Thursday I woke up and realized how happy I am here. Not that I haven’t been realizing this all along, but it was just one of those days when I realized how grateful I am, and then I remembered that – oh yeah, it’s Thanksgiving. That’s why I feel grateful, maybe. Even the French really don’t give a rip about Thanksgiving.
“What’s the point?” a French student asked me this weekend. “To eat as much as you possibly can and then get sick afterwards,” I replied. “Oh,” he said, looking extremely confused by this thought. Eating until you feel sick is not a very French thing to do.
Don’t worry, though: I did actually explain the real reason for Thanksgiving, one that doesn’t make Americans sound like fat pigs. “No, really it’s about family,” I said. “And being thankful.”
Anyways. Thursday I was thankful. I headed to my favorite café bookstore in Aix to spend the morning writing and avoiding my homework, since I have no class on Thursdays. I sipped small French café crème, wrote letters to friends I should have written to a long time ago, wrote some of my story, looked through books, and listened in on people’s conversations around me. For a while, I listened to another American (weird!) talking about trying to find a turkey to eat that night. I watched the bookstore cat on the chair next to me violently cough and sneeze, and the little boy whine to his father in French about wanting more chocolate. I thought about where, exactly, I am in the world – like, if I was to put my finger on a globe and find Aix, then examine how far this is from the Pacific Northwest. I am far away, and it’s rare that I actually have an opportunity to think about this, because I’m always going and going and going here.
Last night, Friday, I had four girlfriends over to my house to make a Thanksgiving dinner for my host parents. We successfully made dinner all by ourselves, despite the fact that we had no idea what we were doing.
“How do we eat this?” my host dad asked. “Should we start with the salad and then move through the courses?”
I laughed at his silliness. “Oh, no, no, no, my dear French host father. This is an American meal. That means that you heap all of the food onto the table and once and then proceed to shovel it all into your mouth at once, as quickly as possible. Flavor, style, art don’t matter. The only thing that matters is eating as much as you can, as quickly as you can, and then feeling horrible afterwards as you retire to the sofa to miserably watch football or A Christmas Story for the billionth time.”
“How strange,” my host mom said, “to be eating something so sugary for dinner…are you sure the sweet potatoes aren’t some sort of pudding for dessert?”
It was one of the most enjoyable Thanksgivings I’ve ever had.
November, up until about a week ago, had actually been a rather weary month for me. I still felt content to be in France, but homesickness hit me off and on in waves for the first time since I came here at the beginning of September. I felt a bit more tired than usual, a bit more antisocial at times, wanting to just curl up in a café and write all the time, a bit more worried about trying to control things. I’ve been worried about money off and on, since things are getting thin and I had a lot of traveling incidents this month where I had to unexpectedly shell out twenty or eighty euros to fix it. (Another eighty for another train ticket, even though I already bought one two days ago for the same train? Sure, why not! Just take it! Really – I have no use for money!) For the first time ever, I had a slightly twing-y aching feeling of wanting to go home. I was having trouble; I was slipping mentally/emotionally in and out of Aix to return to Seattle and Linfield.
But, I took a long train ride by myself to Geneva last weekend, to meet Marty Bode and explore the city, to get in one last weekend of traveling before my money really runs out and before I leave. I love taking trains by myself, because I love to space out while staring out the window. I love the long quiet stretch of time where I really have nothing else to do – no interruptions – so I can write. Something clicked back into place last weekend, some sort of gear that had become slightly off this past month, and I felt better. This week, I feel joy again to be living here. I’m looking forward to going back to the States, but also really don’t want to leave France. I actually had a dream last night that took place three weeks from now, and I was leaving, and I was feeling this horrible sense of panic.
When I stop to think about it – it really doesn’t make sense to leave; it’s not fair. I feel horribly, horribly sad. I feel even a little pissed sometimes, that after so much work at becoming French, I'm getting yanked out of it. Here, we have been living very intensely in France all semester, completely submerged in the French life for nearly four months, and we have turned away from American things partly because we were at first told to, and then because we wanted to – limited our internet, limited our contact with family and friends back home, rarely spoke English – and now, voila. Look what’s happened. I’m not American only anymore (well – I am and always will be first and foremost American, since I do not have a tiny bone structure and sound nasally and loud when I speak), but a little French as well, or, at least, a little something different. Look what’s happened – we have established a rhythm here, and we have changed. We have finally slid, not without a lot of struggling first, seamlessly into a place abroad. Now, I don’t want to go back because I don’t know how I will fit in back home anymore. Three weeks left!
