Much to write about again this month. Influenced by all our friends here who don't think it's such a big deal to leave their children with friends or grandparents for shortish stretches of time, we accepted my aunt's offer to come stay with the four while Sean and I went away to the

other side of the country, to stay in a friend's house near Annecy. So my aunt arrived from Spain on a Sunday, and on Monday at 6AM, we kissed the children and walked to the train station carrying our backpacks like college students (that's when I realized that being a college professor is really not very different from being a college student: you carry a backpack and depend on the kindness of family and friends for all fun activities). We travelled all day, first on a two decker TGV, then on a really old little mountain train with compartments and curtains on all the windows. Oh, the children would have loved it. But we also loved it without them: we had a compartment just for us, and we stopped at every tiny village along various lakes, and though we arived in the city of Aix les Bains going forward, we left going backwards.

We got to the beautiful city of Annecy at 2pm with lots of time to explore. It's built on a series of canals and along the bottom edge of a lake, with mountains surrounding the lake (Sean thought it looked just like Bellingham!). Unfortunately, we never saw those mountains because thick clouds basically sat on the lake the entire time we were there. We climbed up to more than 2000 meters the first day, and all we saw for our troubles (the French don't seem to believe in switchbacks, they send the trail absolutely straight up the mountain, so that ill-equipped people like me, who go hiking in running shoes, have to hang on to tufts of grass

on either side of the trail to avoid sliding back down to the edge of the lake), were fields of crocuses, fields of snow, and white mist. No Mt Blanc or any other lesser known peaks. 4 hours of straight climbing and no views! No complainers either, though (except for me)!

One of the especially nice things about the French Alps is that even after you've been hiking alone in the mountains for 6 hours, you still find ample signs of civilization: there are the summer pastures (chalets high up in the mountains where the shepherds come to graze the sheep and the cows in the Spring), monuments to WW2 dead resistants, cow patties and cow paths that utterly confuse you when you're trying very hard not to get lost in the fog and the snow. It was the first time in my hiking life that I'd had to reason hard about details of the map and how they corresponded to details of reality so as to find the path on the other side of a field of snow, or from among 10 cow tracks. We must have taken that map out a thousand times in our 8 hours in the mountain, but we did not get lost. When we got back to our village around 8pm, we realized it was movie night there, and we even made it to a 9 o'clock showing of a stupid French movie, which, exhausted as we were, we found pretty funny.

Anyway, with all the cloudiness and the rain, we didn't hike like that every day, but we still had a lovely time. We travelled back on the Friday and found everyone in a pretty good state. My aunt was a bit tired, but cheerful. Simeon had spent a large chunk of the time with his friend Mateo (so as to spare my aunt the dismaying spectacle of the violence of the two boys' fighting), Magdalene had had to do a fair bit of managing Mimi's temper tantrums, and Matthias seemed suddenly to have reconciled with doing his homework. I still don't know what my aunt did, but the good will is lasting.

On the next thursday after that, we had yet another vacation (for the ascension, all you ignoramuses who don't know your Catholic feasts) and we went to visit my uncle in Normandy. For those of you who met my cousin Eve when she spent the month at our house two summers ago, that's her family. My uncle has a big house in the country, where Miriam and Matthias blossomed at the contact of nature. We'd almost forgotten how lovely it is to be far from the city, since we're always stuck here in Nantes, but both Sean and I in the Alps, and then all of us in the country near Caen rediscovered that essential part of human happiness: fields, cows, rivers, grass, the smell of Spring... Actually, Mimi's new passion is picking flowers (even the forbidden orchids that grow plentiful on the sides of paths around my uncle's house, but that are endangered elsewhere. She was careful to hide them behind her back when she went close to him, the naughty one), so she was willing to hike quite a long way in her search for ever new varieties of yellow, white, and purple flowers.

Of course, we also did a fair bit of sightseeing, not at all far from the city and the cosmopolitan crowd. Normandy is completely overrun by tourists, and although it is full of extremely beautiful things, it is also difficult to get anywhere near those beautiful things, so thick is the mass of people between you and the treasures. In our case, the sight-seeing was made all the more difficult by having the dog along, which meant that we had to split up into two groups for every cathedral, church, museum: one group that went to dog friendly places like playgrounds and cafés, and the other that went to sweaty crowded places full of vulgar british and

german tourists (oh, and yes, Magdalene, sophisticated Japanese ones, she's fallen in love with Japan, and so loved following the Japanese tourists around the Mont St. Michel and understanding one or two words of what they said). Above is Matthias waiting outside one of the many beautiful churches in Caen (the abbaye aux messieurs, pictured below), and to the left are Sean and Mimi waiting outside the Bayeux cathedral (in front of a tourist shop that sold thoroughly inappropriate postcards that made me unhappy that these vulgar things were now in my children's imagination).

In Mont St Michel, it was Simeon, Mimi, and me who waited outside the abby and almost got swallowed up by the quicksand of the famous bay while exploring in and out of the city.

At the D-day beaches is was all the children and I who went to play on the beach while Sean and Magdalene visited the cemetery and the memorial. We managed to see a lot, with the impediment of the dog and the various caprices and fits of miss Mimi. The splitting into groups also caused quite a bit of fighting and confusion: we lost each other a few times, and there were a few sore feelings on all sides when one group got stuck in a huge line and didn't see the Bayeux tapestry for long enough, while the other group sauntered through and had time to read the funny latin captions, or when one group got to see the WWII memorial museum in Caen while the other had to stay at my uncle's house and hang out while Mimi had her nap (no, actually, I was happy to do that, I didn't want to go to the museum anyway, but since it was me who got more time with the tapestry, I figured I'd throw a tantrum too to muddy the waters and not let anyone see who was getting the better deal).

It's a hard life we lead here. We're just coming to the end of two weeks of vacation, in two parts. The first part we spent in a small village called Plouguerneau, in Finistere, in the North of Brittany. Our friends Stéphanie and Xavier, the parents of Simeon's best friend Mateo have a house there. We followed them there for the week-end (a 3h drive), they showed us around for two days, and then left to go back to work on Monday, leaving us behind with the house (complete with kayaks, bikes, soccer field, and anything you can dream of to amuse yourself out there) and Mateo.

We were pretty busy there. We hiked out to islands at low tide and then kayaked back, dogs and babies and all (I told Stephanie I was going to write about it on this blog and she told me that would be bragging... which it is). We hiked out to chapels and menhirs and sacred springs and dunes and more low tide islands, and at high tide we kayaked. All this, mind you, not just with our kids, but my brother and his family met us there (they rented a house at the end of a beautiful rocky point right where the wind starts howling and turns freezing when you're walking

or running up the coast). All the cousins got along beautifully, though as you can see on this picture there was some friction between the dogs (we're having a three legged race here). Simeon and Mateo got along quite well too. Mateo never rests, whereas Simeon pretty much can tolerate no more than one activity a day, so there was a lot of Mateo trying to drag Simeon out for another soccer game, or another card game, or to collect tadpoles, or to build a dam on a little creek, or a bike ride, and then falling back on Matthias when he couldn't get his first choice

(that was good for Matthias, getting some positive (if second rate) attention from an older boy). But Simeon and Mateo were inseparable and unbeatable when it came to soccer teams and card games. We had a few memorable card games involving everyone except Mimi (don't tell her, she was already asleep), where Simeon and Mateo behaved like rascals and beat all of us older folk silly.

This here is one of the sacred springs. They are quite abundant in that country. They were worshiped by the celts, and then christianized

with dedications to saints and chapels and the like, but apparently there were still devotions performed at them until the 50s. A while back, when I wrote a novel about ancient Ireland, I had included one of those sacred springs, and so I really wanted to see one. I spent a few hours unsuccessfully looking for one that was supposed to be near the chapel where we were playing three-legged races, then I brought out the big guns (Sean and Mimi, the great geographers of our family) but even they couldn't find it. So when my brother found this one after we'd already left, he was kind enough to take a whole bunch of pictures for me (unbeknownst to him, we had stopped there on our way out, but with no batteries left in our cameras).

For part II of the vacation, we came back to Nantes and got rid of a few children: Mateo went back to his family to go skiing in the Alps, and Magdalene went to spend a week with her best friend on Ile d'Yeu, an Island off the coast of Vendée to the south of us. She's not home yet, but she seems to be happy when we talk on the phone. On the other hand, Sean would never have agreed to take a week of vacation at home if there had not been special circumstances to warrant it (and if he hadn't, it wouldn't have counted as vacation for me!). His mother and stepfather met us in Finistere on the next to last day of our stay, and then met us in Nantes.

Wisdom (one of the cardinal virtues surrounding

the gisants of François II, duc of Brittany, and his

second wife-- as well as a lion and a grey hound)

So we've been tourists again here, both in the city (we've been back with newly appreciative eyes to the castle and the cathedral--as you can see from a new crop of pictures, in fact, I started to follow a tour of the cathedral, hoping I could find out what story was carved on the pillars at the entrance--a story about a woman and some camels, but when I asked the guy he said "well madame, I can't tell you all the details of everything in this cathedral, it would take much too much time" in typical french fashion: when

you don't know the answer, try to shame the asker. In fact, I was the one being stupid, because all I had to do was ask my own resident expert, the famous professor Sean, and he told me it was the story of Rebecca and the stolen house idols)

and in the surrounding areas: these three pictures are from the monastery of Fontevraud, where are buried Richard the Lionheart, as well as his parents Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (that's who the two gisants represent). Many years ago, long before sabbaticals seemed something possible in Sean's future, Sean designed a course for an application to teach in the semester abroad program Western participates in in Angers. The course was about Medieval celebrities, of which Robert D'Arbrissel (founder of the monastery) and Elianor d'Aquitaine were both examples. He had included in the course a description of a planned field trip to Fontevraud. So he got his field trip, only with his own children and parents as charges rather than a bunch of American college students.

Now, here's a typical Claudia story. On the large, not very detailed map of the area, it looked like there was a hiking trail between Fontevraud and our next destination: Chinon (Sean wanted to see that city in particular since he's done a lot of work on Joan of Arc, and that's where she found the Dauphin (heir to the king) and convinced him to let her lead an army against the English). So I begged and cajoled until Sean agreed to take care of everyone while I walked between the two towns. I had meant to stop at the tourist office to get a more detailed map, but of course, that was closed for lunch until 2:30, and I didn't want

to wait, and I had seen the signs for one hiking trail while visiting the monastery, so off I went, with no maps, hardly any water, and more to the point, the opposite of a sense of direction as part of my biological-psychological make-up. I didn't remember any names of any of the villages I should see along the way, nothing. So, of course, I got lost. I did reason my way through several meetings of trails, reasoning that included looking at where the sun was and spying a valley ahead that I concluded must be a river... In fact, I did find the Loire river (after about an hour walking due North instead of East), and then the split between the Loire and the Vienne (about 15

Km away from Chinon). So, a hike that was supposed to take two hours actually took 4, and everyone was a little annoyed with me when I got to the castle (there's only so much you can do in the ruin of a castle with three little kids and your parents, even if it is the castle where Joan recognized the Dauphin from his men after he had put his crown on someone else's head--in that high tower you can see here). And this below is the view they had as they waited for me. "Do you see her coming on that bridge? Look for the black and white contrast of Tipomme, no? No one that could even conceivably be

them?" In any case, because I'd gotten lost, I was coming on the other side of the river, so they couldn't have seen me coming... Even if I had been.

Yesterday, the last day of the vacation, I took Mimi to Paris to visit the surgeon that our surgeon in Seattle recommended for her foot-surveillance while we were in France (she's supposed to get checked every 6 months). Here she is, on the TGV, ready for her big trip. Boy, I had promised her any number of outings: the Jardin du Luxembourg (which has, of course, merry-go-rounds, pony rides, paying playgrounds, stands that sell crepes, sail boats for pushing around the little basin...) AND the Jardin des Plantes (which has all of the above as well as a small zoo). Well, we made it to the Luxembourg for a rushed 30 minutes where she tried mightily to have fun so she could satisfy my anxieties about the trip (although she refused the pony ride despite my desire to see her enjoy one). But then it was time to rush to the hospital so as not to be late for her appointment... What a joke. We got there about 15 minutes early and the receiving nurse, who was having a personal conversation full of, "yes, I kiss you too, and kiss the children for me, yes, mine are fine, in camp for the week, etc.," made us wait 20 minutes before she'd even look up at us to see what we wanted. After that, we waited for an hour and 15 minutes with no sign that anyone was being seen. I figured this must be the french lunch: our appointment was scheduled for 2, and the great doctor professor (did you know professor trumps doctor, and that I got nastily corrected for saying doctor as if it was a slight!) was having his second cup of coffee with dear friends and not worrying that it was now 3:15. And I was right, I think, since he rolled in around 3:30 looking quite self-satisfied. It's a funny dilemma, actually, because when I'm with my friends the doctors and they set everything aside so we can have tea together or dinner or the whole week-end, I think it's just the best, that people who are so busy can manage to really make time for friends. But when I'm waiting for the great doctor, oh, I'm sorry, professor, I do not regret for one second that Mimi's foot was fixed in the US and not here. Anyway, the great doctor professor barely looked at her, the exam was conducted entirely by the physical therapist who (as is usual with the para-medical professions) gave her a much more thorough exam than the great professor doctor she sees in Seattle, and said her treatment was very much misguided and told us to change everything (while the great professor vaguely nodded, as if bored). Anyway, and then we had to have x-rays (for a disorder that has nothing to do with bones, but of course I was too chicken to point that out), and then we had to wait in line again to see the great man who sent us on our way like a great lord benevolently sends away his subjects. Ok, but the best is still to come: the woman who first checked us into the hospital, not the one with her personal conversation, the one who was going to make sure we paid, had ordered me to come back to pay after the visit. Well, we get to the place with less than an hour before we have to catch our train back to Nantes (sorry Mimi, no zoo), and there is no one there. We wait, we clear our throats and cough, we call out "anyone there?", and then we hear faint voices in the distance, so we move that way. Here is our cashier lady chatting away with her buddy about who's in love with whom, Gray's Anatomy and ER style, and when she sees us she makes her severest face and says, in an icy tone, 'what are you doing here?' "Well, we're just trying to pay. We know you're not used to it, but we don't have insurance, you told us specifically that you don't bill and that we needed to pay before leaving" "Oh, well, we have your address, I'm busy now, so we'll bill you." Between her work ethic and her changing the law as her moods change and the nurse's phone conversation, it's a wonder anything gets done there. There you go, you can tell there's another republican speech about people not paying for their own health care (that's to cover the completely unnecessary x-ray) and people having too much job security (that's to punish those two irresponsible and gossipy women) coming. It must be my father-in-law's influence!

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!

February vacation is upon us, which means that contrary to my last entry, I am on full motherhood duty... well, today and half of yesterday, that is, last week we were all at the beach (our friends lent us their house at La Turballe and so we were able to visit all the places we missed last time) until Tuesday, and then on last Thursday, I went to Paris ALONE. Let me quickly disculpate myself here. I was supposed to bring Mimi to see a surgeon recommended by the surgeon we see in Seattle, so I already had (non-refundable, non-changeable because cheapest) train tickets... and then they changed my appointment. Of course, I protested and acted outraged in my most American wronged customer persona, but they didn't buy it, and then, machiavellian mother that I am, I began to see how I might turn this to my advantage..., you know, you can't let a perfectly good train ticket go to waste, and then, well, there's an exhibit I really want to see that doesn't start until the middle of March, so, well, good opportunity to make sure I can go when I bring the girl to her doctor.

The main event of our stay at La Turballe was that we lost Magdalene in the woods. Oh, for maybe an hour and a half, it was just one of the most terrible things that have ever happened to us (Sean did lose Matthias in Cornwall park when he was 2 and a half, but I didn't know about it until later). She got mad at the boys for wanting to bushwhack through thorny bushes, what with her elegant coat and scarf and all, so she decided she would go a different way. But when we got to the parking lot, no Magdalene at all, and no amount of calling could produce her either. So Sean and Simeon went searching back through the woods (after going out to look for her along the road where she might have come out of the woods at any point) and they found her sitting where she had left us. She had found the road and gotten scared because it wasn't where we had entered the woods, and then she had some dim memory that when lost in the woods you stay where you are and wait to be found.

Aside from that awful event, and some unfriendly treatment from the baker (who sighed and rolled her eyes every time I ordered another thing), a crazy guy in a parking lot who almost killed Miriam and then yelled at me, and when I yelled back, followed us in his car for at least 10 minutes, which left me a little scared whenever we saw a black car later in our stay, and the cute little pillbugs (cloportes, in french, which is one of the few nature words my kids now know in French) that scare Magdalene and infest the house we were staying at, we had a lovely time. Sean and the boys spent a lot of time playing war-like games in the woods (the very ones Magdalene was lost in)--it helped that there are German fortifications all along the beach, built in 1945 in anticipation of the Allies invading on the coast of Brittany instead of Normandy. I went running on paths, in woods and on the beach, I covered myself in shame trying to play badminton.

We went on a long hike on bluffs and a beach (very different from our beloved Ebey's Landing, but the same general idea), and the boys, who never ever stop fighting (especially at that house which comes equipped with a game of monopoly with which the boys are obsessed but which turns them into nasty capitalists, the kind that everyone knows is thirsty for war), even were friends for a little while there, on the beach and bluffs (the photo is just there to prove that point)

We stopped in Guerande, a beautiful medieval fortified town (with its entire fortification intact). On the outside of the walls, the buildings are pretty awful, but inside the city, everything has been preserved beautiful and traditional (this is a traditional window treatment for this part of Brittany, for example), except for the tourist shops that line the main street to sell salt and its accoutrements (the main traditional agriculture around Guerande is salt marshes where the salt is harvested by hand).

We also went to the very picturesque port village of Piriac, where the famous writer Zola lived for a while, and where he set one of the short stories Magdalene had to study at the beginning of the year (for you faithful blog readers, the short story with the geese that represented human affairs, and the manure pile that symbolized power)

PARIS

The second part of my vacation... well actually, the first part of my vacation (while Sean worked hard at home) took place in Paris. I got there at 10 AM and figured the first thing to do was rectify that terrible slight that was done to me in Madrid (for those who don't remember, the slight consisted in Mimi's having a screaming fit which forced me to leave the Prado after only 30 minutes of contemplating the Bosch and Bruegel paintings I have been longing to contemplate for a lifetime). So, childless and free as the wind, I made my way to the Louvre which you can see here in my quite artistic rendering. There was only a moderately long line which gave me time to wolf down a sandwich so as not to be troubled even by hunger in my contemplations (well, they only have one Bruegel and two Bosch, there at the Louvre, but there are a few other gems), and then I braved the massive crowds making it hard to breathe in the Italian wing of the museum. There were a few positively weird things, like this huge (completely uninteresting if you ask me) painting by a contemporary guy named Soulage (ahem, the inventor of 'black') hung in a room full of early Renaissance paintings by Botticelli and Ucello. There are a bunch of interviews with the guy next to the painting where he says he wanted his painting in the First Italian renaissance room because his painting was mute and Ucello's deaf... whatever (oh, the French will think I am so American, oh, and maybe you too, Jim, if you're reading this. Feel free to educate me, anyone).

Let's see, otherwise, among a host of other things (I stopped my visit when I reached the 17th century, everything becomes a bit too monstrous at that point) there's a quite amazing portrait of Cleopatra killing herself (she holds a snake to her breast, and if you've just spent five months reading Freud, I can tell you, you can't stop standing in front of that painting staring--well, especially if you don't have young children with you--oh, and she happens to look just like an actress in the HBO TV show Rome!), there's the beautiful 'deaf' Ucello battle scene that's captured in the heat of battle, with the front horse rearing and showing his teeth, and the sky so black. Anyway, I guess I'm not going to describe all my favorite paintings, but just a bit of trivia, in case any of you are planning to visit the Louvre: you can't walk for the crowds in the Italian wing, and then the German/Netherlandish wing is completely empty, despite the glorious presence of the aforementioned Bosch and Bruegels and two Vermeers that you can sit and contemplate as long as you want. Oh, and once you finish your visit, don't forget to rent a little sailboat in the Tuileries park for your children to push around a pond with a stick. I wish I'd had them there for that, and also to try out all the merry go rounds (I saw at least 15 in my five days in Paris).

This is the Church of Saint Etienne du Mont, right near the enormous and hideous Pantheon. I used to walk past it on my way to my piano lesson every week and think philosophical thoughts (I was only 14 or so, my goodness, Magdalene's age) like 'God must exist if humans create so much beauty to honor him'.

This is the Hotel de Sens, a 16th century remnant in the flamboyant gothic style of architecture--the museum of the middle ages (where I had a very pleasant conversation about J.P. Satre and the weight of freedom with someone who was turning the pages of the manuscript presenter with me, we were looking at an illuminated manuscript page from from a law book about how to resolve disputes between neighbors about cutting trees whose roots are one one side of the fence while its branches are on the other--have you been thinking of cutting any part of our Japanese plum tree, Steve?) is in the exact same style.

Ok, if I'm getting bored with my own travel writing at this point, I can't imagine what any of my readers must be feeling, so I probably should take a break. But I must at least comment on the photos I've loaded onto this page, so bear with me for another 3 minutes. Here is the chapel from the castle at St Germain en Laye, close to where I was staying during this stay (with good friends of my mother's). It houses the museum of archeology which would normally not interest me at all (in fact, it didn't interest me when I visited it with my class as a child so much so that I had not a single memory of the place other than boredom) except that it houses some Gaulish objects which, when I was interested in early Irish history (when I was writing a novel about that, many years ago), kept coming up in books I consulted then. It's funny how a past desire that doesn't really have anything left to do with your present life can still motivate you. I went to see the objects I remembered, but because the novel is long finished, and all the history I learned while working on it long forgotten, the visit was quite a waste of my time. I think maybe this is the case with all past tense desire that you have only because you were once interested in something. Like if my ears prick up because I hear people talking about philosophy, which was once part of my life. If I really pay attention, I always feel annoyed afterwards.

I once thought Notre Dame was huge and grey and oppressive, but not this time. First of all, there are these carvings all around the altar area, the life of Christ as a child on one side, and scenes from his resurrected life on the other (the scenes from childhood are the best, but the light on that side is too dim and the photos didn't come out. Too bad. There's a beautiful carving of the massacre of the holy innocents, with details like a mother shoving her fingers into the eyes of the soldier who is trying to kill her baby. This one is the resurrected Christ meeting with the holy women. Magdalene has a collection of Mary Magdalene representations, and I assume the one with the red cloak is the right one. But there's more in the cathedral. They seem to be renovating some of the side chapels, so some of them are fully painted and their stained glass has been restored, and the glorious dance of colors just can't not lift your spirits. Add to this that when I went to visit, I happened right in the middle of an adoration of the crown of thorns (St Louis brought it back from the Holy Land in the 13th century and had the Sainte chapelle built to house it). It's sealed in glass, but you can actually see it. Even if it has nothing to do with Jesus, still, even a crown of thorns from the 13th century that was adored by Thomas Aquinas and Saint Louis is worth a few emotions, in a colorful chapel, with candles and incenses and berobed priests.

On my last day there, I made a pilgrimage to the old suburb where I grew up. This is my high school, the Lycée Lakanal, just around the corner is a beautiful park where I used to walk my dogs every day after school. I walked all around it (it took me close to an hour and a half) and I must say, perhaps under the influence of my upcoming 40th birthday, I felt quite nostalgic on this walk. Somewhat disconnected from the person I was when I used to walk past that church and think deep thoughts, or walk the halls of this beautiful school. Maybe that's what's sad, when you don't feel connected with the other parts of your life, then it's really as if you're continually losing parts of yourself.

So I will now sign off and take my children to the library and the grocery store. I have to steel myself. 5 days away may have rested me and made me more patient, but it definitely dis-habituated me from the habitual state of chaos and conflict that reigns among my children. And that's with one missing: Magdalene has gone on the train on her own to visit her 'internet friend' Maggie in Angers.