First Impressions - 14 March, 2011
Monday, 14th March 2011
We venture out for our first exploration of Tourettes-sur-Loup:
A side street
The mayor's office
Entrance to City Hall
Curtain on window
Mimosa tree
And lunch by the fire at Chez Grandmere, a local bistro with fantastic couscous this and couscous that. We have them all, topped of with a chocolate and pear cake. Oh, all right, I had the nougat ice-cream too!
Josje, who owns the house, calls to see how we are doing. First impressions, she says, are most important, because after that you no longer really see. She’s right in a way, one can never see the same thing again for the first time and yet while one cannot repeat the experience one can caress the impression repeatedly so that it may yield new interpretations.
When I first came into this house my “first impression” was: “Too much stuff!” I was afraid I would find it claustrophobic to live here. Usually I remove “clutter” in a rental home. But this is not a rental home. It is a home. And when I open my eyes beyond my habitual judgement I see that everything in this home has been collected and placed with love and tenderness. This is a house filled with memories. Bought 31 years ago by Josje and her husband when their 3 children were small. It was originally a shepherd’s hut, the hut now forming the dining room around which the house has been built in a simple rustic style: humble beams, plaster walls, no straight lines. The entire house is filled with photographs, going back generations, each in its own idiosyncratic frame, probably collected from the many markets of Provence and Paris. Written over the desk in the little study : Je t’aime. . A photo of Josje’s late husband guards the entrance to the house. And in the living room a Mexican saint watches over us.
We name our new home.
“The House of Remembrance.”
And how appropriate that we arrived during the annual Violet Festival, violets symbolizing, as they do, remembrance.
We have been talking of the fragility of life. I say to Joel:
There is a certain kind of inevitability to be alive at this age…..
I came here to shake that feeling.
I will be nicely tested by that in the next twenty-four hours, starting with Joel pouring boiling water on his hand tonight, the skin immediately blistering and peeling, the immersion of hand in cold water, the calling of Ember (our New York studio manager and guardian angel) whose sister works in a burn unit, the many simultaneous calculations of how serious is this burn? Do we need to go to the hospital? Where is it ? And, oh God, I have to drive the rental monster for the first time? At night? In the rain? ON WINDING ROADS !@#*. I downgrade the seriousness of the burn. Dress it with ointment and gauze, give him anti-inflammatory meds and 2 Excedrin PM, call our NY doctor to find out if I can also pump in some codeine or will that kill him and then I will either HAVE to drive the car to the hospital or lie by the dead body until morning. Fortunately the med cocktail is approved and my poor husband goes to sleep for 9 hours. Me, not so much.
Some more of Maggie's new photographs
The friendly sink where the not so friendly burn happened
