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By Root 892 0

They called her “witch, soothsayer, false prophet, sacrilegist, idolator, apostate, scandalmonger, rebel, troublemaker,” but no matter what, Joan knew who she was. I envy her conviction and try to summon her strength. Even after having come through the trial without a single slip-up in her carefully worded testimony, after they ignored the lack of proof and convicted her of the ridiculous charges of witchcraft and heresy anyway, even then, as she was tied to a stake and burned alive, she stayed strong. Something about Joan triggers my fighting instinct. A pilot light re-ignites inside me. “Hold the crucifix up before my eyes so I may see it until I die,” Joan told them, even as the flames licked at her feet.

In the weeks that follow, I find myself noticing more and more the hidden beauty of this place, behind the imposing grim façade which is there to frighten off the fickle, it seems. This place is for those made of stronger stuff, for those who refuse to capitulate. Its rewards come out of hiding only for patient eyes. One day on my walk in the woods, a red fox leaps across my path, its tail a proud streaming flag behind it. And on the front steps as I come home one evening, I disturb a hedgehog descending. He curls in on himself, nose tucked in, playing dead. A hedgehog! I am beside myself with satisfaction at this development and set a dish of milk next to the little ball of prickles, but it is committed to the bluff, and remains motionless, fleeing the moment I turn my back. The woods here are brilliant golds and crimsons, and odd new mushroom clusters sprout from the mossy ground. And the people here are salt of the earth people, but I find a delightful streak of twisted humor behind their weathered “visages de terroir,” their “faces of the land.” The doctor in town, whom I see for a kidney infection, is decked out in full western gear—leather vest, bolo tie, and cowboy boots—so that I have to check the name plate on his office door to make sure I am in the right place. He writes me a prescription with a smile and saunters out of the office in his clacking boots as though he’s exiting through the swinging door of a saloon. The pharmacist has a Weimariner dog that sits beside him in the small village pharmacy. “C’est mon fils,” says the pharmacist. His son. He produces a felt fedora, which he places on the dog’s head, and the dog walks around the pharmacy patiently adorned. This is a place of contrasts, warm against cold. It melts my icy view of the road before me. These are people enjoying the only life they have and what is before them, and their lives are hard work. Yet they find simple pleasures. And I find my rhythm, and the baker learns that I am here, so he stops his truck before my little house at 11:30 every morning except Sunday and Monday and honks his horn. I come down and he opens the side of his truck to expose the glass cases of pastries and baskets of baguettes. He is a jolly plump fellow, just what you expect a baker to be, and he sing-songs “bonne journée” when he leaves. “Maybe tomorrow, a brioche!” I say as he drives off, and he honks again and waves. In Monthureaux, I visit the butcher and order a pork pie and a bottle of wine. He notices my sniffling, and I tell him I have a cold from the frigid damp that won’t let up. Ah! Mon dieu! Sick! Lucky for me, he knows what to do. He tells me I must drink much more hard liquor, that the French never get sick because the alcohol burns the germs right out of them. He laughs heartily as he packs up my pie in crisp paper and makes a motion of tipping back a phantom glass to his lips. I eat my pork pie, which must have a pound of butter in the flaky crust alone and a pound of cream in the filling, on the steps of the town square, and drink straight from the bottle, and it is good. This is a place one learns to love slowly, I discover. And maybe my life is not over yet.

I begin to write in the evenings, and I begin to like what I write. A tiny idea is beginning to form, a dream I had once and discarded because it wasn’t practical and I didn’t believe I was