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.