American Dreamer
In the mid-2000’s I lived part of each year in France. It was a long-held dream come true. I fell in love with the French on a family trip to Europe when I was a child. It was my first brush with real elegance — the way the people moved and dressed, the gorgeous, old-world architecture and, above all, the magical sound of language transported me. Of course, I’d never seen or heard anything remotely like it in my small town in Colorado where I mostly slouched around wearing bluejeans. I was suddenly fully awake in the City of Light, my heart thrumming with dreams and budding passions heretofore unimagined.
Many years later when both my parents died, I was left some money which I used to buy an ancient stone farmhouse high on a hill in the foothills of the Massif Central. It was a place of such extraordinary beauty that I often stand in my memory on my little balcony (mon bolet) and gaze beyond the blooming Chestnut and Wild Cherry Trees and the tile-roofed barns towards the green, rolling hills in the distance. I’m thrilled just thinking about it. La Belle France!
During the first few years I wanted more than anything to BE French and was delighted when up in Paris French tourists would once in a while ask me directions. I was a tourist too, but I somehow managed to look like une vraie Parisienne — like I belonged there . I actually lived in what was referred to as la France Profonde or deep France. I learned to speak the language because I loved it and because there were very few English speakers around. Since there were more cows than people, I also got good at mooing on my long walks when I felt like “talking”. Sometimes I sang to the cows in English. They particularly liked the Blues, I think.
As I worked in my garden, expanding it beyond the lavendar plants and roses which already grew there, my neighbors would catch me speaking to my plants in French. I remember saying to certain weeds, “Pas ici. Pas maintenant!” (“Not here, not now!”) as I yanked them out.
I planted daisies and veronica, lady’s mantle and buddleia — even a small fig tree. On November 1 — the traditional planting day for grapevines — I carefully prepared the hole I dug at the bottom of the stone stairs beneath my balcony, and, with all the care I could muster, I gently placed a tiny, fragile grapevine. My dream was to work the French earth, learn the language and learn to see the world in a new way.
The grapevine flourished and its tendrils joined the established vine which grew from the opposite end of the balcony, like hands reaching for one another. This was the gift of returning to the same place year after year. My garden, as well as my heart, continued to unfold in the exquisite beauty surrounding me. As I grew to better understand the words and ideas flowing around me, I realized that though the language was musical, often the ideas expressed were just as short-sighted and ignorant as in America. They just sounded better. I found in many ways the people were just as petty as we are. I guess I’d expected them all to be poets and philosophers!
After several years of being entranced with things French, I noticed that when I came back to America there existed a more open spirit that I didn’t experience as often in Europe. More often than not, here we smile at one another. We chat in elevators and on park benches as if we’ve known each other forever. In America, I felt relieved that smiling at a man would not be interpreted as a “come on” which I’d often been accused of in France. I think the American culture is basically friendly and welcoming. Oh, not always, but it is here in the West even in our polarized state of affairs.
It was refreshing to feel more connected with my own country. And, though I have loved getting carried away writing about my lovely France, which in my heart will always be my second home, I am so glad to be in this bumbling, stumbling, in-your-face, smiling, often rude-but-honest country of ours. I feel more myself here. Having had the great, good fortune of planting myself and thriving in another country for a while, I’m content to be breathing the air of America. Because there is hope and possibility flowing through my blood — our blood — of what the world could be. Of what this place is supposed to be. I feel it. I see it. I stand for it. I call forth the vision of my ancestors who fought for independence to manifest it. Maybe we will make the dream come true.
Little by little. Step by step. Petit à petit.