Let's see... January was the month of Galettes, February the month of crepes, so what would be more natural than that March should be the month of some other interesting and typically french custom, like, well, Easter? Mimi's teacher asked me the other day whether Easter is something we celebrate in the US, and whether Mimi's ever had easter eggs. I guess someone who's never had galette des rois might never have heard of Easter (although poor Mimi who is basically addicted to candy, found lent (with no chocolates and candy) pretty long, and was asking every day whether it was easter yet). As it turns out, though, Easter here uses pretty much the same imagery as in the US, eggs, chickens, rabbits... also bells (the story is that for easter, all the bells of all the churches fly to Rome, and on their way back, they drop eggs into people's yards. Funny enough, because Mimi has been insisting that the easter candy she found at her place on the dining room table on Easter morning had been left there by the easter bunny, and when we asked her where she had heard of such a thing (he doesn't seem to exist here), she said she figured out he existed when she saw père noël at her school before christmas... I guess she reasoned that if santa claus exists when we had told her he doesn't, then what's to prevent the easter bunny existing when we were too happy to take responsibility for all the treats he left behind. She does have a special thing for bunnies, too, because of papou). On the other hand, Easter seems to be a much smaller deal here than it is in the States: the only signs of it are all the $80+ eggs in bakery windows. But on the whole, there's not a huge build-up like there is for Christmas. And then, though Monday is a holiday too, both Sunday and Monday shops are open, and churches are pretty much as empty as they always are. Yes, Matthias, I'm sorry I had us leave a half and hour early to go to church to be sure to get seats. There were seats aplenty throughout.

In the long time since I last wrote, we have done many things: this here is the 'alignements de Carnac', fields and fields of menhirs and dolmens just sitting there with no supervision so that bad little boys like Matthias can climb all over them and make it so that stones that have stood there for 5000 years slowly becoming more and more exotic and incomprehensible, will crumble to dust tomorrow. We visited all these prehistoric sites with Simeon's best friend Matteo's family (who is lending us their house in Northern Brittany for a week during the spring break--we seem to be becoming moochers, people who get

lent other people's houses). Apparently, prehistoric people in the golfe du Morbihan (about an hour north of us) had already figured out how to dry salt out of the sea, and so got rich by trading it. As a consequence, they had money to spare and leisure time to spend it, and they built monuments (whose meaning is lost to us) that lasted. All along the coast to the north of here there are tumuluses (burial mounds), dolmens (one large stone resting on two others) and menhirs (large oblong standing stones). One of the dolmens we explored had carvings slightly reminiscent of Mayan motifs (something that looked like a sun with a face inside it). The architectural remains (all the stones) are pretty amazing, but the carving really hit me more forcefully with the feeling that there had indeed been minds, people with complex rationality and meaningfulness building these things out of a fairly intense feeling. We've been reading the kids the Philip Pullman trilogy (The Golden Compass) and if he were writing about it, he'd say the carving had more dust surrounding it than the rest of the stuff. One of the problems with the lack of supervision of these sites is that with the lack of supervision goes a lack of guidance--no explanatory signs anywhere. So I am reduced to talking about my children's science fiction literature to express my views on these monuments. Pathetic.

In any case, the one with the most dust on her is me after turning 40. I think it's the first time I think of myself as an adult. Before, I could always think, 'oh, I'm young still, that's why I'm screwing up so badly.' But now I'm forced to think, 'wait a minute, I'm an adult now, I'm 40, I can't keep on doing this.' We'll have to see how long this change of attitude lasts, but I have been more patient with my children and more circumspect about what I say all around (ahem, except for right here, this will be my one childish thing that I have not set aside now that I am a grownup). Sean was at a conference in Barcelona the week before my birthday and only came home in the late afternoon, so the hike I had asked for was delayed to the next week-end (Easter week-end). We went to Tiffauges, the castle of Gilles de Rais (a contemporary and companion of Joan of Arc, but also a man who was tried and executed in a celebrity trial in Nantes on charges of massacring and eating children) and took a beautiful walk along the Sevre river (the same one that runs into the Loire in Nantes. It's definitely my favorite of the rivers here, from Nantes to Clisson (where we went very early on in our stay) to Tiffauges: it's beautiful everywhere).

Here's the castle, blurry in the background of my crying child. This is about one minute into the walk. Still to come were the famous March giboulées (in April, no less), where the sky is perfectly blue, and then, suddenly, before the easter bunny can take even the tiniest hop, it's hailing on you. The cheerful part of it is that the sun never stops shining and the birds never stop singing, and the cows never seem to notice. But Mimi notices and cries and demands to be carried, and when no one will do it, she throws her papou into the mud and sits down her own bottom into the same mud. Okay, so though it was beautiful, historic, brilliant green with the

spring, all in all lovely, it was a bit whiny too.

Here, Matthias is leaping off the terraced gardens of the castle that come down to a tributary of the Sevre, the Crume which was dammed up near the castle in the middle ages (the dam was Sean's favorite part of the structure) and then bridged over by a 6th century bridge (that's what the guide book said, but Sean, whose American spirit of rebellion is being aroused fiercer than ever by the French tendency to grumble and complain about authority, but eventually comply and believe like sheep, wondered how one could ever tell with such a small bridge, oh, and he has doubts about Gilles de Rais's guilt and any number of other things I swallow without blinking). Sorry I'm talking about all these beautiful things without including photos, but this one was too much my favorite to replace it with photos of bridges and dams without a Matthias.

One of the reasons there are not many pictures of Simeon and Magdalene here is that Simeon's been sick and opted out of these outings, and Magdalene has been too happy to stay home 'to take care of him' (but really to miss the hikes). On Sunday, Sean finally got to actualize one of his dreams since we've been here which has been to go gaze upon the house where we might have lived, out in the country, if his wife hadn't been so pig-headed and insisted on living some place where she could walk to the store, the opera, the movie theatre, the schools, the park, etc. No, no, this here is not the house. Actually I didn't go see the house because Sean dropped me off by this chateau so I could go running on a path by the Erdre... the continuation of the path that I usually catch right by the house, but much to the North. The Chateau is beautiful, as are all the others that line the banks of that river. It seemed not to be inhabited, but nor was it falling into ruins. I don't know who it belongs to or what it's used for. But Magdalene and I wished we lived there, that we could come out on our terrace in the morning and look out on our green lawns and our horses grazing below. Then we asked Tipomme why she wasn't a horse.

On that same Easter run/visit to Sean's dream-house that I deprived him of (Matthias, upon seeing the house in the middle of cow pastures, complained that if we had lived there he wouldn't be addicted to TV and other electronics as he is in town, because he could play in the countryside, which is so much healthier! On the other hand, the run there, on that part of the Erdre, is too short for me, I can do much longer ones from downtown), Matthias gallantly picked a bouquet of flowers for Magdalene (actually, he picked it for himself and then was persuaded by his big sister to gallantly give them to her).

Then on Easter Monday, which is a holiday here, we went up to visit our friends Muriel and Emmanuel (the doctors) at La Turballe. Here is Sean posing for the picture, but the second before I bugged him to take it he was in deep conversation with Emmanuel about something or other (the neurons that line the intestinal tract, or wind surfing, or the beauties of this area our Maine (they're spending a year in Boston next year) or Washington (they've promised to visit us there), or fixing the roof on their shed, any of a number of things those two men are interested in in common). And here below is

Matthias being mauled on the beach by his friend Anna (their middle daughter) while they played house in some kind of old bunker thing from the second world war that had been disturbed by the recent storms that battered that area.

Speaking of WW2, Magdalene has been complaining bitterly about the anti-American sentiment coming out in her history class now that they are studying the post war reconstruction of Europe. She reports that according to her teacher, the US and the USSR have their good and bad points, in approximately equal amounts, except that since the US makes it

out that they're the champions of freedom and the USSR the champions of oppression, while the US are in reality witch-hunting communists and ruthlessly seeking after world domination, the US is hypocritical in addition to all its other faults, which might make it worse overall. The Marshall plan? A nefarious tool of American domination and hegemony. No doubt the American-led invasion of German-occupied France is a piece of the same policy, a policy designed to wrest power away from their only real competitors, France, when it was down, something they could never have achieved if they had faced them in a fair fight. Every day, when she comes home from school, she proves that the rebellious American spirit is strong in her too, not just in her father. Don't mess with her or her country!