aucun adieu

I am bad at good-byes. I always feel like they are too small and sudden and awkward to really express how meaningful it is to have known a person for a time. And the longer they last, the worse I think...because it's like I'm trying to say something that really just can't be said, and I'm not doing it justice. So if I ever leave you with a short and sweet goodbye, this is the reason.


I am doing exactly that to this blog.
I waited too long to write this post, and now I feel that I have so many things I could write that it is not possible to write anything at all.  So I leave you with an anticlimactic last post. Apologies.

To make up for it, I'm starting a new blog since I can no longer write on this one since I am no longer in France. You may disagree with me, but...new season, new blog. Time to move on. I'll write about the last few weeks in Europe as the thoughts come to me.

(just because i don't live in france anymore doesn't mean i no longer have anything to say)

stringsonsky.tumblr.com

a la prochaine !

-beccaleigh

songs from france

my favorite newlyweds

So this blog is called La Cueillette, which, if you remember, means the harvest, usually of fruits or nuts or something. It's also called Songs From France. Now, there are songs from France.

They are here and they are waiting to be listened to. By you.

D and L and I recorded four in the small guesthouse next to the pool. Curious? Hmmm???

We had an incredible time together playing shows and talking to people about music and also about everything else. There is so much I could say about it, but if you would like an idea that is better than what I could say with words, watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsjZf4BLf7Y

That was an impromptu couple of songs we played in Cordes sur Ciel, which means "strings on sky." An appropriate place for sharing a love for music with strings. Medieval village. Absurdly beautiful. Lots of dancing little kids that came out of nowhere when we started playing.

Also this. This is what our day-to-day life was like for three weeks. Um...yep. What a gift.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP8tHlLCo7k&feature=autoshare

I have just returned from a visit to Angers, in the Loire Valley, where I was visiting a dear friend who I met two years ago in Rennes. Since we hadn't seen each other in two years, and also the weather wasn't great, we spent a lot of time in the kitchen making way too much food and catching up on life.

angers

pad thai for two

On the train on the way back...well I should say "one of the trains" because it required four trains for me to get from Angers to Albi.....anyway, on one of the trains, for some reason my seat was in first class, which I didn't realize until I was about to get on the train (sometimes train booking is weird like that). It was great because first class train seats are way better for sleeping in. So I wake up when the controlleur comes through to check our tickets, and there are these people in my car speaking Spanish...I don't speak Spanish, but I've spent enough time in Spain to be able to tell that they were not Spanish. Anyway this one guy was acting as their translator, and he says excitedly to the controlleur, "do you know who this lady is? she's Che Guevara's daughter." At first I though maybe he was joking because the French are always joking. But he wasn't.

This is my last week of teaching, and my goodbyes to students already feel so nonchalant. I guess maybe it's because they're high schoolers. Or they are just too awkward to know what to do. Or I am. Or everyone is. Anyway in France no one says goodbye. They all say à bientôt...see you soon. Thank goodness for that. It's funny though because nearly all of the people I said à bientôt to the last time I lived in France, I did see again. It wasn't super bientôt or anything, but it was soon enough.

goin to carolina in my mind

Sometimes when I'm daydreaming I go to this one barn in the countryside outside Greensboro. It's one of those picturesque "farmland of America" type places. There are chickens and a couple of donkeys or whatever down the hill from the barn. Probably there are some goats also. To get there from the highway you drive down this looooonnng road through a gate that probably has a welcome sign on it. But....this is a special barn.
I have done much dancing in this barn. Every fall during my college years, the Quaker folks around the area would put on a barn dance, and we would all hop in the back of someone's truck and head out there to do some serious folk dancing. All of the Quaker mommas would make pies, so on the first floor of the barn there are like 20 pies and hot cider. The second floor is this huge high-ceiling'd room where all the dancing happens. You can hear it/feel it when you are on the first floor, and I always sort of had the impression that maybe people were going to stomp right through the floor.
The best part about the barn though, requires going up some stairs from the second floor into a loft where you can watch everyone dancing down below, and then climbing up a ladder from there to the roof of the barn, where you can see the most stars ever. That's where I go when I'm daydreaming.

I could look at the same stars here, and it would probably be even better because Albi has basically zero light pollution. But there's just something about North Carolina.

cathedrals in the hearts of the people that i know

J'apercois la fin qui arrive, et ça fait peur un peu. En fait, ce n'est pas la fin qui fait peur mais l'inconnu qui m'attend de l'autre côté de l'atlantique. La nostalgie pour ma vie en France existe déjà...je regarde autour de moi et je vois la beauté, ma famille bizarre et internationale, les habitudes que j'ai....un petit café l'après-midi, le matin sur la terrace sous le rosier, tout ce qui est vieux, plus vieux que mon pays entier...

Bon bref, tout ce qui m'attend est aussi beau. Mon coeur est plein de musique...une musique qui est venue avec moi en France et qui va repartir avec moi quand je partirai. Je peux espèrer que je ne perdrai la musique de la langue. Certes, il y a d'autres langues qui m'attendent....

Ce matin je suis allée à la messe pour la première fois depuis décembre ou janvier, et partout dans la cathédrale il y avait des enfants qui faisaient n'importe quoi, et ils avaient tous des feuilles de palmier puisque c'est le dimanche des rameaux....et moi je suis un enfant, feuille de palmier dans la main, admirant le mystère autour de moi...

D and L and I are calling this the "Mega-mystery Tour." Life is a mega-mystery. What else can I say? They arrived here late Monday night, and our first week together has been a joy. Singing with them again is like coming home. I'm amazed at how little difficulty we encountered piecing our voices together again for the first time in six months. People's response to the music so far has been interesting and really varied. We played our first show in Toulouse on Wednesday night at a "café culturel" that seems to have some pretty strange and intriguing regulars. I had been to a show there before, and that show was extraordinarily different from our own....at the one I went to before, the bar was really crowded and loud and all the lights were on, and some people were listening but most were just having their Friday night entre amis. At our show, they turned down the lights and it was completely silent the entire show. I was so surprised...not at all what I expected. It was really good though, especially for certain songs that are quieter and more subtle...our second show was nearly the opposite. We left out any quiet songs because there was so much noise that no one would have been able to hear them. The noise was caused mostly by a fountain though, not necessarily by people. It was a beautiful show, nonetheless. I don't think I've ever sung that loud in my whole life. Belting=not my strong point. Yet.

In other news, last weekend I went on a really wonderful day-road-trip with Pierre, Brent, and Neill to Carcassonne. We listened to some Ryan Adams with the windows down and ate some cassoulet (for the first and probably last time...I think that was the most fat I have ever consumed in a single sitting), got slightly lost in Castelnaudary, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I will tell you more about it with some pictures.

saturday morning's rose garlic

oh albi, you so charmant

These days, the only time that I don't feel like a giant is when I come out of one of my high schools, the technical school, and have to push my way through the mob of students on their cigarette/hang out break to get out to the outside world. This high school is, I would say, about 90% boys. And most of them are tall, large, rugby-playing boys. Normally this statistic is not to my advantage. However this morning as I pushed my way out to my sunny Friday afternoon, I smiled to myself as I waded relatively unnoticed through a sea of them.

In the States, I am slightly "taller than average," for a girl. In France I am, I dunno, "extremely taller than average?" Most shoe stores don't carry my shoe size (when I ask I get wide eyes, a chuckle, and an 'ah non madame,' without even looking in the back). And I spent about two months looking for a pair of gloves here, and finally I gave up and bought a giant pair of handmade mittens from the grand bazaar in Istanbul. And I wear like the second-to-largest pants size that exists. That is not even possible. How can that be possible? I guess my real question is, why are French women so petite ? They are tiny and minuscule.

Here is my hypothesis: in America, we have so much space. So much. So in the past couple centuries we've just evolved to fill up more of the space. Everything we have is more spacious. Our homes are more spacious, our cars, our lawns (lawns: do not exist in France), our cities are sprawled way the heck out, and we still have miles and miles of countryside with seemingly nothing in it.. So we grew into them. The spaces. Everything over here is closer together and smaller in general. I think it's not really a big deal to go from here to Paris (or to Spain, or whatever), but to the locals, it is a JOURNEY.

Speaking of journeys, this morning I made the journey from my house to the Saturday market one block down the street. One of the things I love about living in a small town in southern France is this. There is a couple who I always buy something from even if I don't really need it because I just really like them and one of them always has their baby in one of those tummy pouch things. They sell dried fruit, nuts, beans, lentils, olives, spices, etc. Their stand is the only place in France where one can find black beans. So, when Brent and I feel nostalgic for Mexican food, we stock up. One time she said to us, "you know, we sell stuff at a lot of different markets around here, and out of all those places, I only have two customers that buy black beans, and it's you two." And proud of it. The first time I bought black beans from her, a very small elderly woman was standing next to me and she said, "I have never seen black beans before...."

baby pouch

Also the guys who I buy onions and garlic from are always so funny. One of them has such a strong accent I can hardly understand anything he says (unfortunately he's always the one who tells me how much it costs, so I just kind of have to guess usually). I picked up this one head of garlic, and the one guy said, "no don't get that one, it's not as pretty as the other ones," so he handed me two different ones, and then when I was paying he put the less-pretty one into my basket, c'est offert ! il m'a dit and then his camarade threw in an extra red onion "because it's the end of the morning," which wasn't entirely true, I think they were just pleased that a young, not-quite-awake-yet American girl wearing pink sunglasses was so interested in onions and garlic on a Saturday morning.

home / home?

One time I was talking with Micka about how last summer I lived in a house in Greensboro with three other girls. And he asked me, "well how did you do it?" and I said "quoi ?" and he said, "you know, like who did what in the house? Who did the cleaning? Who made dinner?" and I found it impossible to explain to him that we all kind of lived on our own terms, we all cooked for ourselves and rarely ate together because our schedules were vastly different. Really our only rules were to keep the common spaces clean and try to take care of things that need to be taken care of as you see them. He didn't understand. He explained to me that before he got married, when he was living in collocation, that he was in charge of cooking, and his roommates cleaned up. They had dinner together every night, like a family. At first I thought this absurd...how could twenty-something-year-old boys manage to keep up such structure in their lives? And wouldn't that remove some aspect of freedom? I suppose the answer is that yes, it would. However, lately I've been wondering to myself what it would have been like if we had committed to that. It would have been amazing! And economical, en plus. College students kind of write off home structure as impossible, undoable, ridiculous. In our house we "aspired" to have dinner together once a week on Tuesday nights, and we didn't actually do that a single time the entire summer. It's like the difference between living next to someone and living with someone. Structure (centered around meals of course) is so essential here. It does create kind of an obsession with food that I'm not always crazy about, but it is a kind of peace and solidity you can count on every day at least once a day (for many French folks it's twice a day...they often go home and have lunch with their families before going back to work). They even break bread together when they eat at MacDo...they sure love MacDo, but they sit down in the "restaurant" and eat it with other people. MacDo's in France are actually pretty hip places to hang out...they all have free wifi and a lot of young people just sit in them chatting away for hours like you would do in any café. I'm not endorsing MacDo...it is horrendous. But I have to admit that Europe's weird embracing of it is somewhat interesting.

The other day I bought my airplane ticket back to America. La fin commence.

travels with steinbeck.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum, always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.


When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.


Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
                                                                                                               -John Steinbeck