On Monday, Mark and the big boys suited up in a mixture of gear that happened not to have been packed in the lost suitcase, gear borrowed from me and the 8yo, and gear they rented in town. They headed across the footbridge to the train station to meet the guide.
The guide’s name is Jeff (further complicating things: I am certain that “Jeff” must be the male version of “Jennifer” because there are so many Jeffs in our life, all between 35-45 years old, that I am constantly having to ask which Jeff Mark is talking about. Jeff your brother-in-law? Jeff my friend’s husband? Well. This is Jeff the Guide.) Mark has had the bizarre luck to travel on business near here several times, and so he has been climbing in Chamonix several times, and so for the last few years we have been joking that he has a guide in Chamonix on retainer, therefore he is not allowed to complain about anything because obviously he is doing pretty well.
Anyway, off they went to meet the guide so they could go do glacier travel and ice climbing on the Mer de Glace, which is the second longest glacier in Europe or something like that.
I stayed in the apartment with the three smaller kids and let them sleep while I wrote a blog post, then we ventured out. Mark had suggested that I take them on the train to the next town, but that seemed intimidating to me — who knows what I would find there and how easy it would be to walk around with a baby and a small boy and a medium-sized girl? I thought to myself, “What’s happened to me?” remembering that twenty years ago I was studying in Lyon and I took several train trips all by myself to towns and cities I had never been before, and I never worried that I’d have trouble navigating or figuring out what to do when I got there. When did I get so timid?
Anyway — so instead I planned two in-town outings.
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Today was the boys’ day to play and we have two whole weeks, so I expected to have to deal with a number of practical matters. I needed to buy food and diapers and coffee filters. I expected to have to do laundry at some point, and tidy the apartment. Of course I would have to feed the children. Mark had given the 4yo and the 8yo each some money to buy things; the elder had €20 and the younger had €4 with the promise of more if he spent it instead of losing it. (“My allowance,” he said proudly, and was sure he had the better deal since his money was in the form of two shiny and interesting-looking €2 coins, not boring paper bills.)
I buckled the baby on my back. I made each child carry a backpack, and I put the diapering supplies in the 8yo’s pack. Out we went.
We walked around town, planning to go to the grocery store last of all so that we could then carry the groceries home. We looked into souvenir shops. One was selling little plastic centimeter rulers with children’s names and name-days printed on them — here in France the trend of alternative spellings has not taken off, so it still makes sense to have popular names pre-printed on things. My 4yo’s name was represented (not the others — my daughter has a double name and she could have put two of the rulers together to make it, at least the French form, I suppose) so we bought one for him. He was pleased with that. There were many stuffed-toy marmots (sort of the town mascot) and plush St. Bernards with the little barrel around their necks. There were many cowbells, hand painted with alpine flowers and hanging from leather straps, some authentically cowbell-sized and others tiny. There were leather goods (my daughter admired a tiny heart-shaped wallet FIFTY-FIVE EUROS HOLY COW) and postcards and coffee table books full of mountain photography. Bedroom slippers and baby shoes that looked like ski boots. Wrapped chocolates with mountain scenes printed on each wrapper.
The children got hungry and so we stopped in a Salon de Thé that sold pastries.
The 4yo took his time choosing three little macarons. Despite the name, these are not “macaroons” — they are a sandwich cookie, roughly Oreo-sized, with an intensely flavored and sweet paste between two colorful meringue wafers. Stores that have them invariably display a rainbow’s worth of colored macarons, and the children are drawn to them. Eventually the 4yo picked raspberry tart (white with pink sprinkles and red paste), myrtille (which I don’t think is exactly a blueberry, but close enough — it was a deep blue), and salted caramel (toasty brown).
The 8yo, having heard me tell of such things, chose a petit pain au chocolat, which is a rectangular croissant with a stripe of dark chocolate running through its center.
“Et moi, je n’ai pas faim,” I said to the young woman who was running the tea shop. As for me, I don’t have hunger. “Merci de votre patience,” I added, because the children had taken quite a long time in choosing their snacks.
“Mama,” said the 4yo urgently, “How do you say ‘I do not speak French?’” This is my child who talks to everybody about everything.
“Je. Ne. Parle. Pas. Français,” I told him, right in front of the shopkeeper.
He looked her in the eye. “Je ne parle pas français,” he repeated.
“You can talk to me English,” she told him, “If you talk it slow-ly.”
So he told her his name, and then all about how we were going to the grocery store after we had a long walk and how his daddy and big brothers were going out on the glacier and how he was four years old and by the way, was she the owner of this shop or did she just work there?
She looked back at me nervously. I grinned and told her that he does that to everybody.
Outside we took a seat and the children eagerly opened up their little packages.
“It’s bitter,” said my daughter in surprise about the chocolate bread, “but it’s good.”
The 4yo ate just the raspberry macaron, which he refused to let us taste, and carefully wrapped the others up for later.
We wandered around — I had to consult the map once or twice. I stopped once to nurse the baby on a bench, and watched interestedly to see if passersby would notice and if so how they would react. I got a few sideways glances, but I actually think people were wondering about my older children; throughout the morning, three separate people asked me if they were on their way to school.
I found this a bit surprising, since it was (I thought) obvious that we weren’t from around here and the children were speaking English to me. But maybe there are expat Brits living in town with families? Or maybe two children wearing backpacks just send a “schoolchildren” signal that overcomes the other cues.
One, a shopkeeper, she wasn’t really looking for an answer, she went immediately around me to coo at the baby.
The second was a pedestrian going the same direction as me, who had already cooed at the baby and asked me if he wasn’t too cold, before asking about the older ones, so I told her: “Oh non, nous sommes touristes ici.” And then I added, “Nous faisons l’instruction en famille,” to see what would happen.
She said, “Oh, c’est merveilleux!” and I think she meant it, I don’t think that was French for “Homeschooling? That must be so nice for you.” I agreed and said that I enjoyed it very much. “Bonne journée,” she said, “bye, bébé,” and went on her way.
The third was the grocery store cashier, while we waited for a manager to sort out my misbehaving credit card, and to her I just said, “oh no, for them school is in the United States.” “Oh, you are on vacation, how lovely,” she said, “and you have three children? How brave of you!”
“Actually,” I said, remembering not to say actuellement which means currently, “I have five. The other two are on the Mer de Glace with their father.”
Her eyes got very very big.
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Navigating the Super U, which I couldn’t help thinking of as a “western-style” grocery store in that it had all the things you could buy in a grocery store at home in one place, was tricky with two excited children and also a baby on my back. The tank of live lobsters! The chocolate display! It seemed as if we bumped into every other shopper at least three times.
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Back at the apartment I fed the children grilled cheese sandwiches made with individually wrapped slices of processed cheese, which were pure white, very soft and fragile, and tasted faintly of Camembert. The 8yo erinkled her nose at it and got a yogurt instead. The 4yo said, “At first I didn’t like it, then I took very small bites and I liked it.”
So I ate the children’s sandwich leavings, and did not mind. Also we had some lovely greengage plums, which are hard to find in the Midwest but everywhere here, and which I remembered fondly from twenty years ago in Geneva.
The 4yo wanted to eat his leftover macarons, but they had crushed and mingled together in the backpack into a blueberry-salted-caramel paste.
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I started cooking dinner, chicken soup, using the French equivalent of grocery store rotisserie chicken, and Alsatian egg noodles:
Then we went out again to buy a few items I had forgotten (diapers; wine). We stopped to look in the windows of a toy store:
And we bought candy from a store called “L’univers du bonbon.” I translated the name for the children, and when we got inside and the 4yo saw the massive bin of pick-and-mix candies for €3,80 per 100 g, he said in awe, “This really is a world of candy.”
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When the boys and Mark came back to the scent of chicken noodle soup, rich with thyme and carrots, and a fresh baguette and a salad (from a bag!), Mark sniffed the air and said, “It smells like love in here.”
“Is this wine okay?” I asked, showing him the vin de savoie.
“It’s the exact right kind of wine,” he said, “it’s right here in front of me.”
We sat down to dinner, said grace, and shared stories of our day.
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Later in the evening, when I ran out the door by myself to the laverie with a bag of laundry, I heard the clanking of the train pulling into the station, and imagined myself hopping on the train as it pulled out of town, without a plan, except to get off somewhere interesting and to get back on and come back whenever that seemed like a good idea. And it seemed easy and simple — certainly I could do that. In truth I have not become more timid. The difference is that toting the children along with me leaves me less room for error.
And — this part is really crucial — with the smaller children, with three of them, it’s so much more difficult to just stop and think for a minute if I need it. When I plunge forward without a plan and I figure things out as I go along, sometimes I have to pause, sit down, maybe grab a cup of coffee, look at the map (literally or figuratively) and get my bearings. Preferably alone. I might mentally rehearse the next conversation I have to have (is there a place here I can get change? What type of store around here would sell me such and such an item? How much are the sandwiches? Where can I find a bookstore? What time is the last train going west?) I might have to psych myself up for any sort of interaction, actually, even one in my own language. And then I can get up and go on. But with the children I cannot retreat into my own head even for a few minutes. I can’t stop and get my bearings. Have you ever tried to sit down and look at a map and look at the street signs and figure out where you are and how to get where you are going, while nursing a baby, and while one child tugs and says “Mom! Look at me!” and the other says “Moooooooooommmm when are we going to gooooooooo?” Not that easy.
That is the part that I know from experience is intimidating. If I could hop on that train all by myself, I could let it take me absolutely anywhere.
But tomorrow with the kids, maybe I can be as brave as everyone keeps telling me I must be.
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