Bright corners of the new day crawled sleepily through the trees outside her house, a humble home in a humble village. She stood quietly on the stone veranda, sipping from a white and blue ceramic cup, awakening her throat with the bitter brew, her housecoat wrapped round her slim body. It had become her habit of arising early, embracing the dawn as a symbol of what it meant to be alive. Boy, did she feel alive!
She hadn’t followed the pattern all her life, but ever since her husband was suddenly gone. It had been six years to the day when she got the phone call.
“I want a divorce.”
She didn’t miss him, which also evoked the memory of a certain sadness. Not the sadness of the phone called, but the sadness that had lingered through twenty years of marriage. Sadness could turn into a bad habit, but at last she’d shoved it away, let it drown in the river of bad memories.
Her two kids, both of them grown, had settled far away, on the other side of the globe. North and South Carolina, Raleigh and Charleston.
Maybe she should live closer, but England suited her. As strange as it sounded, even to her, the weather suited her, the small cottage, the changing seasons, and a location that required little effort to travel to the nearest city, and cities on the continent. She and her friend, Francine, had just come back from a two months stay in a small town on the edge of Paris. At least she had returned.
Her high school French had been brushed up, refurbished, to the extent that she could parler with waiters and trainsmen, and buy a new blouse on the first try, and read the newspapers, except when it was peppered with local dialect.
Francine was French and decided to stay. Good for her! Of course, Jean Pierre had something to do with it.
She had slept with him, too. As excitingly delicious as a fresh croissant with fig jam and a café au lait. But, of course eating breakfast all the time, and just breakfast, could become slightly boring. Besides, she found his someone bulging stomach a little off-putting. No he was not fat, but not the slim French lad that had settled in her imagination since she was a girl. He did have the French charm, a gallon of it. So the once…or was it twice…? Francine knew. She had to have known. Ah, well, Francine never mentioned it and goodness knows she wouldn’t.
Jean Pierre and Francine fought off and on, and one night when the heat of confrontation simmered, Francine said, “Here, you take him.” That was that. C’est l’amour. But, two nights were enough, sure enough.
The French are more open minded. That’s what Americans say. Better put to say, in France, liaisons are accepted as a part of nature for both men and women, the part of the brain that says, let’s meet in the afternoon, but don’t let it spoil a friendship. Cinq à Sept? Five to seven would be perfect for me, she thought.
Francine and Jean Pierre had gotten married a couple of weeks later, the occasion celebrated in a small stone church that was old enough and dusty enough to have served as a delightful spot for honoring the Roman god of dandruff. The priest was slightly younger than the church, short, gray, and a testimony to osteoporosis. He mumbled in a confused manor that left the bride and groom asking, “Pardon?” more than once or twice. The priest kept going, evidently not able to slow down and risk losing his place in line. The bride and groom did the best they could and stuck in answers from time to time, randomly, and with great emotion. “Our heaving faber, how be thy namb.” I do! Me, too!
A small affair and she had served as the Maid of Honor. Several persons from the village of Pont de Pierre, Stonebridge, attended, Pierre meaning stone as well as Peter. She’d had a chuckle over that.
The attendees were a scattering of mostly the old and feeble who’d heard there was an availability of cake. The older women supplied congratulatory tears at various times, whether out of sympathy for the groom, or just forgetting where they were and how they had gotten there.
Jean Pierre didn’t just offer cake, but a spit roasted pig and variety of baked vegetables, doused with sauces. Naturally, there was beaucoup wine and chunks of baguettes. Soon neighbors who had missed the wedding turned up with more jugs of wine and well named homemade brandy referred to as Merde de Chèvres, goat droppings.
Everyone celebrated well into the evening. Ah, the memories. She awoke at the breaking of a new day, next to a somewhat familiar face in her bed. It was that first dawn that reawakened her to the beauty of life.
Now that she was back at home, it was time to readjust a bit.
Jean Pierre’s brother, Andre, a slimmer version of his younger brother, came up behind her, as she stood on the veranda, and put his arm around her waist. “Pourquoi aimes-tu tant le lever du soleil?” Why do you love the sunrise so much?”
