The first day we were at Les Gaillands, while the oldest was climbing, I came back from the concession stand just in time to see some of my children tussling with some other children standing by with their mother, and Mark telling one of our children “You apologize to him so he can forgive you,” and at the same time the other children’s mother was instructing her child on the correct way to apologize. At first I thought — Hey! She sounds exactly like what we sound like when we instruct our kids to apologize. And then I thought — Hey! She’s speaking English with an American accent, and so are the kids.
“You sound just like us,” I said to her in surprise, and really I meant that the children were busy with the same script: I’m sorry that I hit you with the thing, will you forgive me? And I’m sorry I tried to take your stick, will you forgive me? although I probably sounded like I meant Americans!
Her name was L. and she was an expat, living here in the Chamonix valley, and she had a blond son the same age as my 10yo and dark-haired twin boys the same age as my 8yo. At first she assumed we were also expats, Americans in the same valley that somehow she had managed not to meet yet, but we explained that we were only vacationing here. “What brought your family to France?” I asked, expecting the answer to be a job or a French spouse, but she answered immediately “The mountains.” We chatted about homeschooling, about having American kids in the French school system, about Utah (where they’d lived before coming here), about climbing. I liked her immediately. Meanwhile the kids were running around and getting along famously, particularly her older boy and my 10yo, and she invited me to bring the rest of the family up to visit them at their house before our vacation was over, maybe Wednesday after her kids were done with ski-jumping practice.
This is not the sort of thing I usually am comfortable accepting ten minutes after meeting someone, but it flashed through my mind that Mark would appreciate it, and something about the kid-apology-style and about the positive reaction to our explanation of homeschooling the kids — those made me trust the invitation. So I scrabbled in my bag for a notebook, and L. wrote her email address in it. And that evening I emailed her with the subject line “Americans you met @ Les Gaillands.” And this afternoon we drove to Argentière, the next town over, for a playdate.
I brought a loaf of bread and a box of cookies as an offering, feeling that it was the civilized thing to do. We arrived at the same time they did, driving up a narrow road out of the town into what looked like a combination of pasture land and campground. The three children hopped out of their mom’s car and ran up to our van excitedly. The house was three-story — each floor was an apartment — and there was a garage (full of skis) and a nice-sized yard with a zipline, a slack line, a swingset, and some other climbing structures. L. put the kids’ skis and helmets away into the garage while our kids hurled themselves at the yard toys, and we went up for tea.
The third-floor apartment was airy, not large by American standards — “Eleven hundred square feet,” L. told us — but cleverly outfitted with space-saving shelves and cubbies. The washer and condensing dryer were in the boys’ bedroom, because there had, oddly enough, been a bathtub in the bedroom, which was covered over and turned into a play space but furnished the drain for the washer. The kitchen had been opened up and remodeled (“Look what we found in the wall when we tore it open to find out why the circuit kept shorting out,” said L., rummaging in a drawer and then handing me a heavy, six-inch-long nail). The views from the window were stunning: the bedroom opened onto a narrow metal-railed balcony and the mountains were right there, with the gondolas visible at the top for the Grands Montets ski area. It was right at the edge of the woods.
We walked up to the forest with the children, passing on a narrow path between two stone fences: one of flat, lichen-crusted rocks laid upon each other to make a low wall, the other of broad stones set on end into the earth like so many irregular gravemarkers. The floor of the path was roots and rocks. In the shade of the forest we came to a sign, the familiar buff-colored sign with green type marking the hiking paths, part of the Tour de Mont Blanc, and here was a little stream, only a foot wide, trickling down, and a little clearing and a bench to rest on, a perfect place for children to play. L. explained that it was her task, as the mother living furthest up the hill and closest to the woods, to generally keep an eye out for any kids wandering up near the edge of the forest, while a different mother farther down watched out for children coming too far down near the busy road.
Back in the apartment, while the kids watched Mythbusters, we munched on cheese and French boxed cookies and talked about skiing, and the bureaucracy of living as a resident alien, and school for the children. L. supplemented her kids’ education in the French schools with American history and lots of travel; her husband worked out of London most weeks, but they had been all over, recently to Iceland, planning a trip to Greece. The apartment had a certain look I associate with homeschooling: an enormous fraction of the space given over to books, a periodic table hanging in the kitchen, a chemistry experiment in a cooking pot in the garage, a microscope on a low shelf in the playroom, bins of Playmobil and Lego and assorted magnetic building toys. At one point she asked me which Latin curriculum I used, then found a notebook to write it down. I almost got the impression that this was a homeschooling family that had chosen to have the core curriculum provided by the French school system as an immersion learning program.
We also got to hear about some of the craziness that is French child-raising. On the one hand, everything is heavily regulated. Each child needs to have something like eight cards: identity, and civil liability insurance, and school membership, etc. You need the permission of the school director to take your child on a vacation during term (“They’ll stop you at the border if you try to leave the country with your child,” said L.) Every child must take swimming lessons. The pedagogy includes actual socialization training, with board games and getting-along practice. And yet… children can run around free in the neighborhoods, and you can leave your kid in the car when you go into a store, and at least in the mountains the children have an active life and learn to climb and ski terrifyingly well at a young age. It was fascinating.
All in all it made for a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon, one that had fallen randomly into our laps. And the kids — our kids — badly needed the time running around, unstructured. L. kept telling me, “I never invite people over. I need a lot of personal space.” and I kept telling her, “I never just accept invitations like this. I’m really quite terribly antisocial.” Mark vouched for my antisocialness. We exchanged un bisou and I got in the car, and we drove off feeling very lucky indeed.
As my 4yo told me the other day, “We have so many vacations in our vacation. You wake up every day and you just don’t know what will happen.”
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