Traveling the Familiar: Why Certain Places Feel Like Home
Can a Home Away be Familiar?
In The Reader, a novel by Bernhard Schlink, the protagonist comments that he once believed he should be more adventurous in his travel, and so he explored countries and cities he might not have visited otherwise. Eventually, though, he recognized that he preferred to concentrate on the locales he already knew in order to make the familiar more familiar.
My husband, Tom, and I have had a house in a small village in Provence for twenty years. When we first decided to make the investment, acquaintances asked why we didn’t rent a house during summers instead of committing to ownership. Some couldn’t imagine why we would want to limit our travel by focusing on a single place rather than visiting many.
My answer makes me think of Schlink’s protagonist. I would rather know when Gariguettes—the first of Provence’s strawberry harvest—will be available in our village market than visit the Taj Mahal, despite its magnificence.
Tom and I have a claim on our French village and it has a claim on us.
Not only because we pay property taxes, but because we are members of the community. Neither of us is French, nor are we permanent residents. But we are not tourists, and that distinction matters. We have chosen to deepen our understanding of this particular place.
Belonging Beyond Tourism
Our village of Maussane-les-Alpilles is about twenty-three miles southeast of Avignon and sits at the southern base of Les Alpilles, a rugged low limestone mountain range. From our house we can walk into the forested foothills of Aleppo pine and Kermes oak where neighbors forage for wild mushrooms in the fall. Sometimes we take our car and drive to neighboring Les Baux de Provence to access the trail to la Caume, one of the highest points in Les Alpilles and the site of a television relay station visible for miles.
As we climb, the effects of the wind become more obvious. The pine and oak trees lean away from the Mistral, Provence’s powerful northern wind that blows down the Rhone Valley. Sometimes I wonder how the trees survive at such steep angles and with little soil.
When I first saw some of Van Gogh’s paintings of trembling olive trees, trees that seem to shimmer, I found them exaggerated, even wondered if they were the product of a troubled mind. But I’ve seen those olive trees shaken by the force of the Mistral. Legend has it that the people of the north sent the wind south out of resentment for the beautiful weather. The Mistral scrubs the skies clean and contributes to the astounding clarity of Provence’s light and its intensely blue skies.
From la Caume’s summit, I can see the vineyards and olive groves that surround Maussane, like pieces of a well-made quilt. Though there is some delicious wine to enjoy from the region, Maussane is best known for the quality of its olive oil. The village rests at the heart of one of France’s most productive olive oil regions. An award-winning mill is less than a five-minute walk from our house. La Noire, an oil made from mature black olives, is one of our favorites. It tastes of golden summer evenings.
A Taste of the Place
Our village has its weekly market on Thursdays in the large open space next to the village boule court. Vendors arrive with trucks and return to the same spots each week. We always stop to buy cheese from the same man. His display includes so many varieties that I could spend a morning learning about them.
He knows that Tom doesn’t like goat or blue cheese and that we will buy some kind of brebis, cheese made from sheep’s milk. We part promising to see each other in the next week.
Sometimes we buy eggs from the woman whose stall is at one end of the market and whose eggs are no better than what we can buy at the grocery store, but we like doing business with her. When strawberries and other berries start to be available, we find them on a large table around the corner from the egg vendor. If we have other errands in the village to complete before shopping in the market, the fruit seller will set strawberries aside for us.
At Christmas time, the man who sells pain d’épautre, spelt bread, and from whom we buy a dense bread studded with nuts, will offer us a choice of homemade fruit jams or cookies—orange and lemon sablés and croquants d’amande—as a gift. We will take the pastries.
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