Green hectares
In true Eva Gabor fashion – minus most of the glamour – after having spent my whole life in big northern cities, ten years ago I moved to the southern countryside with my two young children in tow.
As a girl I’d spent many summers in the country. And even though it was on a “farm” – w/ swimming pools, ponds stocked with trout, and where the closest thing to livestock was a poodle – not a Farm, still we’d mingled with the locals (well, okay, we bought eggs from them, relied on their goodwill and machinery to rescue us when we did something particularly stupid and/or dangerous, and got chewed out because our dog kept chasing their cows around the fields) and we’d driven into the small nearby town for ice cream and butter tarts, so I figured I was hip to the lifestyle and knew pretty much what to expect.
I’d always been a sucker for flora and fauna, rain boots and breathtaking landscapes, and was especially lured by the words South of France: air imbued with lavender, sun-drenched everything, wine flowing from the taps, wise earthy folk and Mediterranean languor – the promise of no more smog, long soul-draining days or crowd-induced misanthropy.
In my position of honorary Gabor, I approached the transition with all the smugness of a jaded urbanite – cocky with the certainty that I was moving from something big and important to something small and simple, from a set of complex rules and systems to one made out of twigs, from the centre to the periphery…
I never once imagined my kids would become hicks, or my daughter set to talking like a haughty southern belle.
Well, now.
Plan A was to find a house close to a city, so providing the perfect balance between the two lifestyles – satisfying cravings for urban hustle and swarm and chain store shopping, then retreating to slow wine on the porch and the clean dark lullaby of country night air.
Plan A fell to pieces within a week.
The first thing I hadn’t counted on was that houses near the city were charmless and expensive, cramped prefab affairs that were to suicide fodder what Orlando Bloom is to molluscs. So deeper and deeper into the countryside I went – the brows of the citizens becoming increasingly prominent and my sense of foreignness more and more acute.
These were pre-internet days in the south of France, with communication relying largely on word of mouth, and I quickly learned that many rural folk would rather let their extra houses stand empty and crumble than rent them to outsiders with undoubtedly perverse foreign ways – and that shouting farmers’ union slogans did little to sway their sympathies.
So finding a place hinged entirely on pure dumb luck (and driving through hundreds of microscopic villages, stopping only to put up a house wanted sign in the town bakery and bar, attempting to charm and pump the locals for leads – feeling, by village number 5, like a second-rate used car salesman).
Plus I hadn’t entirely counted on the passion with which outsiders were vilified by certain small town folk. Now, the fact of my being Canadian disturbed only the rare xenophobe – most people here have a thoroughly romantic view of the place – rather, in villages which have been populated solely by the same five families since Palaeolithic times, an outsider is someone who comes from anywhere more than 10 kilometres away: ‘don’t trust him, he’s from down the road a piece’.
I had people slam doors in my face and yell go away through the keyhole; refuse to talk to me because, ‘I don’t know you, don’t know your people.’ So it was on to the next town, next dead end, more droopy-eyed stares as I stepped out of the car, promising to be fully immune to my blandishments and growing panic.
Then, one week before my lease and increasingly tentative belief in the romance of all this was up, dumb luck ambled in at last. A 400-year-old stone house deep in the vines, a river running out back and a village school for the kids, and the kindest landlords ever. But it was a 40-minute drive to the nearest city, so any excursion there (with two young children in tow) was invariably an ordeal, and became a less and less frequent occurrence.
So it was on to Plan B: full immersion in the bucolic life.
And that’s when the cabin fever kicked in.
The mind and body’s transition from an urban to a rural lifestyle felt at times like being weaned from a powerful addiction. As dazzling as were the sunsets and the sweet smell of morning, in the early days it seemed that there was only so much to look at (and nothing to do) in my new country home. Yeah, yeah, trees, vines, mountains… oh, look, a snail.
I craved the streams of people, the crazies, the hawkers, street musicians, theatre, movies, restaurants, bookshops and galleries, the endless assault of choice and instant gratification. I missed the things that had made me flee. And, oh god, how I missed home delivery!
There had been no welcome wagon in the town, I’d lost most of my Parisian clients who’d panicked at the thought of my being so far away (despite the fact we only ever communicated via e-mail); my bank balance was down to the double digits and I needed work desperately.
The only person apparently eager to befriend to me was an inmate from the asylum up the road. He’d escape several times a week and come round to sell me branches that he’d broken off the trees in my garden. And, one especially fine day, he walked straight in the house and into the bathroom where I was taking a shower – this time with a shopping bag of hand-picked manure for sale.
His name was Jean-Raymond, and his prices were very reasonable.
My kids began refusing to speak English, the old folk who spent their days on benches in the village square eyed me with deep suspicion, and there was little to offset my growing sense of isolation.
But, little by little, a curious thing happened. I began to notice that the landscape in fact changed in small ways from day to day. I began to marvel at details.
Where getting stuck behind two tractors parked in the middle of the road (the closest thing we ever had to a traffic jam) – their drivers gabbing endlessly about the weather and who was doing what to whom – once made me seethe, I found myself slowing to the pace, not clinging to each minute as something to be filled efficiently. I boned up on village gossip.
My breathing began to change, my gait became less pushy. I began to obsess about gardening and memorise the names of the butterflies – Issoria lathonia, Argynnis adippe, Lasiommata maera, Lysandra bellargus…
The days became longer, more absorbing, less harried and not crammed with distractions. I discovered e-commerce. My trips to the city now only filled my head with white noise, and I couldn’t wait to get home. I began to make sense of things differently, priorities shifted. I began to have fun with my kids again.
I offered to teach English at the village school, and helped out at all the fun and dinky events. I found work and what it is to live at a natural human pace. And, before long, the townsfolk began dropping by, with fruit from their orchards, homemade liqueur and lavish tales of who had done what to whom. They opened their doors, and invited me inside.
And most stopped asking me to do moose calls.
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Comment
- Images come to mind as in “From here, you can’t see Paris” by Michael Saunders.
— Raf Aug 21, 9:47pm # - Sounds like you’ve paid yer dues. Boy, are we jealous. We can’t wait to escape the steenking city (Minneapolis, MN, USA) too. Best of luck to you all in your new(ish) TYPE B lifestyles.
— Chris Aug 22, 3:05am # - That rang so very, very true. Thank you.
— Jeremy Aug 22, 1:13pm # - i know this story…. it’s my life! well, very close. and you tell it soooo well. thanks for sharing.
— blue fairy Aug 23, 7:10am # - This is a beautiful post. It’s how I feel sometimes, having moved to the middle of nowehre, Missouri. It’s the details, the way I’ve begun to relish in the lazy days, or rather, to feel the pace slowing down. It’s a different kind of life. One that scares and enthralls (when I let it). Thanks for writing this.
— midwesterngal Aug 25, 4:43am # - what a lovely note. I haven’t though about eva gabor & green acres in ages.We moved 4 years ago from paris to the Alentejo in portugal. Its hard to know if its the change from one country to another or from city to country which is more unnerving.But with time I’ve decided its the city to country jump thats really full of the unexepected. You’re right, its the sense of time passing that is so different.
thanks
— ann Aug 30, 2:03pm # - I loved this too. We have recently moved from suburban Chicagoland to central Illinois, to a little town that in its entirety is as big as the high school my son would have attended up there.
You captured the metamorphsis I am going through perfectly.
— Peggasus Sep 7, 4:47pm #
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