Autres temps, autres mœurs

4:23 pm

My daughter is having her last swim in the pool with her daddy at our apartment in JLP. The misplaced anger turned aggression because of change felt by an eight year old is astounding and  and yet understandable. My own emotions and confusion are difficult to regulate, so how can I expect her to? I can't. It hurts. It hurts me and her. I know she does not mean it when she says "I hate you". What she means is, I hate this internal confusion and I do not know how to channel my fear and excitement. A few minutes later her empty stripped down bedroom is set up like a reading nook with the bare mattress and pillowcase-less pillows on the dirty floor. A selection of leftover books that would not fit in the luggage await to be read. She has calmed down.

It is intangible this getting ready to " flip"  the switch from heat to cool, sun to drizzle, light to shadow, French to English, but practice makes perfect! So as the song says, "I'm leaving on a jet plane, I don't know when I'll be back again. so kiss me and smile for me, tell me that you'll never leave." I will always have a bit of French in me, and room for something other.

"J'entends ta voix
dans tout les bruits
du monde."

Paul Eluard

The necklace

11:22 am Juan Les Pins, France


Today my home is France. Tomorrow night it will be Durham England once more. 

Seventeen boxes, taped up like criminals to a wooden post surround me in our small apartment in the South of France. Each one containing way more than I need. Ready for their own journey back, like me, to England. They sit on the floor, bulging and taking up space and wait for the UPS driver to come and collect them. I wait too, and like the bulging boxes, find it difficult to contain the mixed up contents of my brain and heart.

My friend wrote these beautiful words below about my attempt to make France a home once again and then choosing to return to England. 

"No place is perfect, no person is perfect, but many moments are. Take those moments and string yourself a necklace of perfect-moment-pearls that you wear everyday. Sea and a rose is a pearl. Add it to the necklace, fondle it, cherish it, remember it. It was a moment. And a moment later a bee could leap out of the rose and sting you on your nose."

So, here I go again, same place, but with new eyes. Practice makes perfect!