VAUCLUSE DIARY

Friday 3 April

Settling into a routine, with the idea that this may last longer than we bargained for. We have now been here for two weeks so at least we haven’t imported the virus from Paris, though we might have picked it up opening that package of gnocchi last night.

As my brother-in-law pointed out yesterday when he stopped by to leave us a bottle of olive oil, the media have decided there is no news but Corona news. Is nothing else is happening in the world? Something to think about.

We had a drink in the garden, 3 chairs, 2 metres between them, a bottle, 3 mismatched glasses, a jar of olives from the village shop. The sun wasn’t quite setting, but it was warm.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Saturday 28th March

Sitting in the small, walled garden, sun on my face, listening: birds, tiny ones that make a lot of noise for their size, a pigeon in the neighbour’s almond tree, another neighbour chipping at the dirt in his small patch of earth. My husband’s flute drifting up from downstairs. Few cars.

I’ve hung a duvet to air, put its cover in the wash, pinned damp-from-the-shower towels on the line. A little snow caps the Mont Ventoux, but the sun is warmer today. Our closest and oldest neighbour would relate the weather to the moon—a sliver in the west at bedtime last night—but lately he has confessed some difficulty with the weather and the old dicta, such as ‘Noel aux jeux, Pacques au feu’.

Later. I spoke to Paul, our next door neighbour (our houses share a wall), about the weather, which has been beautiful today, and warmer. He mentioned the cold of two days ago which  has been bad for the orchards. A little higher up, towards the Mont Ventoux, farmers have made fires overnight in their fields. It’s because it’s Leap Year (‘une année bissextile’), he says—cherchez la femme?

I’ve been pulling weeds from the small patch of gravel that is our ‘lawn.’ It’s a mindless but soothing activity, like ironing or doing a jigsaw puzzle, or, another current activity, learning to write cursive, again.

My handwriting, never particularly, pretty, what with using a computer most of the time, was becoming sloppier and sloppier, to the point where, signing books, I was embarrassed, and signing checks, upset with myself. One of Paris’s Big Bookstores, had a shelf of handwriting manuals for school children. I purchased one and am working through it. It’s amusing, even interesting, to see how French school children are trained. I’ve finally understood why children in schools use paper that is lined, with grids of lines between the lines: ‘petits carreaux’ and ‘grands carreaux.’ One reason is because all the letters are not the same height. The ‘l’ is 3 small squares high, but the ‘t’ is only 2 small squares high, and the vowels are 1 square high. Accents, points and bars get added after one has finished the whole word.

Monday 29th March

All of a sudden the days are longer…Europe went on summer time yesterday.  Was it my imagination that there was more activity, or simply that ours down-below neighbours were playing boules in their yard? In the afternoon we went for ‘our walk,’ permits in pocket, in case we were stopped. Spring is here, and what I noticed most of all on the side of a nearby hill, was the smell of thyme, everywhere underfoot, in flower, in mauve flowers. The smell of walking on a carpet of thyme might be one of my earliest memories, or associations, with Provence, from when I first came here, as a girl from Vancouver; that and the red tile floors and roofs.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Friday 27th March

Biking is out. Physical exercise outdoors (walking, ‘le footing’) is reduced to a perimeter of one kilometer from one’s house, one hour a day, alone or at least only with the people with whom one cohabits. My children’s doctor friends are writing nightmarish stories about the situation in the hospitals where they work, whether in Paris, New York or California. There is one case in our village, a person who is confined to their home in one of the outlying areas of the commune. A cousin of ours, in a senior residence in Marseille, is affected.

We get our daily baguette and Le Monde at our tiny village shop. In the next, larger village where we do most of our grocery shopping, three shops –fruit and vegetables (and a smattering of things like cheese, butter, yogurt), the butcher (who does pasta), and the bakery—have joined to offer deliveries. Yesterday they brought us a week’s supply of produce, and some treats for us and our neighbour: pains au chocolat, giant meringues, even to round off the bill at 10 euros, a chocolate chip cookie. It’s well-organized: they call in the morning to give us the bill, we prepare our payment (cheque or cash), and they deposit everything on the stone bench at the front door, as the envelope with our payment flutters down, weighted with a clothespin.

Vaucluse, Monday 23rd March

The bookworm in me is happy to be locked in the house with nothing to do but read. My mother would shoo me outside ‘to play,’ or, as a teenager, ‘to have fun’. But my idea of fun was reading, with my feet up (essential, says Calvino—in, I believe, the first or last chapter of If on a winter’s night a traveler). Caught reading after lights out, under the covers with a flashlight, too engrossed to hear footsteps on the stairs? Me again.

But our next door neighbour, who turned 90 last year, who is a farmer, a paysan, doesn’t agree. Hearing him down below, returning from his olive field at the end of the afternoon, I put my head out (a safe distance from the attic window to the street. ‘C’est triste,’ he said, with a look of dejection I’m not sure I’ve ever seen on his face before.

The Vaucluse, Friday 20th March

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.

Paris, Wednesday 17 March

Birds singing at 5? 6 am this morning, but where are they? The only green around here is two long blocks away, and the only birds I ever see are pigeons sheltering in place on the knobs and ledges of the church across the street, and now and then a few seagulls up in the sky, keeping an eye on the garbage situation. All work has stopped on the church stonework, but the dust is still there. The gauzing veil they strung over the scaffolding never did much to keep it down, especially when they were sanding the stone. I have to think it was merely cosmetic.

The sun just rose: jagged shadows on stones and rooftops…and I am reading the headlines in 4 newspapers, French, UK, US. By now I can write the stories myself: the narrative has stalled (Le Carré, whose new spy novel I’m reading, would never let this happen).

One thing is new. How to wear a mask without ruining your hairdo? It should be easier to figure this out than the insurmountable disaster of the bicycle helmet. So I’m perusing newspaper photos of women in the US, the UK, Italy and France (my hair is frizzy and the Asian fashions don’t help much). I think Italian women have figured this out (they had a head start, but no Italian woman--at least the ones who make it into newspapers, and are photographed against worldclass fountains—would leave her house without proper footwear and makeup, her mask adjusted so the elastic is under her hair, not on top. I’ll try that later. But I’ll be wearing my Nikes, which are actually New Balance.

Paris, Tuesday 17th March

Busy day. The government has closed everything down and insisted (or a fine) people stay inside except for brief grocery shopping trips, doctors’ visits, pharmacy visits (we are so lucky to have corner pharmacies still, with kindly advice-giving pharmacists who know you by name; also good small grocery shops and fruit and vegetable markets). We had decided to return to the Vaucluse where, at least, we can go outside and even biking and hiking. My husband booked a car for this evening, but something he read made him think he should try to pick it up this morning. Lucky for us he did. They were shutting down at lunch, but had no cars, even though we had reserved and paid. After a lot of palaver (and they were helpful) they found a car that had been turned in but not yet cleaned and my husband drove it home and cleaned it. Tomorrow we leave and hopefully won’t be stopped, because we have heard there were guards at the autoroute toll booths. Of course, we’ll quarantine when we arrive and won’t go into any shops on the way down. Fingers crossed.

This morning there were some people in the streets, some of them wearing masks. This afternoon when I went out to buy some food and pick up a prescription there was no one. The shopkeepers I saw said people had shopping in the morning but not in the afternoon and the indoor market will be closing at 3 pm for the next couple of weeks. I went by the soup kitchen, where I volunteer; they too are closing, but giving out packed lunches in the morning to anyone who needs one. Two small kids were playing soccer with their dad on the square in front of the church; a student-age young woman was running up and down the church steps.

Our group of buildings too has emptied out but one resident had organized a little gathering (4 people) of those who remain, with chocolates and freshly-squeezed pomegranate juice. We chatted at a distance from one another in the courtyard, and then headed up our stairs to our suppers.

Paris, Monday 16th March

Terrible article in the NYTimes yesterday about Europe by Steve Erlanger. I didn’t read the whole thing though, the part where he gets into the Black Death. But what an accumulation of clichés and banalities in the opening paragraphs.

We voted around lunchtime, came home, stayed inside until late afternoon, then went to the park, which was unusually crowded—nowhere else to go, I guess, all the places people might usually go on a Sunday (most stores aren’t open anyway on Sunday in Paris) being closed. The cherry trees were beautiful and it has been many years since we were here to see them. When the sun started to go down, we moved to the east side of the park where there were even more people, so many there wasn’t an empty chair. We hovered, at a safe distance, until some people got up and commandeered theirs, and read for a while at a safe distance from others, until my husband, who is a virologist, said he could smell virus wafting over the flower beds and we went home.

This morning we are thinking we should leave the city while we still can.