Summer a la Provence
Experience gets under your skin. Memories bubble there. The smallest scent, sight, or sound can trigger one and it scratches its way to the surface. Some rise, burst and dissipate before they fully register in the mind; the hint of familiarity vaporizes in contact with the present. Others, oppressive and dense, suffocate us, like a like woolen blanked in a summer heat wave. But then there are those, sweet and mild, that you must tip-toe after like a beautiful butterfly. If you pounce upon them, they startle and flee. However, if you move softly, slow your breathing, then - like the butterfly - the memory will allow you to approach and savor it like a crisp apple plucked fresh from the tree, more splendid in its simplicity.
It is this butterfly and apple kind of memory that has played hide and seek with me these last few weeks. In fact, it frequently visits me in the late spring and early summer. While I have never visited Provence in full bloom, I crave its fragrance and flavors as if it were a cherished family recipe. Though my three months there were draped in autumn foliage and the signature lavender fields merely added another hue of brown to the landscape, I remember it in the vibrant hues of coffee table picture books and tourist postcards: thirsty greens, deep purples and earthy browns. My palate also longs for zucchinis, tomatoes, leeks, aubergines, onions and garlic simmered in the herbs of the hillsides, a loaf of fresh bread and a few sips of summer wine.
With no means to transport myself to France on a whim, as if indulgence could ever cure the longing, I seek out substitutions. I intermingle lavender into the potted flowers on my balcony. A collection of herbs grows in my kitchen. My Provence cookbook is flagged with a dozen sticky notes and the shopping list calls for produce in a rainbow of colors. The bottle of ranch salad dressing in the refrigerator goes unused as I make my own vinaigrette from memory. On occasion, ingredients are forgotten, but a few random sprinkles of this and that, and a little extra garlic can always remedy it. Sometimes, I'll even go so far as to rent Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources and spend a few hours in the countryside with a mad thief and murderer. I contemplate brushing up on my French by reading the other works of Marcel Pagnol, but never quite go that far.
After so much travel, I've found that there is no curing homesickness. Returning to the place one pines for, the traveler finds the landscape changed. The friends left behind have new chapters to their lives; and the traveler himself is stamped by his voyages having journaled new adventures without them. Few will follow him down his photographic rabbit holes, and fewer still will understand how the smell of thyme and spearmint growing wild on a sunny hillside one afternoon could have woven new tiny threads into his fabric that somehow alter him. We must savor the present wherever we may find ourselves, but know that it is the past that has seasoned us. These moments will soon enough infuse our brains with new snapshots to pull out in the future like souvenir postcards. No matter how many times we may visit a specific place or what herbs and flowers we may grow in the garden to attract it, we cannot capture the butterfly in our memory. We can, however, enjoy more moments by climbing out of the ruts of the road, taking in other vistas and letting them flavor us.
