Foreign Correspondence

We are off to France to visit a son and his family, who were relocated by his company at the end of August for a stint at headquarters in Paris. What a project getting four people, inclusive of two children, ages four, and one, plus two dogs, and most of the furniture across the Atlantic. The only things they left behind were two cars, which they sold within minutes using Craig’s List. At the other end, it took six months to lease a car in France, a function of the slow pace of immigration paperwork qualifying them for driver’s licenses, a prerequisite of having a vehicle in that country. Conveniently, public transportation will get you about anywhere over there. But it is the luggage that accompanies small children these days, the collapsing and uncollapsing of strollers, and the hoisting of it on and off buses and trains, that wears you out in the absence of the back of a car with which to transport it all.

From the start, they have produced a weekly podcast chronicling the adventure. Email me if you would like to subscribe (address below). The first few months of installments may cure you of any desire to attempt a similar high-wire act. At last, they have settled into a routine—the children are attending schools and daycare (crèche, en Français), they are learning the language, they have made friends, are going to children’s birthday parties, walking to the bakery every morning for fresh bread with all the other Parisians, and they have a car. We are going to see how it gets done.

It means we will miss mud season. Most of it. What a shame. If we are lucky, by the time we return the driveway will be firm enough to support the car without dissolving under the wheels into deep tracks that harden like lava flows as the soil dries out. That would be a relief. It is demoralizing to drive over bumps and potholes, literally unsettling. The frost heaves are already jarring the teeth. We are not built to bounce along. And a shovel is barely any use as a repair tool once the driveway is mostly stone again. 

I suppose I could take a moment to reflect on the amount of water the ground holds to have it behave as mud until the tundra defrosts—likely, several hundred thousand gallons across our few acre parcel. Sorry to say, I am not enough in awe of that fact to treat the mud with any favor.

When we return, we will be up against what has to be done in the form of raking, blowing, and planting. My father insisted that no matter the winter, the lawn would need to be mowed every year before the end of April. His precept was true for us until last year when I did not need to mow until the first week or two of May. Yet, provided it does not snow in late April, there will be things of an immediate nature to do when we get back, and I will be worrying about them while we are away. Washing windows, grooming the lawns, mulching around the shrubbery. One cannot just bop off to France without thinking about readiness for the change in season. It is a never ending thing here.

Mud season makes it as good a time to travel as any. On this occasion, especially, I look forward to exchanging a few smiles with the French people as we struggle to speak their language, pointing out things we would like to sample in their grocery cases, or seeking directions to relics of their thousand-year history. I look forward to inviting any of them, who seem interested, to visit us in Monadnock. They should come in winter, I will explain, for warm stove fires and pot roast. Or summer, for chicken barbecue. Or autumn for the colors, of course. Just not mud season.

I will write you from France. À bientôt!

(Published in The Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, April 8, 2025)