Constance Leisure's Blog

We arrived in France over the weekend and drove down from Paris through Sancerre and into Burgundy taking back roads through farm country where they raise the famous white Charolais cattle in the region known as The Morvan.
It's end of summer bounty here in Provence, plateaus of figs, tomatoes, aubergines, and the different assortments of mushrooms are all piled high in all the street markets. The vineyards are full of harvesters in straw hats and huge double-sized tractors that help with the work.
On the way here, I finished The Double Life of Liliane about Lily Tuck's growing up years spent mostly in Europe. A great book for re-entry into France! Now I'm reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich which is antithetical to what's going on here with all the beautiful summer food and good times with friends who I haven't seen all summer after spending four months in New England.
Because they're humorous, maybe I'll dive back into Anthony Powell's 12 book series A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement that takes place mostly between the two world wars. I only have three to go and I'm sorry to be coming to the end.

One of my favorite places to go for a day trip in Provence is down to the region of the Camargue where the great salt marshes of France are located. It's the place where they raise black bulls (the special Minoan bulls who take part in the Ferias and bull fights in Nimes and Arles) and where you see cowboys on white horses herding them or galloping along the beaches. Fuchsia flamingos graze in the marshes and an abundance of coquillage, all manner of shellfish, can be found there. This is one of the most protected areas in France because of the fragility of an ecosystem where fresh water meets the waters of the Mediterranean. It's an area of rice growing--red, black, brown and white--and delicious crisp white wines. We drive down to Sainte Maries de la Mer, known for its gypsy festivals, to buy Gardiane de Taureau, the regional specialty of long-cooked beef stew. Fresh fish is sold at stands right on the beach, and we eat clams and mussels near the small bullring in front of a dramatic bronze statue of a bull breaking boldly through a barricade. And then there are the drives through the marshes, the great "etangs" whose watery edges extend to the horizon, and the bird sanctuary where storks and egrets abound.
If you love Provence, I recommend Two Towns In Provence by MFK Fisher, and American woman who lived in the south of France during the war, one of our great writers (she translated Brilliat Savarin who famously said "Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are"), she writes with sensitivity and sensuality about her life in France where she was on her own with two young daughters.

It's cherry picking time in Provence right now--the big red ones and the unctuously sweet yellow ones with a pink blush called Queen Anne. The vintners often plant fruit trees or rose bushes at the end of their grape vines. It's not done for an aesthetic purpose--it's so they can see if there's any sort of insect infestation in the grapes as the bugs will generally go to the rose or fruit first.
Behind my house up in the hills there's a tiny vineyard off a dirt road with a magnificent ancient cherry tree. No one cares for it and the boughs practically touch the ground, a good many of them dead. But every year it bears the most succulent blushing yellow cherries. When my son was little, we would always go up there to harvest a few; no one else seemed interested and no one ever shooed us away for being on their property. Over the years I've watched this ancient tree go from bad to worse, so a couple of winters ago I went up there with a saw and an ax and removed some of the dead wood. The poor tree was also covered with strangler ivy that puts its roots right into the bark, so the ax came in handy.
If the vintner noticed that his old cherry tree was looking a bit better, I hope he thought that maybe a helpful druid had gone up there to see after that orchard of one.
I'm not in France right now and am dreaming of those cherries, sunset colored, warm on the branch, sublimely delicious. I hope that a tired hiker will pass by, notice them, and will reach up and take a few, thrilled and grateful for the bounties of Provence.

Just finished Americanah by the Nigerian/American writer Chimamanda Adiche. She is a wry observer of African and other immigrants in foreign climes like Britain and the U.S. If you think Hispanics have it rough in the country of Trump, the "non-American blacks" as she calls them have it just as bad and risk getting their joie de vivre ground out of them when they come to live amidst Anglos in search of a better education or better work. But Adiche has a wonderful sense of humor and a very deep understanding of the cultural differences that separate us. Her view of American men reminded me of Edith Wharton because her descriptions of the male of the sex definitely don't make them look ideal. (Weak and self-absorbed might be the correct terms.) However, there is great joy, pathos, communication and love emanating from her women characters. Another smart and insightful Nigerian author I like is Teju Cole. Bravo to the brilliant young writers of Nigeria!

Sigfried Lenz’s novel The German Lesson, originally published in 1960, is spectacular. The story concerns an expressionist painter (a thinly disguised Emil Nolde), who is not allowed to paint during the war as the Nazi regime considers him to be a decadent artist. It is told from the point of view of the son of the somewhat mad (like the regime), local policeman who is charged with making sure nothing is put on paper or canvas by the artist and even goes so far as to confiscate blank papers and canvasses because the artist says he has been formulating paintings though he hasn’t yet put brush to canvas. The narrator-son is writing from a home for delinquents. The descriptions of the area, the far north of Germany, are wonderful (terrific translation) and reminiscent of Nolde’s paintings. He was an artist who, like Turner, was concerned with light. Light against darkness and oppression.