Noirmoutier
I married a Frenchman. This means that every year we visit his family in the Land of Deliciousness (delicious cheese, delicious almond croissants, delicious wine, delicious fig jam, delicious butter…). We’re in Noirmoutier, an island off the coast of Nantes. It’s been lovely, starting even from the airplane trip. Normally, every time I board an airplane I want to die. Well, I DON’T want to die. I don’t want to go down in a flaming wreckage. Somehow, most twistedly, this makes me feel like I want to die. But this time when we took off (take-off’s always the hardest for me), we got a beautiful view of Manhattan and this was very distracting. Also very cool: I could see my house! Yes, from thousands of miles up in the air I could look down and point with absolute confidence to where I live.
Noirmoutier is famous for its butter, potatoes, and salt. Which sounds like plain eating, but it’s a winning combination for me. Otherwise, I eat a lot of cheese and this stuff called frommage blanc, which is what yogurt dreams it could be. My friend Donna came to visit and we did some writerly things and walked by the beach and such but also…we ate a lot of dairy products.
I’m no connoisseur of salt. I personally think that if anybody pretends to “know” and care about varieties of salt, she is a liar. Or has her priorities in the wrong order. It is salt. As much, though, as I don’t really care that the salt on my potatoes is “fleur du sel” or dumped from a Morton Salt Girl cylinder, I love looking at the salt marshes here. The island is very flat, and the marshes are laid out in wet rectangles with heaps of salt drying in the sun. When the salt is just below the water, it sparkles. It might be nice to be a salt farmer—you go out with your rake and drag the salt into a pyramid. Kind of like having a big zen garden.
Today my husband and I got on his motorbike and went for a ride on the underwater bridge—except, of course, it was above water at that point. The bridge is uncovered at low tide only. It’s fascinating to see the seaweedy mud spread around you for miles, and hundreds of people out in their boots, attacking the sand with rakes and prongs, searching for oysters and cockleshells and clams. There are also wooden towers every hundred feet or so in case you’re one of those suckers who drive out when the water’s coming in and get stuck. Your car’s a wash, but at least you can climb up the tower and wait for low tide again.
I’m getting a fair amount of writing done, and LOADS of reading. Really enjoyed Stephen King’s On Writing. Reread an old favorite: L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle. Was both traumatized and impressed by Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (heartbreaking, brilliant). But my best read so far was Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me, about a twelve-year-old girl who lives in the Upper West Side, loves Madeleine L’Engle, helps her mom practice to be a game show contestant, and begins to receive mysterious letters from a stranger who somehow knows things about her life—even before they happen. When You Reach Me is incredible. Read it now.
was just trolling by and had to say: The Blue Castle! The Blue Castle! oh man I love that book.
I know! Well, this time I skimmed through all the wide-eyed How Beautiful is Nature! stuff. So Victorian. I took in so earnestly, though, when I was a kid, and would repeat things from the book. “We shouldn’t pick flowers,” I’d say in a mystical tone. “They lose their magic when away from the wood.”
But it’s such a pleasure to see Valancy come into her own. And I like her new clothes. And the romance is very satisfying.
(of course, I was a very silly kid. I had no sense of irony and would do things like memorize Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”).
i think i always skimmed the nature parts (except for when valancy makes the necklace out of flowers—does that count?). In general, so much less compelling than the “olive is mean about the wedding” bits.
my childhood fav. emily dickinson was “I’m nobody.”
I didn’t mean ALL the nature-related parts. I liked reading about Valancy and Barney tramping in the woods, etc. It’s when they TALK about nature or Valancy goes on and on about John Foster’s books that is one big snore.
But yes: still much less compelling than the “Olive is mean” bits. That Olive—keeping all her goods in the shop window.
You clearly had good taste in poetry as a child. I think I was drawn to the sort of princessy quality in “Because I Could Not Stop…” Sort of like an early version of that movie about Brad Pitt as Death.