When I saw this house on my first walk up the hill (mountain) to the Université de Savoie that summer, I admired the textures, the way each level feels like the earth but manages do get more modern.
On the second day, I fell in love with the door on the side, from which a woman, stooped with age and cigarettes, descended each morning to weed the garden that covered her yard.
On the third day, I decided that functioning wooden shutters are a necessity.
On the fourth day, I was a horrible person. I looked at the woman and used degrees of curve in her back to guess her age. Then, I tried to guess what year should would die. Maybe I used words like "pass away," or "fall asleep for the last time." I don't use those words here; I don't pretend that the sentiment is any less horrible than it sounds.
I painted a life in this house. I determined crop rotations, imagined Joe on a ladder each summer whitewashing the first floor while I walked around caulking and cleaning windows on the ground level. I imagined waking up each morning at the foot of a mountain.
When she wasn't out walking along the rows of peas and tamed wildflower, she watched us from the large open window. It wasn't unusual. As my stay in Chambéry progressed, I knew which windows to look up at to find a person holding a cigarette casually, letting it burn and ash into the open air as they watched us. I wasn't surprised. The scattered trail of 30 Americans winding up the hill each day seemed far more unusual than sitting at one's own window, watching the world.
The day I carried my camera to school with me, when I had begun counting days before I came home instead of days of adventure ahead of me, she was not in her yard. The wind was still, and the curtains were flat in the open window. I leaned against the shed that housed her garbage bins, next to the road and in line with a fence not pictured.
As I slipped my hand through the fence to frame the picture, I saw the curtains flutter. I clicked and turned up the hill. For a moment, I'd considered waving, stopping to tell her what the house meant to me.
The picture sits on my desk, distracting me from my writing, my translating, even my social media playtime. My feelings haven't changed.
We may not live in Chambéry. We may not live in France. We may not leave the Midwest. But we will have our home and we will fix our shutters and we will plant our seeds. And when I remember what all of this means, I can't help but long for this picture too.
Going home tomorrow. Planning a wedding for real this week. Focusing on my family and detoxing my brain, looking forward to my dad working about what I'm eating and my mom worrying about what I'm thinking, because they're both getting it just right. They both know the answers already.
It's been a rough patch. Going back to the home that's held me for all of the years I remember instead of focusing on the home Joe and I are trying to create will be a welcome relief, a refresher, and a reminder of what's at the center of what we're building.
0 comments:
Post a Comment