Love, fear and a return to France: A family memoir by Berry Catherine

Author:Berry, Catherine [Berry, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-13T05:00:00+00:00

Tight turns and temptation

“The 3 Rs? What do they mean to you? Anyone?”

It seemed an obvious question to me, especially since I was sitting in a class for my master’s degree in education.

“Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic?” I volunteered when the silence got too much for me, but my Hermione-Granger-style smartness was crushed and dismissed with a wave of the professor’s hand.

“That is old-school thinking, Catherine.”

If the quiet before had been intense, it was exacerbated now by lack of movement, including inhalation.

“Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.”

The fourth R for Rabbit was ultimately pulled out of his proverbial hat accompanied by a smirk of satisfaction and a collective intake of student breath.

The big reveal left a lasting impression on me for the right and wrong reasons, and I have been a staunch advocate of op shops, second-hand clothes, repurposing, and licking my plate (figuratively speaking) ever since. In truth, my mother could have told him that she had told me so ages before, as ‘waste not want not’ was our family motto. Discovering vide-greniers in France was then, for me, a wonder. But they were more than opportunities to save the planet and a few pennies; they were excursions with stories.

Beaufort is the name of a hard, raw cow’s milk cheese with a distinctive concave shape. One wheel can weigh up to seventy kilograms and requires eleven or twelve litres of milk for each kilogram of the end product. It is also, unsurprisingly, the name of a village in the Beaufortain region known for said cheese. We had history with the Beaufort d’été cheese that stretched back to Molly’s first tasting of it on one of our street market forays, and yet I had not visited the village. The fact that its vide-grenier was being held on the day of our drive up the mountain was a bonus and no coincidence.

We did not take the most direct route there, which always feels like the sensible thing to do until we are on our way. As it turned out, our apparent tight traffic shaves on the road up paled into comparison with our choices later that afternoon. But it was scenic. Barns with a strong, deep-rooted presence, not reflective of their dilapidated exterior; grottos and chapels for travellers in need of a moment of quiet contemplation or prayer; and cows, lots of cows, doing what cows do in summer and grazing on the sweet grass and alpine plants, unselfconsciously returning our examination of them and their surrounds. Their delicate orangey-tan colour and gentle look were deceptive as these were resilient creatures bred to cope with the high, rugged terrain.

There was firewood, too, cut and stacked in enviously tidy piles in fields under corrugated metal sheets or making an outer shell to the homes at altitude, reminding me that I needed to order fuel for our home, and that I was putting off that task in favour of gallivanting up, down and around … and around.

The three-flower town was going to be pretty. That was

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