First blog post

Last year we spent a year beyond anything we could have dreamed of, living in the south of France, in the western corner near the Spanish border, in a town spectacularly placed 15 minutes from the Mediterranean and overlooked by Canigou, a Catalan mountain on the edge of the Pyranees. We’d chosen France for reasons relating to Tris’s real estate (link to come) but also because our kids were learning french at school, and then crucially because the area was described as the sunniest corner of France, with 300 days of sunshine per year. That was enough for us to poke our fingers at the map and cry “Here!”  No freezing temperatures, the snow just for admiring on the mountain, decorative really, rather than for shoveling from underfoot. Sounded like a dream. The year before we left the snow fell on our Nova Scotian town like this:

The Fickle Finger of Fate

At the end of 2011 our lives hit a very low bottom. We were struggling on every front. We had leapt from our safe secure jobs as an Environmental Technician and Paramedic into real estate, moving 5 times in the process, by buying a 24 unit apartment in a small town in Nova Scotia. Being newbies in the field there was enormous pressure to learn and improve the building. We had 3 children in 4 years so clearly we were swamped there as well. Financially we were sweating. And renting out the basement to 2 students at a time. Our relationship lurched under the strain. And then, as the children hit ages 1, 3, and 5, it was all topped off when our 3 year old son padded down the stairs in his footed PJs on Christmas Eve morning with a badly swollen eyelid. His diagnosis that afternoon was high risk leukaemia.

Somehow we stumbled through that year, bouncing along the bottom of a dark time. Lost my father of a heart attack far too soon. We separated. And then, gradually the tide turned, and there came a long climb out. Over three years of chemotherapy and hospital treatments, which we will be forever grateful to medical science and the IWK hospital and Canadian health care for, that challenged us all in the grueling process, but gave our son his life back. An apartment building that was slowly transformed, and eventually, there was a lovely live-in manager to lift the daily burden. Two parents still trying together and three children chaotic and happy.

So as we finished leukaemia treatments (in the snowstorm pictured above in fact, wading to the hospital through the snow while backpacking children), we started finishing preparations for the family cure. We saw that homes were available in the off season (roughly the school year) in southwest France for close to our housing costs in Nova Scotia. Flights we saved aeroplan points for. We planned to let the real estate simmer under the care of the wonderful manager, now that the portfolio had grown under Tris’s passionate effort and could provide a baseline of income. And after a year of figuring out schooling, housing, and health care in France, agonizing over many details, finding a family to rent our home here furnished, and painting, repairing, purging, packing our house, we left, scrambling to finish up details up to the last minute (thanks for your help mom!).

And then there we were in France. This blog will tell what came next.

Our story has moved

You can now find posts and follow us to France at http://www.roamingfrance.com.  I hope you visit!

Animal Farm

Kat is a creature magnet.  At home in Canada she had a habit of rescuing/capturing everything that came her way, from snails and leaches (yes I know) to snakes.  We had a cat, Indy, who was a regular on her bed, sleeping together.  So we shouldn’t have been surprised in rural France, in a farmhouse set in peach fields, to find a steady stream of creatures making their appearance in our lives.

Lizards were standard on the warm rock walls of the mas (farmhouse) but were mostly left for viewing since they had a habit of losing their tails if you caught them, which didn’t seem fair.  Tris and the kids had a tail tasting session after a particularly large lizard escaped with his life but not his tail, and I seem to recall frying and salt and a general consensus of rubbery.

One early capture was one of the snakes that we frequently heard rustling in the undergrowth as we walked by.  Kat showed up with a plain, grayish snake a foot long, in raptures (“Isn’t he GORGEOUS”).  Indeed, how about: is he harmless?  Turns out he was, and in fact was not even a snake, but a legless lizard (who didn’t shed his tail), who hung out with Kat for a couple of days in a chilled out way before his release.

And then there was a large toad, collected after heavy rains when the dirt road up to the mas was hopping with toads, who lived in a box in Kate’s room for a couple days, escaping overnight from the box to my consternation.  She also rescued a bat one evening from the pool, and looked after a couple of baby mice.

But the biggest interruption to our family was the kitten.  We were by the pool when barking alerted us to the tree by the parking area, where a small grey kitten shivered and meowed in its branches.  We lifted her (a female as it turned out) down and it was quickly obvious she was starving.  There followed two months of cat care and more dollars spent than we’d spent on health care of Indy, our cat in Canada, in a decade.  She had diarrhea which took 2-3 months to resolve, and it fell to Kat and I to clean and scrub several times a day.  We had her spayed at 6 months to avoid any more starving creatures on our watch.  And she eventually turned in to a chubby, sociable furry soft gray ball who loved to have her tummy rubbed.

We planned to bring her back to Canada (after trying to shop her around unsuccessfully), pet passport and all, but the day Tris returned to pick her up from our friends who were caring for her, after our 6 week summer trip, on his way to the airport with our extra stuff, well as she was being passed over to him some hint of her fate (crate, flight, deported from her country of birth) must have washed over her subconscious (ok either that or she associated Tris with early day vet trips), and her claws flew out, her tail bushed, and howling and spitting she wrest herself from his grasp and headed at speed into the underbrush.  And so she remains Français, and I picture her with a little beret enjoying the sun.

Meanwhile Kat’s pet adventures continued.  I came out in to the yard one day to see her approaching down the lane with -squint – was that a big fat rabbit? in her arms.  Yes, fat, floppy eared, and blind, both eyes having been pecked out, we surmised by chickens on the nearby farm.  She and her siblings attempted to tend and feed him veggie treats until he fled, possibly back to his original chicken coup.

And then finally we became temporary surrogate parents to a fledgling goldfinch, rescued from the yard on his inaugural flight by our neighbours, fearing the 2 cats wouldn’t give him a chance.  They passed her over with the following note: “Dear Kat, Looks like the little bird made it through the night.  We thought you might like to look after the little fellow until he can fly.  Good luck, Charlie”.  Of course, she did like, but off she went to school, after trying to feed the bird a strange mixture (egg bits? and snail parts? i forget) and hastily assembling a home for her in a toy bird cage.

We named her Hope, and Hope quickly escaped her temporary home and hopped around our house that morning peeping and pooping.  After some research, I took her back to the location she showed up from, then hung around at a distance to fend off cats, while Hope hopped around peeping frantically.  After about 10 minutes, a pair of goldfinch arrived, and dive bombed her repeatedly, shoeing her off in to the undergrowth.  Where we Hope she safely managed her next phase of life.

I am not sure if we will have Smoky and/or Indy with us in France this year but I am pretty sure there will be other unexpected new visitors!

The Move To France

Some days getting there seems a little out of reach. An ocean between us and sitting at a cafe in Thuir, sipping a coffee under the mulberry trees, and an ocean of work.

The house, not rented.  Hard to rent; furnished, for ten months is a tricky one. There’s been very little response.  Last time it was a one year rental and we luckily set it up with a wonderful Belgian family.  I may have to switch it to one year, but then we need somewhere to live for the summer.

The business is in a growth phase, but that is in Tris’s hands.

No tickets to cross that ocean, I’ve been collecting points but probably mostly to get us home.

The house, unfinished; basement reno underway and now Tris wants to change the bedroom flooring, which could wait til our return, imo.

Purging and packing.

The cars, sell or what? The cat?  Let the schools know, on either end. Health care. Purge and pack the house.  Stain the deck. Still, the list is a lot less daunting than the first time.

So, we have 3.5 months left, but pretty far to go.

What we do have (all we have) is the plan to go, and a 200 year old renovated farmhouse with a pool, set in french rural fields, booked for only the first 4 months, with a balcony facing Canigou that I see daily in my minds’ eye.

The thing we did do was easy, get Kat’s ears pierced.  Somehow that was promised among the distress of her realization she’d be leaving all her friends for grade 6. Though she does have a small crowd of friends on the other side of the ocean, who speak a different language, and that’s pretty cool.

But my inspiration is simple, and as always the thing to do is just DO the first thing. And then the next. And the next.

Magical Morocco

Perhaps because school days in France are so long (8:45am to 4:45pm) they give 2 week long holidays every six weeks.  Only 144 school days per year, compared to 190 (avg) in Canada.  Leaving aside how effective their system is, that is a lot of holidays.  The parents often have 9 weeks of holidays.  It’s very jammy, if not without problems.

But for us, it meant adventure.   And the epitome of it all was the trip in February to Morocco.  The main goal was for Tris’s real estate program, but all of us had adventure in mind. It turned out to be the highlight of the year, one in the family lore, to tell each other about the time in the Sahara and the oasis, about tea getting poured from graceful samovars into tiny cups from great height, to treasure the geodes from the Atlas Mountains, and remember sleeping in tents in the desert right out of Lawrence of Arabia. For the kids, their favorite experience was the days in the dunes, sliding down the sand hills of Erg Chigaga near M’Hamid.

Henna hands for Kat in the main square in Marrakech, Jamaa el-Fnaa. Add in the souks and snake charmers and calls to prayer, with gorgeously tiled riads to stay in, and it was exotic, a bit dreamy, like a movie set.  The children were wide-eyed, sometimes alarmed, goggling over the piles of spices and jewelry.  Chester became a pro at finding his way and proudly leading us through the tiny alleys and many turnoffs back to our riad, a precursor of his chess skills. We had bare bones rooms in the heart of old Marrakesh, and would go a couple streets away for breakfast in a gracious riad where yogurt and pancakes were served on low tables while we sat at benches covered in colourful Berber cushions.

A tiny white rental car took us on the alarming drive across the Atlas Mountains, up through the snow and long dizzy turns to the Tizi ‘n Tichka pass where clever salesmen dyed incredible geodes into gorgeous, almost believable colours, selling them beside implausible fossils.  And then shards of quartz 1.5 feet long, like from the making of the world.  We stood on a mighty shoulder of the planet.

And thence on to the Vallee du Draa, an eye-popping oasis following the Draa River out of the High Atlas Mountains, productive date palm groves set amid rocky barren hills.  Not completely barren though: sediment of a burgess shale-type deposit preserves fossils of fauna from 400 million or more years before.   Kasbahs were the other main attraction from the road: old citadels of mud brick, imposing even as they crumbled.

Finally, the desert.  After hours of donkey-counting, and kasbah or people watching as we drove south, we arrived at M’hamid on the Saharan outskirts.  Our guide appeared as we halted uncertainly in town, with no further directions to go on, and soon we were driving out over hard playa to the first camp, which was located in the shelter of some mysteriously unmoving sand dunes.

The next couple days were sheer romance.  Tenting – but in huge permanent structures with beds, very comfortably, the sands at our doorstep.  Berber meals of tajines, couscous, and cut oranges with cinnamon, in the main tent, followed by  a real treat, Berber music, drums, pipes, tambourines, song.   Stopping in an oasis near a tiny stream, which popped out of the rock for a brief run, to have a beautiful meal of roast chicken and many sides, while the children tried sketching a nearby goat who was working his way through the compost scraps.  And then camel rides on the dunes, and climbing to the very top with wind whipping sand into the slits exposed in the scarves wrapped around our heads.

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

It was, essentially, perfect.  Though Chester remembers wistfully that a very special blanket to him was left under the covers of one of the tents, and he hopes it is bringing someone pleasure.

French Favorites: Why We Can’t Resist Returning

Our first year in France was a huge effort to accomplish.  I agonized over schooling, choosing a region, a house.  I researched for untold hours about all things visa, health care (particularly complicated for our son who had just finished leukemia treatments), car buying in France, bringing a cat, etc.  And from this end renting, repairing, painting the house and deck, packing, purging, selling the car….

Throw in how hard school was for the kids to adjust to, and yet we still feel it was worthwhile and are doing it over again???  YES!!!  And hurry: before the ducklings complete their transformation in to ducks and object too strenuously to leaving home.

A 200 year old stone farmhouse with a pool nestled into peach fields.  The mountain Canigou visible over your shoulder.   Bicycle into town, and buy your unwrapped baguette and some fresh kiwis to put in your basket for the ride home.  Jog along dusty paths with tiny med climate plants and flowers clinging to the garrigue (scrubland), up the foothills under Canigou’s nose, and breathe deep, looking out across the plain to the far Mediterranean sea.

Set off on a sparkling day on your new favorite hike on the planet; throw baguette, cheese, and water in your shoulder bag.  From your door through the peach fields, up the dirt road onto the foothills by a tiny rocky village dwarfed by its church.  Climb a promontory steeply up to the sky to a hermitage and ancient chapel boldly capping the rocky knob, and gaze in all directions, mountain, valley, far Med sea, village.  Continue on, descending into the valley among the olive trees, past the ancient lookout tower, up to Castelnou, one of the prettiest villages in France.  Sit on the rocky terrace of d’Ici et d’Ailleurs for a drink, or for lunch, a delicious 3 course affair, to finish with a tiny coffee, and then head homeward sated with the pleasure of it all.

Castelnou

 

Or any of a dozen other amazing days.  Visit a secluded Med beach, snorkeling or shell hunting.  Or eat oysters with wine at the busier beaches.  Head towards the nearby spa town of St Thomas to visit the hot bath outdoor pools, all year long.  Visit the walled town of VilleFranche de Conflent and hike hundreds of steps above to the fortification under the mountains.  Go slightly farther afield (only one hour!) to the famous Carcassonne.  Or maybe hike, like in the above picture, to the Tour de Goa watch tower, dramatic in the ring of mountains.  Climb Canigou itself, a mystical experience with comfy refuges to stay in.   Have a day in Ceret or Collioure, beloved by many artists, for art museums, forts, climbing, sea bathing, fabulous lunches….

Entryway to Carcassonne

I could add many more.  We couldn’t believe the choice, the sense of wonder and adventure and discovery, of being in a land without time.  Throughout this year back at home my days are peppered by memories popping into mind, from picking a bay leaf for the sauce from the tree in our garden, to the sharp scent of wild herbs on my fingers on Canigou, to feeling drenched with colour and tastes.

Worth it.  All worth it.

Sometimes the answer is ‘Because it is there’.  This time, the answer is: Because It Is Fabulous!

Village below Canigou

Coullioure

School in France for Canadian Kids

So what is going to school in France like, for Canadian kids, age 9, 7, and 5?  Ours had some French under their belts thanks to bilingual school at home, and french preschool for the youngest.  Well: it was hard.  Very very hard.  Big black gates to enter at 8:40 in the morning that shut behind you until 4:45 pm.  A long lunch, 1h45min, and two recesses, but a long academic day with much less gym, music, art, and library time.  The younger two had a lot of trouble understanding or communicating with their teachers for the first few months.  Luckily for our youngest, she was in Grand Maternelle, (kindergarten), with a kind teacher, and after a month of struggle had made friends and found she liked it.

Not so for the 7 year old.  The Nova Scotian curriculum no longer teaches cursive writing and his teacher was strict, yelled, and threw his work in the garbage.  He had trouble understanding, trouble communicating, and trouble talking to the other children.  He spent time standing on his own on the school yard while the other children, sympathetic and curious, eventually left him more and more on his own.  A change from his happy sporty game playing days in Nova Scotia.  This is the child who had missed a lot of school while being treated for leukemia.  He cried before having to enter the gates every morning for months.

Handwriting, Age 7   Before and after a school year in France

So, what recommendation for anyone considering such a daunting move?  And why inflict this on them??  We did not anticipate quite how hard it would be on him.  But there are ways to help.  The stronger their French is, the better. Make their TV shows all French content.  Practice cursive with them before going if they haven’t learned it in school.  Speak to their teacher early on to make very clear that your expectations are that your child will not be at grade level to start with, to let them work at their pace.  By the time we did this, though not until October, it helped enormously with Chester’s experience in the classroom.  And then we started having kids over for playtimes, soccer games, and swimming, which made a big difference in inclusion.

We reminded our kids regularly that they just had to do their best, and were not expected to know what to do all the time, this was expected.  That it would come.  That any of the kids there going to school in English in Canada would find it just as tricky.  And then after school times were pure break time.  Swimming, ice cream, watching lizards, trying boules, having fun.  Each Wednesday afternoon there was no school, and it was time for freedom.  We went to the Med, 20 minutes away, to swim and picnic.  And every 6 weeks they had a two week school holiday, so it became a hang on until the break, it’s not far off.

The oldest, Kat, found her way in the easiest.  She had a good ear for languages and had had more school time.  Her classmates were excited to have a Canadian girl in their class and fought to hold her hand and talk to her.  Her teacher was sympathetic and assigned her a seat mate to help her understand assignments.  She found the days long but headed off cheerfully in the morning.

They also had to get used to the school lunches.  Cafeteria lunches in France, wow.  We would chat with other parents at the gates and they would shake their heads and sigh over the state of the lunches, while we waited for the lunch report every day with awe.  Duck, lamb, veal, local beef.  Fresh baguettes, salads, imaginative sides.  Cheese courses, fresh local fruits for dessert, such as cherries and kiwis.  Our picky eater, Kat, transformed amid the cacophony of adventurous eaters that surrounded her, tried a lot of new foods, and still rejected a lot, but it had a lasting impact on her palate.

Overall?  I wish it hadn’t been so hard on Chester.   By the end, he was adjusted, had friends, went off to school more or less cheerfully.  And now, to our surprise, he was the first one to say he was ready to go back.  They all came back to school in Canada finding it enormously easy.  So I’ve been reminding myself that adversity and challenge are part of growing up, and going through the hardship has given them confidence, new friends, and new tastes, not just the stress.

Past French Life

We have been to France before.  We lived there for the year last year.  The children attended the local school in a small town, Thuir, in SW France.  (I had a diary, but no blog).  What inspired this?  Other than our background of travel through our twenties, our self-identity as free when walking along a dusty road in a new land?  Actually, it was mostly that.  But too it was the pulverizing damage to our psyches of the past decade, not to mention to our relationship. Our son, I’ll call him Chester, had just finished treatment for leukemia, we’d had 3 children, moved 5 times within Canada, started a real estate business, been separated, and been ground down by relentless stress.  Our relaxed selves from 10 years before were unrecognizable, souls fried and gone, not to state it too dramatically.  We were still together simply because separating was still too hard. We came out of the cauldron of those 10 years now owning real estate, with a manager looking after it, and had quit our ‘normal’ jobs.

So just like we jumped in to buying a 24 unit apartment building, and then 20 some units more, we jumped in to heading for a new country.  Each time, the jumping was preceded by: endless research and planning, due diligence, and then a shrug and signing on the dotted line.  Followed by lots of work.

Tris has an advantage, like a secret weapon.  He’s British – Canadian so this makes him twice as crazy.  He does things like jump off a wharf into the Atlantic ocean in the winter.  He also is allowed with his family (until Brexit!) to live in EU countries.  We jumped through lots of hoops, including me unnecessarily going to Montreal for a visa, assembled the paperwork, researched schooling, debated what to do with Indy the cat, figured out a house to rent in the off season in a small town in southern France.  Rented our house, which had to be painted, renovated, packed.  Actually, I did all of that while renting out rooms in our basement, while Tris did the real estate work.  Bought plane tickets.  Foolishly we decided Tris and 2 of the ducks, the older two, would go earlier to England where he has family, to buy a used car and pick the younger duck and me up in Barcelona after a nice road trip in the supposed new (beater) used car.  Never found a decent used beater. Bought plane tickets to southern France and picked us up in a rental, all in all a lot of extra stress and money.

The first time is hard.  The idea is, the second time is much easier, and that is what I will describe as we do it all, hopefully in an interesting way that will make it seem feasible to anyone else who is interested.  Maybe enough to inspire families to take the work 4 years take the 5th year off option, for example.

So that is how it came about, broadly, and I will hope to bring you in to the folds of the moment as we prepare and go on the next GREAT DUCKS ABROAD ADVENTURE.

Hope to update soon on what the Ducks think of it all, and what the first year was like.