Grounded

After three weeks of travelling, I was meant to be flying home today.

However, there is a huge cloud of volcanic ash hovering over the UK and it looks like I will be grounded in Texas a little while longer.  Hopefully, the tulips won't be finished before I get home.

School and work will have to wait, and so will my younger daughter's appointment to get a retainer.  Thank goodness my older daughter had the foolhardy notion foresight to bring an entire suitcase of GCSE books and materials.  Meanwhile, we have the great big silver lining of more time with Texas friends, more Mexican food, and more sun.  As we wait, we may have to adopt a semblance of "normal" life -- meaning, time for homework, homecooked meals, and hopefully, a return to the blogworld.

We still have Paris

Some years ago, my friend Jenni and I decided that we would go to Paris for her 50th birthday.

How far away that prospect seemed . . . how distant was the horizon of 50.

Despite all of those years of talking about Paris, we find ourselves just two weeks away from our Eurostar reservations . . . and with no real plans.

All day long I have been trawling through websites, looking at places to eat and sleep.  But when you only have a few days in Paris, you really want it to count, right?  How to find those really special places off the tourist-track?  Jenni and I have both been to Paris, several times in fact, and we no longer need to wait our turn to climb the Eiffel Tower.  What else could be waiting in Paris for us?

Any suggestions, bloggy friends?

Merci

Jet Lag: Disease, or Disconnect?

White: Saturday in New York

Last night, at approximately 2 a.m., I awoke to a sudden and sharp state of alertness. This morning, at approximately 10 a.m., I shuddered from the waves of a deep and nauseating state of exhaustion. Diagnosis: Jet lag.

Some people travel a lot for work. I travel a lot because my life -- and loved ones -- straddle two continents. Thus, I frequently suffer from the physical and cultural effects of lurching too quickly from one state of mind and being to another.

Last night, as I was lying relentlessly awake, I remembered a line from a Laurie Colwin short story called "Passion and Affect." Jet lag is the true disease of the late twentieth century. There are the physical manifestations of the screwed-up body clock, of course, but then there is also the strange emotional disconnect brought on by traveling too quickly through time and space.

On Saturday, I was trudging through snow and eating cajun chicken wings in a sports bar inhabited by hockey-mad New Yorkers. By the next day, I was inhaling the unmistakable whiff of damp English spring and roasting chicken and the only sound was the faint chirr-churping of birds. I'm sure that I would have been happy to be home -- if only I hadn't felt quite so ill.

In the days before the miracle of airplanes, when would-be travelers made their slow and stately progression across the Atlantic by ship, there was no such disease as jet lag. I assume that the long watery passage became the link -- the substantial segue -- between two disparate modes of being. The traveler was thus prepared by the long delivery and the gradually changing sky.

Modern travel is both too quick and too slow. No matter where I go, it seems to take about 19 hours from English door to American door. The flight time is somewhat irrelevant to the transit time as a whole as delays, queues and dead bits of time are an unavoidable part of the process. For instance, the 45 minutes spent on the Toronto runway, waiting for the plane's wings to be de-iced while we choked inside in the suffocatingly hot air, seemed interminable. Skin cells die on double-time in that oxygen-deprived shuttle. But on the other hand, what is 24 hours when it can catapult you suddenly from winter to spring? Or summer, for that matter. (Most of the Canadian planes seemed to be heading south to Mexico.)

If jet lag is the disease, then water is the only cure I've found. You have to drink it, scrub up with it, and perform the kind of ceremonial cleansings made possible with a washing machine. I don't know why, but I can never successfully transition until every stitch of clothing has been washed, dried, ironed and put away. I perform these chores and wait for my emotions (always a little slow on the uptake) to catch up.

My skin is still looking a bit gray, but at least I can feast my eyes on this green deliciousness. It is/will be good to be home.

Green: Tuesday in England

Sundazed

For several years now, a big black cloud seems to follow us wherever we go on holiday.

We've had April snow in Texas, a week of torrential rain in Italy at the tail-end of a summer of baking heat, and a soggy July in Ireland (although, granted, that particular weather pattern might not be atypical).

The last time we were in the south of France, it rained most of the week. Our swimming pool grew cold and went unused. We got soaked in a downpour in Grasse. We slipped on the steep
cobblestones in the ancient town of Eze. We huddled in a tiny appartement, playing cards and reading, hour after dank, gloomy hour.

Therefore, you will understand why day after day of the clearest blue skies leaves me feeling rather stunned . . . and sundazed.

In the first few days, we couldn't get enough of the sun. We were either swimming, or playing ping pong or tennis, or walking, or just lying by the pool -- soaking it up. I felt like an animal, or a child, or an aristocrat from prewar Europe. My day was devoted to feeding and watering and exercising my body.

On one particularly memorable day, I walked the two winding miles into Vence and back for the morning croissant run, I swam and sunbathed all afternoon, and I wound up the day with an hour or two of tennis doubles. As the sun waned, I drank a strong gin and tonic and nibbled olives on the stone porch -- feeling rather Great Gatsbyish. (As I want to keep on the truthful side of whimsy and romance, I will admit that the doubles tennis game was a round robin with six children . . . and that the gin and tonic knocked me out. I doubt that F. Scott and Zelda were ever felled by a single G&T, but then it requires more stamina than you might think to "play hard.")

Have you ever noticed that when you first relax you just feel tired? We've been to bed by 10 pm some nights, drugged by the great draughts of fresh air we've breathed all day. The outside is inside here because the windows and doors are always flung open. At night, a cool breeze drifts up-hill from the nearby sea.

A fair bit of novel-reading has been mixed in with all of this mindless physical bliss, and since most of it has occurred poolside I have given some consideration to the question of what makes a good holiday read. I have decided that being able to match the subject of the book to the physical and emotional landscape is a bonus, but not strictly necessary. What is really required is a book that is so engrossing that you can tune out the shrieking of six children in the pool, not to mention an occasional blasting from a water pistol. Language must be simple, but elegant.

So far, I have read three books . . . and they represent the entirety of my scattershot approach to holiday reading. I brought one of the books from my to-read bookshelf: Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates. I found one book here, on the villa bookshelf: Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer. And my favorite of the three, The Road Home, by Rose Tremain, was a last-minute purchase from Heathrow.

I had heard good things about The Road Home, not least from my blogging friend Just a Plane Ride Away, and Tremain's writing is just the sort of reading terrain that I like best. It has substance, and style, but she lets those qualities serve the story -- and not the other way around. This is a really topical book, too, as it explores the experience of a Polish immigrant who has come to England to find new economic and emotional opportunities. Lev, the protagonist of the story, was totally real to me and I was positively gripped by the various learning curves thrown at him. I suppose that books always aim to reveal life from the perspective of another person, but rarely do they do it so thoroughly and believably. Some books are "hard to get into," but my attention was caught at the first page of this one and it really didn't flag until I, with some sad regret, finished the last page.

A couple of days ago, I received a charming email from one of the regular visitors to Storyvilla. She is coming here for her wedding in September, (!), and she happened upon my little blog while she was googling. We had an interesting back-and-forth about the contents of the villa bookshelves -- from the preponderance of Graham Greene, which the owner favors, to the presence of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which my Irish correspondent left behind on her last visit. I have decided to leave behind The Road Home, and hopefully this Storyvilla visitor -- and others, too -- will enjoy the book as much as I have. Blogging often feels like a message in a bottle that you send out, with the hope that some likeminded person will read it. There is a particularly serendipitous pleasure when one's scribbled messages drift upon unexpected shores, and I like to think of holiday books as leaving a similar trace.

The light is starting to fade from the upstairs study window, which means that it is gin and tonic time. This is the light that has inspired artists, from Renoir to Matisse to Picasso to Chagall, but so far I've mostly just kept my sunglasses on. Perhaps next week, as we tire of the swimming pool, we will begin to visit the many museums in the area. In the meantime, most mental pursuits have been suspended . . . and I remain just a bit sundazed.

Book quandary

It is almost 1 am, and I really should be going to bed soon . . . but I am fretting about what books to take with me to France tomorrow.

After a day of manic pre-holiday preparations -- washing and drying and sorting, packing way too many clothes (but a modest number of shoes), cleaning out the refrigerator, organizing the pet-care rota, making numerous phone calls and appointments, paying bills, mailing packages, spending three hours on the Internet trying to find a hotel room for tomorrow night, editing the carry-on luggage -- I still have not sorted out the crucial detail of my holiday reading.

For some reason, (could it be my curdled brain?) nothing is sounding quite right to me. I'm wanting something French in flavor, but a scan of the unread books on my shelf yields nothing but Suite Francaise -- and I'm not sure that I'm up for WWII stories at the moment. I should bring along Midnight's Children, but it doesn't seem like a good book for the pool. I'm looking for that balanced blend of substance and frivolity, and it just isn't jumping off the shelf at me. I suppose that I could rely on a random pick of Heathrow's offerings, but that's a risky strategy, too.

The right book at the right time always elevates a holiday for me -- and just like scent, or taste, or music, it can help reinforce the flimsy structure of my memory. When I read Eat, Pray, Love on the beach at Antigua (winter 2006), or The Big House by the sand dunes in Cape Cod (summer 2005), I experienced the perfect melding of inner and outer landscapes. Earlier this summer, in New England, I seemed to be stuck in the memoir genre . . . and this, too, was perfect for my nostalgic mood and a certain wallowing in Americana.

Should I just rely on the abandoned books of the previous residents of the house? Maybe those castoffs will be inspired . . . after all, the villa I am going to is named Storyvilla.

Re-entry

My house in England, a 200 year old converted barn, has a distinctive underlying smell all its own. Underneath all of the transitory fragrances and odors of the house – the scents of candles, cooking, or the cat, for instance – there is an indescribable, and yet readily identifiable, smell that never changes. When we returned to this house after five years of living in Texas, and despite the fact that two families had occupied the house in the meantime, I immediately detected that unique smell.

But just like one’s own skin, or the perfume one always wears, I lose the ability to discern that smell when I am constantly in the house. I have to go away for a time, and the house has to become slightly foreign to me again, before I can truly smell it.

When I returned home on Saturday, after nearly three weeks of being away, I was really struck by the strong, strange smell of my own house. It seemed to assault my fragile, exhausted senses, rendered oversensitive by that long and tedious process of getting from one distant place to another. (With the five hour time change, it takes exactly 24 hours of travel to get from the lake house in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire to my door.) Although my husband had made various, obvious efforts to tidy the house, it felt off-kilter to me. In some subtle way, it didn’t feel quite like “my” house. And yet, that dichotomy of being able to smell it for exactly what it is!

While we are on subjects olfactory, have you ever noticed that airplanes all have the same smell, too? Whether you are in first class or the cramped cattle car section, all of the various smells of humanity are boiled down to some airless essence: part human dirt, part chemical sanitizer, part lack of oxygen. I always have to bathe after flying because I can detect that stink of “plane” on me, and I feel it like an actual physical discomfort.

Perhaps it is a sort of ritualized cleansing too, like the post-plane purification, but I cannot apply myself to any task – even that of relaxation -- until I have washed and ironed every scrap of clothing that made the journey with me. When everything is unpacked and back in its rightful place, I start to ease back into my real life.

The very process of travel, not to mention the destabilizing effect of the time difference, is so unsettling. Having established a vacation routine, it takes me a few days to get comfortable again in my home routine. I’m so aware of the deep, dense quiet of this house – so different from the airy, open-plan companionable clatter of the lake house in New Hampshire. In the lake house, I could hear the downstairs shower start every morning before 7 am. The house would be flooded with sunlight. A pot of coffee, the first of the two that we would drink every morning, would be brewing by 8 am. Here, the light and the sound are muffled by carpet and dense walls and thick curtains, not to mention the low, cloudy English sky. It is early afternoon, but I might as well be alone in the house because my children are still sleeping – stunned by jetlag. Instead of coffee, I drink cup after cup of tea – which never tastes the same in the U.S., even if you bring English teabags.

I remember, just this time last week, looking around the lake house and taking deliberate stock: Thinking, this place so familiar to me now will soon be lost to faulty memory. Blue kitchen; pine floors; large wooden table, which has anchored meals, and conversations, and hours of puzzle play; the smell of pine trees, which can be seen through every window; the creak of the swinging door to the porch and sun room; the tobacco-brown leather chairs; the rubberized smack of the large American-style refrigerator door opening; the sound of crushed ice being poured into plastic cups. I felt so rooted in that place, but I will almost certainly never see it again.

My mother claims that when I was a child I told her that “the days move slowly, but time passes quickly.”

It must have been summer when this thought occurred to me. Remember how slowly summer days seemed to pass when you were a child? I always feel like summer vacation days, particularly when they are lazy and agenda-less, are almost the only time an adult can still feel the expansiveness of time. A week ago, I remember having that thought: How long a day can seem when all you have to worry about is what you are going to eat for lunch, and whether you would prefer to swim or read a book. It seemed like I was on vacation for such a long time, but the time has passed – and will start to recede quickly now, because it always does. And in a few more days, I will have almost forgotten what it even felt like.

Postcard from Saratoga Springs

I always think about food, but never more than when I'm on vacation.  

When I'm traveling, life is all about my next meal -- and sometimes the activity between just seems like the needs-must required to work up an appetite.   I have three more days in Saratoga Springs -- famous spa and horse racing town -- and this morning I realized that my dearest friend Laurita and I were planning the next few days of eating with all of the seriousness and precision of a military campaign!  Saratoga is such a great food town, and part of the problem is that I want to re-eat at all of the places we've already eaten at . . . not to mention the hot spots we haven't yet managed to visit!  There just aren't enough meals in a day.

Yesterday we managed to fit in most of Laurita's  sentimental favorites:  cider doughnuts at Sutton's, ice cream at Martha's, and ribs at PJ's.   (Laura is a harpist, and she has been visiting Saratoga for the last twenty years to "gig" at the Lake George Opera Festival.)  We also managed to visit The Sagamore -- a beautiful old hotel on Lake George that makes you feel like you are one of the privileged few from the gilded age.  We wanted to have lobster rolls on the deck, or tea on the terrace, or cocktails on the lawn . . . but we were too stuffed to take in anything but the breathtaking view of boats bobbing in the blue, blue water.

Everything in this Adirondack region feels slightly retro -- and even the tacky tourist bits are cute kitsch.  It is like the best of Americana, preserved in the aspic of fresh air and pristine piney woods.   

Last night I wanted to swoon with happiness.  We were sitting outside, and the air was balmy.  The moon was nearly full, and I swear it was the color of a tangerine.  We were eating yummy, messy ribs, corn on the cob, and fried green beans.  PJ was spinning old 50s tunes from the Everly Brothers and Elvis Presley.   (Apparently you can find him on 880 AM radio, but Laurita swears that you lose WBBQ as soon as you leave the parking lot.)  I felt as bubbly as Gidget -- minus the surfboard and Moondoggie.  I could have stayed there forever, or at least a lot longer, but the junebugs started divebombing us and the kiddiewinkles started complaining.  

I want to go again tonight, but we are supposed to be eating fried chicken at The Rock.  Like I said, too much great food . . . not enough time.

Gone to Texas

Bee Drunken is currently away from this blog, as she has (I will be back on April 16th, so don't be a stranger!)



And please, please join me for the Booker of all Bookers!