Going Backwards To Move Forward

Back on the train, facing backward, the lush green of the Normandy we were just exploring passing on my left like framed pictures in a photo album. The pages separated from each other by the panes of the train window and not unlike flipping the pages of an old family album. The pictures evoking emotion and triggering my toggles, switches that brought racing back the aromas and flavors of each moment spent slowly roaming the countryside.

My body swaying gently to and fro, sort of rocking as that Paris bound train extruded me from the quiet and tranquil, apple skin and moss scented region where I drank gallons of semi-sweet cider alongside delicate but pungent crepes filled with cheese, stinging mustard, foreign spiced sausages and nearly alarmingly orange colored egg yolks that burst with the slightest brush of a fork tine. Sweating glasses of Menetou-Salon covered in oceanic scented finger smudges as we plopped slippery bivalves unto our palates and dug into the tiny spiral shells of various sea creatures to extract their briny meat. Meltingly creamy, salty and rich caramels d’Isigny expanding in a soft blanket across the palate before being washed away with the heady, sultry apple caressed Calvados that left my chest swollen and sweetly stinging with fire. 

 

As the train rolled on I caught a glimpse on the other side of the tracks. One of the many simple roadside signs, flat brown with rudimentary drawings of attractions awaiting those sliding past us going the other way. The drawing a little seaside town with boats tied up at the docks. The sign now out of direct sight but my mouth began to water as I flashed on an afternoon spent on a bench in the town of Saint-Vaast-La-Houge. The sun heavy and proud in the perfectly blue sky, the villagers taking a post lunch stroll along the marina. The pink-cheeked, well fed children tucked into perfectly draped scarves and lapping away at tiny waffle cones piled high with various colored and flavored ice cream you just knew had to be the best you would have ever tasted if you could negotiate yourself a taste. Parents looking about, nodding at passers by while investigating who was working on their boats and who was just returning from one of the oyster farms that were stacked just beyond the marina, whistling and “tisk-tisk” tisking at their small dogs that were running beneath my bench to retrieve any dropped bits of my thrown together bench picnic, goodies found at a funky Maison Gosselin market in town. 

Oily, thinly sliced cured meats, butter cookies that shattered delicately when you took a bite, the crumbs that made it upon your palate melting pure butter and just the proper amount of cooked sugar. Cheeses washed with Calvados, funky, stinky, and sticky and just the kind of thing I love to scrape from my thumb with my teeth, feeling the fatty texture roll about in my mouth. Olive oil potato chips, yeasty, flaky, petit baguette ripped off in hunks, (get those crumbs wee puppies) dunked in tarragon mustard before we piled ribbons of salty meat on top. Washing it all down with not cold enough smuggled cups of Ricard and water…the ocean, the oyster shells, the croaking of being repaired boat engines, reprimanded doggie sounds, sea birds above, black licorice and aggressive cheese hanging from my lips.

As the train continued to rock me I felt something come over me. Something so very familiar and for so many reasons. One of the most primal, desired and hated feelings I can remember from my childhood. I was hungry. It came over me so fast and so powerfully that I couldn’t tell if I were truly needing food, if the memories of Normandy were fucking with my head or if it was a whole other kind of hunger gnawing and clawing at me from the inside and demanding I pay attention. I took a sip from my water bottle and the answer was becoming clearer by the second. Oh sure, I could have used a quick bite before our planned 9:00 PM dinner in Paris but it was not food I needed to fill me. I took a moment to truly reflect about where I was, in my second week of a month long trip to France. There for family, friends and getting swallowed up by new sights, but it was wine I was on my way to reconnect with and my hunger pains were growing ferocious. 

I felt my chest inflating, almost as if my breath and excitement were rushing over me too fast for me to catch up. It had been too long since I felt this level of want and it was deliciously devouring me. I heard the announcement come over the speaker in our nearly empty car on the train, less than ten minutes and we would be back in Paris. I thought of the years I would sit on the porch of whatever place my mother could afford to rent, blowing bubbles which I would emotionally fill with my hopes and wishes for the future, watching them float down the block and disappear like I wished that I could. The nights escaping to the silence of an empty pool. The sneaking out of my bedroom window to head to parts of town full of its own saturated sadness where longing souls stood around in groups on the street corners, their own hunger, of every kind, inspiring rash decisions and unwise grabbing. The clumsy fumbling of young hands, fingers, lips and inhibition ….I had dreamed myself out of a million ugly places but never could I have ever imagined my hunger would bring me here. To this place in my life. To this place on the planet. To this place where I could literally feel myself spreading open my hungry heart to wine all over again. 

It’s stirring

I’m vibrating

Ready to feed…..

The View From Up There

 “Mommy, Up” my tiny voice barely audible as I tugged on my mother’s below the knee knitted beige and orange sweater. My neck straining and pudgy finger pointing to another little girl, one about my age, perched a world above me as she sat atop her father’s shoulders, chin rested on his thinning head of curly hair, the sparkle of the Disneyland Main Street Parade played out before me better in the reflection of her eyes than what I was actually able to see by desperately trying to shove my pin head through the throng of long, to me anyway, legs that lined the curb. The night sky swollen and heavy with the smell of cotton candy, fireworks, sour pickles, sweat, lemonade and hard candy suckers. My once a year visit to see the happiest place on earth. “Sam, I can’t. Come stand in front of me, maybe you can see better” her painful to the both of us response as my agonizingly single mother tussled my already messy hair and looked, just as longingly at the family beside us. The parade I could see in her eyes then made me sort of glad I couldn’t see…..much.

 Years later I was able to see the whole light parade on my own two feet. The loud music, the twinkle lights of Cinderella’s pumpkin inspired carriage, the painted grinning princess graciously waving her silken white glove covered slender arm in our direction as Jiminy Cricket skipped along behind her dodging piles of horse poo and the occasional three year old that came darting out from the curb. The whole of the ordeal looking, feeling, so much more exciting and enthralling when I was watching it play out on the face of a little girl whose legs were dented by her father’s thick fingers, him holding her tight as he bounced up and down and told her who was coming next. Never really suffered from that whole grass is greener thing, just sort of accepted that everyone’s view can make a massive impact on how you see and feel things. I never quite got the worship and adoration of the whole shiny, polished, white gloved show, Disney or otherwise, but I very early on found my desire, inspiration and place canonizing the tiny details. The face before the paint. The reflections and reactions. The genuine. To this day I’m not content to not see but I follow the faces, the scents, the thick fingers and storied ridges more than the twinkle lights and horse poo covered main streets. 

 

Our first full day in Caen was spent listening to the waves lap and splash upon the sand and monuments at Omaha Beach. The sun just splitting the clouds as we stepped out of the car and without words or enough breath in our lungs we tiptoed upon the grains of real, and agonizing history. I heard nothing but the thump of my heart in my ears and the slosh and pull of utterly wrenching water scraping, cleaning but never erasing what had happened there. The cold air slapping against my cheeks couldn’t even begin to sting as much as feeling of loss, and pride, one feels standing there.

 From there it was on to the American Cemetery and there simply are not words big enough to explain or express what it is like to walk the gorgeous tree-lined, achingly silent path, make a slight bend left in the road and see before you the stark white, crossed bones, an ocean of them laid before you, your freedom to be there because of their courage and sacrifice. The sun once again pulling the clouds aside, a warm beam of sun splashing upon my icy cold pink cheeks and there was but one thing to do and I did it, I wept.

 Randomly walking the rows, reading the names, seeing slightly wilted flowers left by loved ones, the children or grandchildren of loved ones, sort of nestled between the green lawn and the severity of the blazingly white crosses….I couldn’t stay silent for fear that the knot in my throat would overtake me. Instead I whispered their names aloud as I passed, my fingertips tracing the etched letters as the warm bits of air stamped with their names left my lips. The day was a gift. An honor and a gift. 

 

Big heavy powerful day behind us and day two was all about exploration. Caen is sort of centrally located enough in Normandy that we were able to just pop into the rental car, wiz about in the round abouts and be spun out in a direction that was sure to give me something to devour. Aesthetically, emotionally or as per my favorite, the kind of treasures that part my lips, fill my palate and warm me from throat to tummy. The sun triumphantly high, the air engorged with mossy, wet, green aromas that reeked, in that come-get-me way, of wet woods and new life. Our bright orange rental car spit out on what just so happened to be the cider trail. I felt my legs get just a touch longer in the passenger seat, the fact that I was there, in that place so far from my own history and reality, feeling like thick fingers holding me tight as I soaked in the entire view. 

 

There is something sort of isolating about riding through tiny towns in Europe, or France anyway, midday in early spring. The weather not yet welcoming of families sitting alfresco for or after a meal, and there are few, if any, people taking unhurried walks on the side of the road. Windows are shuttered and closed and the loudest sound we heard was the rubber of our own tires taking in dirt and petite clay soaked pebbles. No radio, no outside noise, no idle chit-chat and nothing but the stillness of post lunch resting, and the click-click-clicking of my eyes taking in each and every layer of it I could. 

 

The tight tiny road/trail allegedly built for two way traffic, our built for this Euro car, taking up two thirds of the road which would have caused me severe angst if I weren’t so fucking engrossed in the utter lusciousness of the garden-like splendor that was spinning around my head so fast I was punch drunk and tingling. The vibrant colors, grand naked trees, two or three hundred of them in each patch, standing erect and tall, leaves months ago shriveled up and fallen to the cold wet earth providing a plushy blanket of decomposition of feed for the next season. There they all stood, these massive skeletal frames like upright witches brooms standing in bunches shoulder to shoulder, brothers in arms, proud but not one too proud as to stand even an inch taller than its brethren. Perfectly aligned as if the universe knew I was coming and gave them all the uniform buzz cut.   

Whipping around each corner there was new feast for me to devour. A tuff of white smoke huffing from the slightly crumbling brick chimney of a century’s old home, the shutters closed revealing sincere shades of lavender and white, a tricycle left at the front steps and an open sign with an arrow pointing to an open, empty, barn offering cider samples. I pictured a family entertaining the three or four year old tricycler, coaxing her to finish her bowl of lentils before taking her nap, the men of the family talking about rebuilding fences, maybe fixing that crumbling fireplace when the weather is better and the ladies taking a few deep tokes of a cigarette between sips of dry cider and collecting the lunch dishes for washing. Would they see us, sure but did I want to bust into the picture and require them to slip on the silken white gloves?

I shook my head, snuggled into my voyeurism and nodded for us to move forward. I was feeling my own pangs. Pangs of isolation, pangs of hunger, those pangs that make your mouth and throat loosen and water, as your body readies for the warm hum and tingle of fruity and boozy satiation. My pangs aside I couldn’t bring myself to disrupt the screaming silence, so we just weaved about the snaking roads, feasted on the way the moisture from the morning rain clung to the thick and statuesque blades of grass making the field shimmer as if it were sprinkled with silver glitter. If I could capture the vibrancy and colors of that ride that day and feast from it for the rest of my days I would never grow tired or underwhelmed. I’m here now, just weeks from my last nibble as it were and I feel like I might be detoxing….might be in need of, just, one, more, hit. Until the next. 

We gorged on history, beauty, the relative serenity after Paris. The apple and pear based cider and booze, diversity of the wine shops in a French region where they don’t actually make wine, ate sick amounts of ocean treats, savory crepes stuffed with cheese, sausage and runny eggs, each other’s cold air stained cheeks, quiet, perfectly manicured un-manicured scenery and the knowing that there were still weeks of wine ahead of us.