28 October 2002

Walking in France

Walking is to France like what corn on the cob in August is to southeast Ohio.  There’s no avoiding either one.

Every single day one of us walks our eight year old 10 minutes up a hill to school.  Most all of the parents do the same thing.  At lunch time one of us traipes back up the hill to fetch her for lunch.  Then back to school up the hill after lunch.  At 4:20 one of us, usually me walks back to school.  In between I might drag my little wheeled shopping bag with me and  walk to the street market, the grocery store or the magazine shop.  Once in a great while I have also walked around town snapping photos of the spring flowers.

Some days I fall into the chair at night and wonder where the day went.  Then I remember all of that exercise up the hill, and I know the answer to my inquiry.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am really enjoying walking everywhere.  In fact I have to work myself up to backing the car out of our little garden, as they call the yard in France.  The stone gate entrance is just wide enough for the tiniest car you have ever seen.  Pulling through that gate works on my nerves.  After 8 weeks I am finally getting confidence in my ability to pull through the tight squeeze without pulling the rear view mirrors in (that’s a feature on all cars here otherwise they would be snapped off by careless drivers whizzing by on narrow streets).  But that’s a whole ‘nother story.

In southeast Ohio it seems uncommon to see groups of people walking around, that is unless they appear to be poor or homeless or at the mall.  I am sorry to generalize in this way, but in my experience I think most people drive everywhere.

In this small town people walk everywhere to shop, and even for leisure.  I have seen whole families just leisurely strolling along talking 90 miles an hour.

The other day I was noticing that my behind and legs were getting bigger.  This really bothered me because I couldn’t figure out how I could be gaining weight, with all of this exercise.  Apparently for the first time in my life I actually have muscles where I normally don’t.  I was immensely relieved to realize that I wasn’t getting fatter.  I was getting thicker.

Before I figured out my fatter vs. thicker theory I asked my darling husband if he thought I was gaining weight.  He dutifully responded, “No.”.  He then went on to point out that I was used to being small in the US but being in France where the women were so thin I must be feeling bigger.  I wasn’t sure if that was a back handed compliment or an insult.

Now in southeast Ohio there are several ways to develop these “thicker” muscles.  I haven’t noticed that a single one of them involves walking up hills to school or the shops. 

You could get those muscles from joining a gym club, which has never appealed to me in the least.  Gyms seem like fabricating work so you can figure out that there is no way my DNA is going to allow me to look like those skinny women on TV.  Besides by the time you drive 32 miles one way to the gym you could have spent that time doing something meaningful like watching “Oprah”.

I’d much rather focus on the old fashioned way of getting excise:  manual labor.    Lots of folks have to cut wood, chop wood, walk up hill to do chores, or rake leaves.   I almost forgot that endless task of mowing the lawn the minute it has grown beyond the point it was mowed last time.

If you’ve guessed that I am enjoying all this walking you are correct.  Even the other day when it was drizzling I put on my raincoat, flipped up the hood and did my errands anyway.  When I first arrived here I would see women walking in the drizzle and wonder why they were out in the rain.  Now I realize that rain or shine, chores have to be done and walking is a fact of life in a small French town.