18 April 2005

A Hotel can Never be "Home"

Traveling down the scenic road between St. Malo and the ferry that would take us back to England, I found myself remembering our first days of living in France.

My life changed forever in January 2002. Cat and I took a plane to England, our goal to find a place to live in a country where we did not speak the language. Jay would follow in a couple of months.

So it was up to me. With Cat in tow, we started looking for that ideal quaint cottage or medieval castle - a stream running through the garden - church bells ringing in the distance - all very inexpensive, and available immediately. Illusion and reality were about to crash.

After many dead ends and false starts, I ended up in a small hotel in the little French village of Senlis (pronounced sone-lease). The Hotel de Bellon was luxurious.

The building was about 400 years old and we were greatly relieved to find it. Our room was spacious, with open beams in the ceiling and a window that opened onto a quaint courtyard. But by the end of 10 days of dealing with the re-location agent, I felt crazy. Admittedly, I was homesick.

It was rainy and cold outside. My heart was breaking from everything I had left behind, and I had no warm clothes. To top it off, we couldn't figure out how to wash our clothes because the machines didn't take Euro coins (France had just converted from francs to the Euro, but the old machines had not caught up). Each night we washed out things in the sink, and we were grateful for the cast-iron radiators that served as our clothes dryers.

My one luxury during those endless days in the hotel was to walk along the narrow cobblestone streets, gazing in awe at the ancient stone buildings. My destination, more likely than not, was the small magazine shop that sold one copy of The International Herald Tribune, an English-language newspaper.

On Thursdays, the paper listed far off places to visit for vacation. As luck would have it, I noticed an ad for "gites" (gee eets). Gites, I learned are vacation houses you can rent in the more remote places of France. In a rare moment of rational thinking, I called Jay in the U.S. and asked him to investigate the possibility of renting a gite for us while we waited two more months for the bank to process the papers for our rented house in Senlis.

Jay arrived two weeks later, carrying our pillows and a huge bottle of hot pepper seeds for pizza (you cannot predict the things you will find comfort in when you are so far from home). We packed up everything, said good-bye to the hotel, and drove to the nearby tiny blink-and-you-will-miss-it village of Rossiere (Rose-ee-ay). There is just no way to describe how I felt when we came around the curve and spied the gite for the first time.

The two-story stone house had a cozy living room with a fireplace. Best of all, there was a washing machine and a real kitchen ... with pots and pans. The owners lived across the road in an old French manor house, just one part of an enormous family farm.

Chickens ran around trying to dig up the newly planted pansies, cackling and carrying on with one another. I took a breath for the first time since I had left the U.S. That afternoon, I traipsed out into the farmer's garden to pick some brussel sprouts. A part of me felt like I had come home.

The smell of the land as it was being plowed, the noises of the chickens and the smell of the wood-burning fireplace all reminded me of southeast Ohio. Up until that point, I hadn't understood France. But sitting there, looking out of the window at the pond, I began to understand.

It became clear to me that I didn't have to be homesick. I had been afraid that I could never fit into my movie-created image of France. But France is so much more than Paris. In their hearts, all Frenchmen are farmers. I could see that the people here had values and cares that matched my own. Everything was going to be fine. I didn't have to start from scratch. I knew this place and the people who loved it.

 

Annie Warmke has returned to her home in Philo, but continues to write about her travels. You can visit her at www.bluerockstation.com.

Originally published April 11, 2005