Posts
The new house felt like The Chronicles of Narnia,
with its walk-in closets and hiding spaces. I even pretended that by
pushing through the coats in the deep closet, I would be able to enter a
new land of magic. But my fingers touched the wall every time.
There
were three floors, plus a basement full of nooks and crannies. We had a
backyard, and then what we called the “way back.” Even the “way back”
had a “way back” because the fence was broken down, and we could run for
a distance in a wooded area before seeing the backs of neighboring
houses. There was the loft above the garage, with a ladder in the shed
to climb up. And there were the cubby holes cut out of the flimsy
plywood walls in the attic—the cut-out sections matching the wall
perfectly, and held in place by a couple of nails. There were closets
upon closets (oh, how one misses that living in France), and there were
even large drawers in the hallway where we used to keep our dirty
clothes to be washed, and sometimes stow away in when playing
hide-and-seek.
Since
the house was somewhat run-down, we renovated the rooms in a joint
family effort, thoroughly gutting and re-doing one room each summer. My
father and brother pounded the plaster until it fell off the lath board
onto the floor. Then we all scooped it up with snow shovels, put it in
boxes and carried it outside to be picked up by the garbage truck. My
father redid the wiring behind the walls, and worked alongside my
brother as they nailed up fresh sheetrock, applied joint compound, then
sanded and painted the room.
My
mother stood outside in the sun with the baseboard and window trim
balanced on two sawhorses. She burned the paint with a small electric
grill, and scraped it off the wood—the old, cracked paint now bubbling
and pliable. Then she sanded and painted everything so that the trim was
smooth and white. When everything was in place—the trim, the freshly
painted walls, the new outlets—the room became a blank canvas, ready to
tell the story of our family with all the things we put in it. In this
way, we conquered the house, one room at a time, and put our stamp on
it.
We
went to “the Farm” each week, which was forty-five minutes away. There
we borrowed land from a friend so we could grow vegetables and freeze
them for the winter. Jeff threw green beans at Mark to tease him while
we were picking and weeding until my father yelled, “Knock it off!” and
we all suppressed our giggles. When the four of us were released from
our duties, we ran through the tall grass, coming out of it with our
pants wet from the spit bugs.
“He’s
around the bend!” I yelled to Jeff as I dodged Mark’s grasping hands in
our game of chase around the house—little kids against the big kids.
“Stephanie’s around the corner!” my brother yelled back, laughing. These
were the names we made up for specific areas of our house so that we
could warn each other of where we might get caught.
Stephanie
and I played dolls and pretended our bed was a boat, a safe haven from
the waters surrounding it. Jeff and Mark experimented with the
tape-recorder, recording funny voices and loud burps and their own
laughter. The four of us played together, swinging around the six white
columns on the front porch, and building lean-tos in the back with the
extra planks of wood lying around. And in the winter, we all went
outside after school to the “way back,” which was set on a hill. There
we navigated our sleds around the trees, laughing gleefully as we zipped
over the snowy moguls before skidding into a halt against the fence at
the bottom.
We
stayed there until it was dark, sometimes lying quietly on our sleds,
looking upwards at the black branches set against the purple sky,
feeling the snowflakes settle softly on our faces. Eventually it started
to get too quiet, too cold and dark, and we deposited our sleds in the
shed next to the garage and traipsed towards the house, my mother’s face
framed by the light of the kitchen window as she prepared dinner.
At
the symphony, the tuning ‘A’ caught my attention every time as the
discordant sounds of all the instruments playing independently fell
obediently in tune with the principal violinist. We were at the concert
hall often, sometimes as much as once a week, and the space felt like a
second home. When Jeff won a local competition at the age of sixteen, to
appear as a guest pianist alongside my father’s symphony, I sat,
breathless in excitement and anxiety, as he played Rachmaninoff’s “Third
Piano Concerto.” He looked so small as he walked across the stage, but
he confidently flipped the back of his suit jacket before sitting on the
bench, after which he rattled the difficult piece off flawlessly.
I
always felt privileged as we wound our way down the box seats after the
symphony concert had concluded, taking the back stairwell with everyone
else, but turning to the private door that accessed the backstage.
There my father joked with the other brass players light-heartedly,
showing us a side of him we rarely saw at home. Everyone called each
other by their nicknames: Stevie, Brucie, Johnny, Dougie, Petey… Do you
think classical musicians are serious? They are not—at least not the
brass.
At
seventeen, Jennie Goutet has a dream that she will one day marry a
French man and sets off to Avignon in search of him. Though her dream
eludes her, she lives boldly—teaching in Asia, studying in Paris,
working and traveling for an advertising firm in New York.
When
God calls her, she answers reluctantly, and must first come to grips
with depression, crippling loss, and addiction before being restored.
Serendipity takes her by the hand as she marries her French husband,
works with him in a humanitarian effort in East Africa, before settling
down in France and building a family.
Told
with honesty and strength, A Lady in France is a brave, heart- stopping
story of love, grief, faith, depression, sunshine piercing the gray
clouds—and hope that stays in your heart long after it’s finished.
Buy Now @ Amazon
Genre – Memoir
Rating – PG-13
More details about the author
Website http://aladyinfrance.com
0 comments:
Dí lo que piensas...