Delivering by Jim Daniels

We feel a bond with the dying flowers because we have the sense that they are dying for us.
Anselm Kiefer

A deliveryman was frantically calling Kristin on Mother’s Day, trying to find our house in rural France so he could deliver her flowers. Our children in Washington and New York had chipped in to send them through Teleflora, an international delivery service that uses local florists around the world. For us, this meant they were coming from Mimosa and Lavender, the flower shop in St. Paulet de Caisson, a small village slightly bigger than our tiny village, Laval Saint-Roman. Laval has no commerce at all except for a winery, La Catherinette—and wineries don’t really count in southern France, since they’re everywhere.

I knew the flowers were coming but wasn’t naïve enough to imagine the delivery would go smoothly. Satellite signals disappear in the black hole of our village surrounded by rolling hills—a dead zone for GPS, cellphones, package deliveries, repairmen, and lost Belgians who got off the autoroute prematurely in their desperation to find the south of France. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the water meter reader always finds us and our half-buried meter. A hand-written piece of paper with our bill ends up in our mailbox, often with a little personal note like, “You might have a leak.”

What were we doing on Mother’s Day? First of all, May 8 was not Mother’s Day in France—here, it typically takes place on the last Sunday in May or the first Sunday of June. But May 8 is V-E Day in France, commemorating the Allies victory over Germany in World War II.

On May 8, our U.S. Mother’s Day, we were going to a vide grenier in the nearby village of St. Martin d’Ardeche, on the other side of a very narrow, one-lane bridge built in 1910, across the Ardeche River from the village of Aigueze. Each side of the bridge has a stoplight. You take turns—a distinctly French concept that we could benefit from in the U.S., the land of road rage.

We left our car by the side of the road in Aigueze and walked across the bridge.

***

Vide grenier translates as attic-emptier, and most villages have them in spring, a tradition much of the world seems to relate to: Spring Cleaning! For us, the vide grenier was an excuse to walk around and hold hands on a beautiful spring day. Kristin, who has adapted well to all things French, walks much slower than me. I try to stay behind her so we don’t get separated. When our kids are with us, it works out—our daughter Rosalie walks at my pace, and our son Ramsey walks at Kristin’s. They are grown and not walking with us much anymore. They are sending flowers.

The city for our postal address is listed as Laval, but we live on the border with St. Christol de Rodières. We live in Laval but get our water from St. Christol. To get to our house, you turn off the main road before you get to Laval. Often, frustrated delivery drivers will call from the lonely relic of a phone booth in front of La Catherinette to shout angrily at us, “I’m in Laval St. Roman; where are you?” Then the fun begins.

If you look up Laval Saint Roman on Wikipedia, you will find this, which confirms what I’ve just explained: “Ways of communication and transport: This section is empty, insufficiently detailed, or incomplete.”

I like the traffic cone—it’s very French. They recognize something is amiss and indicate that knowledge with a red cone, satisfied that their work is done. My favorite French road sign is the exclamation point in a triangle, to be interpreted as you like. Just make sure it’s something exciting!

A village of 213 inhabitants, Laval is actually slightly larger than St. Christol, with 162 inhabitants (which, according to Wikipedia, is because it experienced a sharp increase in population since 1975 (italics mine)). Its inhabitants are called Saint-Christolois or Saint-Christoloises.

Inhabitants of Laval are called Lavaloise. Our villages are so small that we could easily know everyone’s names, but we get these little identifiers, like team nicknames—just like Parisiens! The only things that small that get a name in the United States are little league sports teams.

Aiguèze is one of the “Most Beautiful Villages in France”©. Given the official designation and signage, Aiguèze (the French love bureaucracy and creating requirements for official designations—what can be legally called champagne, for example?) is where tourists descend, zipping right past our chemin, not stopping in Laval or San Christol. Chemin: Typically, a one-lane path on which drivers going in opposite directions have to work it out—somebody pulls over where they can and lets the other car pass. Sometimes, a brawl nearly breaks out over who can be most polite.

In addition to being a junk/garage/rummage/antique sale, a vide grenier often features food and beverage vendors and some live music. Think mussels and wine, not fried Oreos and kegs of beer. The vide grenier was a weekend activity for locals before tourists started arriving in June.

We try to attend any festival or fair within a short drive from our village. We have been to chestnut festivals, jousting festivals, olive festivals, truffle festivals, St. Valentine’s festivals.

Our kids, ages two and three, seemed to enjoy them all when we first came to this area back in 1997, on sabbatical from my teaching job. There isn’t a holiday out there where you can’t get your face painted, but just try and get a sign with your street name on it.

Laval actually has five innovative bumpless “speed bumps,” ralentisseurs, despite the fact that there’s nothing to slow down for except the one beautiful family-run winery that dominates the main and only drag, a zero red-light town. While I love the Jouve family that runs La Catherinette, we are literally surrounded by other grape fields and wineries. The smell of squished grapes infuses the air in the fall. It seems unfair to call them raisins. It’s like calling plums prunes, lugging along all the constipation connotations.

The French enthusiasm for speed bumps is an indication that their love of the roundabout (there are an estimated 320,000,000 roundabouts in France, about 60 times more than the country with the second most (Germany)) may at last be flagging. The enthusiasm for speed bumps has clearly run amok. An investigation carried out by one of the journalists of the French magazine Auto Plus revealed that about one-third of the speed bumps they analyzed around the country were, in one way or another, illegal.It’s like a speed-bump gold rush.

***

In May, the wildflowers in southern France suddenly begin emerging, in wild, spontaneous eruptions, popping poppies to brighten the landscape. To be honest, the idea of having cut flowers delivered seems almost absurd—the tainted luxury of them, their suffocating smell, their almost plastic sturdiness. But what was I going to tell the kids, don’t send your mother flowers?

If you do happen to get driving instructions on your device, there’s the fact that we live on the Chemin de la Rauquette, not the Chemin de la Rouquette, which is a real chemin. Chemin de la Rouquette runs through the hameau, or hamlet, of Rouquette, which has enough signage to send anyone looking for us with a paper map off into Perdu(lost)ville.

I told Rosalie to write “drive through gate and leave on table on terrace” in the “special instructions” box when she ordered the flowers. I didn’t want to sit around on our terrace listening for car tires on the gravel driveway.

The delivery man had Kristin’s phone number since she is the better French speaker. I had to take remedial speech classes for nine years in school, so even English was a challenge for me. Her joke for our French friends is that she speaks for me in French just like she speaks for me in English. I, the introvert. She, the extrovert.

***

At the vide grenier, we wandered the crowded, narrow streets, looking at junk that smelled like a musty attic. Kristin’s obnoxious ringtone went off. It plays a flurry of bugled hunting notes and attracts attention everywhere, even in a vide grenier. They hunt wild boar here, and I swear I saw some hunter-types go on high alert when they heard that ringtone. Afterward, I found her finishing her conversation on a cement wall overlooking the Ardeche River.

She told me the kids were sending her flowers—which I knew—but that the delivery man couldn’t find the mailbox, the driveway, the gate, the house, or the table. She told him all our go-to direction tricks and hacks. He was going to try again.

After another call from the florist, her anxiety began spiking at the inability to get the flowers that were circling us somewhere nearby. The look on her face reminded me of the time she lost the kids in a supermarket when they were young. She missed the kids.

“Why didn’t we stay home?” she asked.

“Around us, picnic benches were filling up with happy families eating and drinking and half-listening to P’tit Jon—little Jon—play the accordion and sing. He had a stoned smile, and his awful pronunciation of English lyrics did my heart good.

While this mostly Catholic nation continues to fall by the wayside on its spiritual path to the ancient church doors—except for first communions, weddings, and burials—Sunday is still a holy day of not working. If you need gas or groceries on a Sunday, shame on you. Go sit in a musty, ill-lit church and repent. What was our guy doing delivering on a Sunday? It will remain a sacred mystery.

Kristin motioned urgently to me. The delivery man had called again, depressed and desperate—though he lived in the area, he had never heard of this magical place, Chemin de la Rauquette. Finally, the two of them came up with a last-ditch “It’s crazy, but it just might work” plan. He knew where the bridge to St. Martin was, and if we could get back across the bridge to Aiguèze, he could meet us somewhere among the mess of cars bridge-side.

“How will we find him?” I asked.

“He’ll be carrying flowers,” she yelled.

For once, she moved faster than me as we wove our way through the dense crowd. Our kids were 27 and 29, so we’d been coming here for 25 years. Kristin spoke fluent French, and our kids learned to see the bigger world through her eyes. Seasoned travelers wish they could spend more time with us here since we did that crazy thing and bought a house. Crazy. Very crazy. As a wise woman, who spoke from personal experience, once said to us, “Have you considered a long let instead of buying a place?”

***

The Mother’s Day flowers were more than flowers—I admit, I was slow to let that sink in, surrounded by that natural sprawl of wildflowers, fruit trees budding, and the mad greenery bursting after winter doldrums. I know they’re always supposed to be more than flowers, but these flowers were quickly becoming everything to Kristin.

Because of the vide grenier and because Aiguèze is a walking village that bans traffic, and because the French will park almost anywhere, the side of the road near the bridge was clogged with haphazardly parked cars and throngs of people—at least 209—traveling in clustered waves into and out of the village. We were worried we’d never find him, that he’d given up.

Then, the seas parted: Kristin saw the florist. The florist saw her, and her look said Those are mine! They ran toward each other like slow-motion movie lovers reuniting after the war, any war. People gave them room.

The florist, shy, abashed, and out of breath, handed over the huge, bright bouquet, flowers thick and sturdy—the kids hadn’t skimped. A huge smile, equally bright, on his face. I was going to say a smile of relief, but it seemed more than that—a smile of joy. Voilà—a French word that’s become an English word (though we often misspell it)—means “to express satisfaction or approval, or to suggest an appearance as if by magic.” Mission accomplished, yes, but a magic mission of love! Was he blushing? The three of us stood on the edge of the road amid the surrounding chaos. I almost said, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” but I knew I’d bungle it in French. After an awkward moment of glowing silence, it was all over.

***

The name of our chemin exists only in the mind of our local mailwoman, Genevieve, who I once danced with at the village fête, the Fête du Rose (sponsored by our favorite winery, La Catherinette!) after we’d both had a few glasses. Genevieve once came to the States to see her friend Mickey Mouse and eat the Grand Slam breakfast at her friend Denny’s.

As the only Americans in the vicinity, we are officially named “The Americans” until another one gets lost and ends up finding refuge here. The trip from the U.S. can take three days, particularly—as happened to us once—if you end up spending the first night further away from France than you started (in a hotel near O’Hare in Chicago, after starting out on a Pittsburgh to Dallas flight) involving trains, planes, and automobiles, and a shuttle bus or two, and a friend on each end dropping us off or picking us up.

Genevieve knows where 136 Chemin de la Rauquette is, and that’s all that matters to us. If any of our meager mail does trickle down to her, she will gladly and promptly brave the wasps in the mailbox and deliver it.

***

If you are waiting for the airlines to deliver your lost luggage after switching airlines after canceled flights and ending up in Chicago (yes, that trip), then you should make yourself comfortable in your dirty clothes. My French neighbors still talk about my homemade cardboard sign taped to our mailbox on the road: VALISE ICI DANIELS 136 CHEMIN DE LA RAUQUETTE!

***

Kristin had her flowers! We sunk into an awkward embrace, the bouquet caught between us.

We wandered back into Aiguêze, side by side, Kristin clutching her flowers in one arm as I clutched her other hand. We walked through the village—in the direction of the cemetery, we realized—people bowing as if they knew our solemn mission: to put those flowers on the grave of a national hero on V-E Day. Here, every village, no matter how small, has its war memorials. Blood was shed in close proximity, and world wars still cast their long shadows of loss.

When we stopped at a café for coffee, the flowers nearly covering the small table, refugees from the vide grenier looked at us, then at the bouquet spread between us on the table and nodded sympathetically. Clueless, we nodded back.

***

The delivery man waved and quickly disappeared back into the crowd. We took turns smelling the flowers. Done for the day, maybe he was headed home for a family Sunday dinner, a huge tradition here. Families—we saw them everywhere. Before we left the café and headed back to the no-signal zone, Kristin was able to text our kids a picture of her with her bouquet.

We got back to our small house and arranged the flowers in a vase from Jeremie, the local potter. Jeremie has a tacky, innocent style, like a child with finger paints—colorful, crude, and anything but subtle, but that large dazzle of flowers still overwhelmed the vase in the late afternoon sun angling down onto the terrace. Wild poppies were sprinkled throughout our fallow field like red stars. It was V-E Day, after all, and they were doing their symbolic work. And we, too, bowed our heads for another long, silent moment.

Poppies are too delicate to last in a vase. It’s better to admire their bright, blurry spots from a distance. I don’t know the names of any of the other wildflowers around here in English or in French, but that’s okay—their beauty speaks for itself in its own language of possibility and surprise.

Life is full of extravagant gestures. “Ah, another beautiful day in France!” I am known to say as the sun sets and the moon climbs up above the horizon to take its place. I like to think both the sun and moon were admiring Kristin’s flowers from their various angles that evening.

Here, in this remote village, the stars always seem more intimate in their clarity, but that night, they seemed to approach us with an even deeper curiosity through the dark, brilliant sky.

We went inside, leaving the flowers on the terrace to witness our days until they wilted like all cut flowers do. Like we will do. Those flowers didn’t know the name of our chemin or rue, our hameau or ville, or the symbolic journey they had taken from the U.S. to France. Or that Kristin is a mother, that our children have sprouted into adults.

Like flowers, we are surrounded by what we cannot know or name. That day, we knew where we were and that somebody had found us. Voilà! How lucky is that?