Provence for All Seasons. Gordon JD Bitney

      Published by Ardath House, Canada

      Copyright © 2012 Gordon Bitney

      Published by Ardath House October 2012

      All rights reserved. No written or illustrated part of this book may be reproduced, except for brief quotations in articles or reviews, without written permission from the author.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

       Bitney, Gordon

       Provence for all Seasons [electronic resource] : a journey / Gordon Bitney

      Electronic monograph. Also issued in print format.

      ISBN 978-0-9917243-1-4 (ePub)

      1. Bitney, Gordon--Travel--France--Provence. 2. Provence (France)--Description and travel. 3. Provence (France)--Social life and customs. I. Title.

       DC611.P958B58 2012 914.4'9048412 C2012-907600-7

      Cover Designer: Alisha Whitley

       Cover and Interior Art: Paul Dwillies

       Maps: Tom Johnston

      Print book first published by Granville Island Publishing September 2012

      This book is dedicated to our friends in Provence.

      Acknowledgements

      Readers may all too easily assume that a book is the work of its author alone. This is never the case. It is always a joint effort, with each member bringing his or her special skills to the processes involved. For this book, I relied on Jo Blackmore and her team of David Stephens, Neall Calvert, Kyle Hawke and Alisha Whitley, as well as Christine Laurin, Gerald Shuttleworth and Tom Johnston. I also owe ever so much to Marie-Hélène for her sound advice and excellent suggestions.

      Note

      In order to preserve their privacy, I have changed the names of our friends and acquaintances in Provence.

      The French words in this book have been italicized. Words that are common to both French and English are not italicized.

      Chapter 1

      Provence redux

      THE SUDDEN ROAR OF THE ENGINES and then the acceleration that pushed us back in our seats announced the flight was underway. By the time the plane reached cruising altitude, I was thinking through the decisions that lay ahead. Oddly, we owned the villa, even though we hadn’t yet decided if we could make Provence our home for six months of each year, let alone permanently. Several years earlier, almost on a whim, we had bought the villa as a part of our retirement plans. The cultural shift was turning out to be larger than we had expected. After all, Provence has a recorded history going back thousands of years, encompassing empires that had risen and fallen, with a unique culture born out of its own struggles.

      For my wife, Marie-Hélène, adjusting to France had not been very challenging, for she speaks French fluently and makes friends easily. The neighbours next door to our villa warmed to her immediately and helped her when she was there alone renovating, while I was still winding down my law practice back in Vancouver. She invited friends from Vancouver to visit and they worked together stripping wallpaper and painting.

      By comparison, I felt as if I were a bit of an interloper in all this, struggling to understand the clipped and heavy French accents particular to Provence. So this year I had decided I would read about its history and travel its roads until I had made it my own.

      The long-planned transition (a major passage, really) in our lives had begun once again. We had spent the winter in Vancouver and were returning to Provence early in order to experience the full transition to another season. Having spent periods of time there, we began to realize how important it had become to us. This was no longer simply a place to vacation; it had become our home in France.

      • • •

      I must have dozed off, for I awoke to activity around me. People were beginning to stir, lifting the small blinds that covered the windows of the jet’s darkened cabin to let light in. There was a sense of peaceful awakening, of new life, of expectancy that spread across the rows of seats. The lights came on and once more flight attendants were striding the aisles, taking stock of the passengers. I could smell food being heated.

      When the plane began its descent, I bent forward to look at the animal case stowed under the seat. Tabitha mewed plaintively.

      “Did I hear a cat?” the woman seated in front of us, lifting her head, asked her companion.

      The steel, concrete and glass structure of Frankfurt Airport was not designed for humans, rather for some efficient robots not yet invented to inhabit its sterile halls. We waited patiently for the flight to Lyon and then approached the gate.

      “Vhat ist in dat case?” one of two German customs officers inquired when he saw the animal case I was carrying.

      “A cat,” I replied.

      “Do you haf documents for dis animal?” he asked, having switched to an autocratic manner.

      “Yes, I do,” I said, reaching into my bag to bring out a file nearly an inch thick.

      “It’s just a cat,” the other officer offered.

      I held the file out for the first officer to examine.

      “Das ist gut,” he said abruptly and waved us on, avoiding a morass of paperwork he didn’t want to tackle.

      The connecting flight was relatively short, the bright sun reflecting off the wing of the plane and into the cabin window. However, the dive through the cloud layer revealed a very different world; all colours were a muted grey and snow was blowing across the runway. After gathering our luggage, signing all the papers at the agency for the car lease and then hauling everything, including Tabitha, through the wind and snow into the agency’s van, we were driven to the compound where the car was stored. There, we loaded the luggage into the car and immediately set off on the autoroute for Nyons in a blizzard.

      This was not the Provence we had expected. I stayed in the slower right-hand lane as sudden gusts of wind buffeted the car; snow hit the windshield and stuck in blobs, blocking visibility; semi-trailers highballed on by, sending up waves of slush that blinded us for seconds between sweeps of the wiper blades. My wife had been silent for some time, and I could feel her anxiety growing. Meanwhile, Tabitha meowed forlornly in the back of the car.

      As we approached Valence, the traffic slowed considerably and then came to a complete stop. When it began moving again, it was a stop-start shuffle, and we managed to travel less than five kilometres in the next hour.

      Then gendarmes stood before us on the road, guiding traffic off the autoroute onto an exit ramp. A temporary sign had been erected that read:

      Attention » Déviation!

      “A detour!” I said. “The autoroute is closed.”

      “What do we do now?”

      “I don’t know. We don’t have a map.”

      “Well, why don’t we try to follow the roads that run alongside the autoroute until we reach Montélimar? That way we’ll know where we are and not get lost.”

      “Okay. The back roads will be slow, but we should be all right.”

      Although the weather was getting worse, we reached Crest, a village we had visited before. The street was empty as we drove through, every shop closed, the shutters locked in place and no lights visible. On the other side of the village we saw a familiar sign pointing to Bourdeaux, and we knew the next village after Bourdeaux was Dieulefit. The headlights of the car lit the falling snow—the rest was darkness.