Willingly displaced to a tiny mountain village

February 23, 2007

Hands down, the first question people ask me when they learn that I've left west coast American city life to settle into a tiny mountain village in France is: "Aren't you bored?" The second is a spinoff of the first: "What do you do all day?" The unspoken sentiment behind both queries is that I can't possibly be happy on the heels of such an obviously destabilizing change. However, life here -- busy -- fits me well. I am very, very happy.

I live just above a river, surrounded by trees, many of them chestnut trees. In the fall when the mushroom hunting is no longer enticing us out of bed early in the morning, we can gather up chestnuts. Unlike the cèpes, they're everywhere; the hillsides are carpeted with them. Last year, while during my first visit to this village, my partner proposed that we make chestnut butter. We are both displaced PhD city dwellers who feel curiously at home here in the mountains. To us, this chestnut gig was a small adventure we definitely did not want to miss. I should probably mention that my partner is French and I am American, in case you were picturing two starry-eyed Americans romantically bumbling around the woods of southern France. What we were, and remain, are two people tired of the pressures of too-fast city life. That being said, back to the chestnuts.

I hadn't packed anything into my traveling bag that even remotely resembled appropriate chestnut gathering garb. Italian leather heels and black silk skirts don't quite allow for the bending that would be required. I ended up wearing a pair of worn men's shoes, many many sizes too large, an equally large sweater with a few holes in it, and, of course, a scarf. Jean-Paul is a charming soul and, as we wandered off up the mountainside, he smiled at me and told that me I was beautiful. It was a good moment.

We spent a couple of hours gathering our precious chestnuts, then headed back home, cold and wet from the rain storm that had caught us off guard. A good dose of pastis and we felt much better. The next day, we dumped all our bags of nuts onto the kitchen table. The first step to making chestnut butter, as it turns out, is long and arduous, a process that weeds out the less devoted among us. I suggested that it would be more practical to buy the butter in a market... We continued on: we peeled, peeled, and peeled until my thumbs ached. The next step required cooking, followed by another peeling session. Chestnuts, as you may know, have two layers of skin that must be removed before the real butter making part comes in.

We had decided to take a few days to complete the entire process and so set the partially prepped nuts in a box high up on top of the armoir in the hallway. When we took them down the following day, we noticed tiny white objects squirming around in the bottom of the box. Then we noticed that more of those same tiny white objects were squirming all over the floor all around the armoir. They were everywhere; some had even made it all the way into the living room. Apparently we had gathered up every worm-infested chestnut in the forest. At least it looked that way to us.

We couldn't decide what to do. We'd put a lot of work into this project. Not to be defeated by these little white creatures, we decided to carefully inspect every one of the hundreds of nuts, turning each over carefully. Not all were unusable, or so we thought. We continued the peeling process until finally we had to concede. Even the chestnuts without any holes -- and therefore, in theory, without worms -- were being eaten from the inside out. There was a worm in even the most seemingly perfect of them. Exasperated and not a little disappointed, we piled the nuts and their squiggling companions into plastic bags, hiked back up into the mountains and dumped them all out. Then we drove into town to buy some chestnut butter. I thought it tasted just fine.

Next entry: mushroom hunting. Now that's a good time! And I do not say this tongue in cheek -- if there were a healing clinic for those around here addicted to mushroom hunting, it would be full... and I'd be one of the patients.