A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

Tag: france

November 17, 2013

A Mushroom in the Cupboard

[excerpt from middle grade children’s novel]

I am not making this up, I promise. There was a mushroom in my cupboard, more specifically behind the cupboard. Even more specifically, there were two of them, and they were in cahoots! But I only found this out later, when it was too late to point fingers and throw wild accusations.

After all, who would have believed me?

Growing up in the French countryside, I learned to fear two things: Gypsies and Merules.  (Socialism was the thing to fear later in life – but for the moment it was Gypsies and Merules).

Gypsies stole children. This we all knew. When their distant bells tinkled through town, our neurotic nanny, Genevieve, would whisk us from the garden. We were untamed, my twin brothers and I – Gypsy children were probably better behaved.

Genevieve had the annoying habit of picking her teeth when she was nervous. During caravan-jingling-through-town times, up shot her left hand to scratch a front tooth and down shot the right hand to drag us to the basement kitchen. We were promptly set to some menial task like de-stringing green beans. Elbow deep in vegetables, Genevieve would launch into frightful tales of Gypsy thievery. Dogs, horses, children, cars, watches, wallets, you name it, they had stolen it. Storytelling soothed her because her tooth-picking hand would creep out of her mouth and dip into the English cream.

Merules were the other thing to fear – though I was not exactly sure why. I just knew that adults were terrified of them. These secretive mushrooms lived in the walls, and if they appeared, the roof could fall on your head. At night, I spent hours staring at the ceiling for any sign of collapse. Merules claimed their territory wherever they lay spore and did not discriminate in their destruction of the old homes of France.

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October 14, 2013

A French Summer

The plane landed at Roissy onto a tarmac that mirrored the drab June sky. Always the day of her arrival was unseasonable weather. The French shook their heads and said the same thing “Ah! Ce temps.”  55 degrees and overcast with a ninety percent chance of rain, a hundred percent chance of gray. Summer by no standard.

France was its most insufferably French during the first hours spent escaping Charles de Gaulle airport: the interminable wait for the bags, the queue of dusty taxis to ship her off on highways flanked by concrete bunkers and sloppy graffiti. The scenic roads of France. Supermarkets housed in lego-blocks with chipper names like Conforama and Bricolorama, factories resembling Ikea versions of corrugated tin shanties, barely alive plants peaking above plastic coverings.  Further inland they drove, past the white-tiled tunnels with their overhead yellow-lit rectangles, past the wastelands of suburban brick flickering offside the highway barriers like images from a moving train. Resting her head against the taxi window, listening to the haggle on the radio, she felt acute disappointment. 

And the countryside did not seem quite right either. It was more crooked and wobbly than she remembered. They passed cigarette-stained towns with peeling shutters and windowsill doilies, old ladies in black orthopedics and knee-length skirts, mending handkerchiefs and knitting stiff wool. France had let weeds grow along her roads, in her gardens, up her trellis; the bristly stalks of unknown plants had taken over the clean corners. 

She was reminded of her grandmother and this made her more depressed. 

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October 14, 2013

One Hundred Years Past

It was a long way she trod from
second one till a hundred past.

Paris bombed!
The wars did come and go.

From the windowsill, she sewed rag to rag
and watched them all. She tied her
things up in boxes stacked a century ago,
mended clothes pressed flat in a Norman cupboard.

She died in a modern hospital room
that resembled nothing the year she was born,
the early century – 1908.
She was just a child when all those boys died.

And then she bore her own in the second war.

Paris liberated!
Flags waved, firecrackers burned.

Years later, they fought.
My father left.

For decades, she was old.
We sat her at a table once a year
and smiled when she was gone.
She smelled like musty things.

How little we notice until they die,

then we try on their heavy shoes,
we unpack their boxes, flip
scalloped pictures, yellow and gray.

We touch their things as if
we knew how to cradle a hungry child
and yearn the taste of milk.

How little we build from souvenirs,
how little we cared to ask when
she sat old by the windowsill.

Life is long – but the same length for all,
the same second one till years gone past.
And the pain it takes to remember,
we soon forget.

She lived to a hundred and three,
and we shall soon forget.

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