to the east of Perpignan (and Salses). Narbonne was a hub during the Roman Empire, and one of the coolest things I saw there was a bit of the Via Domitia, an ancient Roman road, that has been uncovered in front of City Hall. I got to walk on it, those giant rounded stones, thousands of years old. It is so worn that today it resembles a boulder-filled riverbed more than a road that carts could roll on. And I went into the Horreum, the depot where goods were stocked, and to the Gothic cathedral. The cathedral was a bizarre one. Only the choir was completed because of the Black Death – lack of money and labor to do the rest. But the transept of the church was started and stopped several times over the next few centuries, and today its skeleton rises over a small parking lot for the church. The back wall of the church is flat, like someone came and cinder-blocked it closed, and the belltowers are optical illusions, tricking me into not realizing that there was only a choir to see. And up in the treasury was a tapestry that was part of the Tudors exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art last year – I love seeing pieces of art repeatedly in different parts of the world. “Oh, here you are!”

It was windy, so windy, and still a bit rainy, but I’m so glad I went. For dinner that night there was cassoulet, the bean (and meat) dish that is a speciality of the Languedoc region, or at least that part of it.

It was good for me to go away for the weekend. Saturday night I had the thought that I could have made it home, turned it into a day trip after all, that I didn’t need Sunday morning for touristing (which was good, because I had friends to meet the next day). But being by myself, in a hotel, warm and dry and away from anyone who knew where I was, was also what I needed. I have a lot of weekend adventures lined up for the next month. Soon it will be May and we are embarking on a long month of bank holidays, giving me lots of time for exploration. And writing.

More photos from Narbonne and Salses are here.

God will sort it out

The story of me wanting to go to Carcassonne forever (and then finally going) is here, but probably the relevant part for today is that I first saw a photo of the city in a travel guide back in 2005, and wanted to get there for ten years. It is an incredible city, a rebuilt medieval castle and ramparts and also a mega-tourist trap in the way of old walled cities here. That is, it is full of tourists and you can feel literally trapped in it, in the walls. (See also: St Malo and the Mont St Michel.) I wanted to go to Carcassonne because it it looked super neat and because it is old and because it was there, and I did not regret it at all. But I didn’t want to go specifically for its place in history.

As I was planning that trip, I started reading a novel about the Albigensian Crusade, and the part of that crusade that was the siege of Carcassonne in 1209, which destroyed the city and paradoxically also allowed for it to be restored by Viollet le Duc in the 19th century. (Basically the king of France kicked the survivors out of the forteress of Carcasonne, which remained a military post while a new city was built on the riverbank below…I have a whole garbled post in me about old things here, and learning to read different centuries of architecture, and that these places are by-and-large not actually museums, but today is not that day.)

Which brings me finally to Beziers, a town that I first encountered in that novel. Before the siege of Carcassonne, the crusaders went to Beziers and sacked the city, and, well, there’s a whole Wikipedia article on the Massacre of Beziers for a reason. In the novel the massacre was directly observed by someone who survived, and it was a striking description. Some unknown but very large number (up to 7,000?) of people were killed inside just one church, Ste Madeleine, and the cathedral was destroyed. The most chilling thing to me has always been the line said to have been spoken by an abbot, when asked how to sort the faithful from the heretics: Kill them all; God will recognize His own.

The Madeleine church in 2024. Sadly not open on Sunday afternoons for an inside visit to try to commune with the place.

806 years later, in 2016, I saw the rebuilt cathedral of Beziers several times from the train and the highway as I traveled between Marseille and parts of the Languedoc: Carcassonne, Bordeaux, Perpignan, Spain, Toulouse. But I didn’t stop. It was too far to justify a day trip from Marseille, too small to justify an overnight. But it was the first thing on my list once I got to Montpellier, less than 45 minutes away on the train.

Beziers was hot yesterday. All of the country was hot yesterday. The cathedral wasn’t open until 2:30 in the afternoon, so I spent the morning looking at locks on the Canal de Midi, and beautiful flowers, and birds. It is poppy season, like I hoped. And once the cathedral was open I was able to go inside and read the plaques and sit in the cool shade. The stones were small, and not plastered over, which gave the place a different look – almost striped. I was able to climb the bell tower to the top, stopping in a gallery inside then up and up an uneven stone staircase, climbing while others were climbing down, though it was too narrow to pass safely. (This is France, not the United States with its safety regulations.) The view from the top was worth it.

I had trouble imagining 800 years in the past, yesterday. It was so sunny, and the town has changed so completely. I walked around with a sense of the historical, though, and tried to think about what it meant to be in this place at this time in history, to think about the now relative to then. I’m glad I finally made it here. I’m glad, too, that the wind is blowing this week. It’s cooler now and I am a happy camper.