We rented a car and left Paris on Wednesday, driving, easily, to Orange, then Malaucène, where we did some shopping and checked our email. The smallish supermarket was only mildly unstocked (fewer varieties of yogurt available, for example) and fairly empty of customers. Then we came here, settled in, called family and neighbours to say we had arrived safely. There were gendarmes stopping cars driving north, from the toll booths at Fontainebleau, and spot-checking cars driving south, at the toll booths south of Lyon. Autoroute gas stations were open, including washrooms (those on the picnic areas are closed), but their mini-marts closed. Traffic was light, and mostly big trucks from across Europe, heavier traffic (still mostlytrucks) south of Lyon. The Rhone corridor heavily polluted, from ?truck traffic. This is the route from Spain and Portugal to the north. Some of it eventually heads east towards Italy and eastern Europe.

The village (which my husband’s great grandfather came from) feels empty; people seem to be holed up. The café is open, but only its grocery and post office parts. None of the usual café customers having a morning coffee or a pre-supper glass of wine. The manager wears a mask and gloves, and keeps gloves for his customers to punch in their codes on his machine. He will keep Le Monde for us each day. “So you are here for the duration?” he asked my husband. Whatever that turns out to mean.

We are not socializing, except, by phone, with our 90-year-old nextdoor neighbour, or my husband’s brother Pierre, and his wife, who live uphill in the centre of the village. Yesterday we went biking: individual exercise, close to home, is allowed, and we did a small loop, me as usual trailing Michel by 10 or so minutes. The weather is beautiful, the countruside too, except for the pollution haze; farmers are burning olive tree trimmings in their olive groves. They are resistant to stopping burning and taking their green trash to the proper place. They have been burning for hundreds of years.

The cherry trees are in bloom. The present heat promises too-high temperatures too soon.

Beverley Bie Brahic