25 Jan 25

Yesterday we drove to France to spend the weekend with our friends Laurent and Nanou, their kids Romane, Valentine and Mathis, a new baby boy named Hector. Driving across Europe I felt expansive. In two or three hours I could be anywhere. I imagined it was all mine, anything I wanted. Even the highway rest areas had a certain charm. Mom and I cheating the WC a euro and squeezing through the turnstiles laughing and pointing at the security camera, trying to pick the right bathroom. The smell of her car vaguely like cigarettes and leather, the kind of smell I associated with all of Europe. Musky carpets, mom’s 500-year-old house. Taking the A6 to Kaiserslautern and making fun of the navi’s pronunciation. Turning off to Paris and Metz. Mom’s car jerks inexplicably when not accelerating though Eberhard’s cheap mechanic “Snydy” has checked it out many times and insists it’s fine, no problems. 

It’s been almost 10 years since I’ve been here, the time we stopped for a couple of days on our way to Amsterdam, the start of our 90-day UK roadtrip. It’s comforting the place looks and feels the same, a big stone house with a spiral staircase and a crazy French kitchen stuffed with baguettes, bottles of vinegar and corked wine, jars of mustard and olives. The kitchen is a 4-way intersection in Manhattan at rush hour. Laurent is preparing maybe 12 flammkuchen pies—kind of an Alsatian pizza on a very thin tart. He’s got buckets of what looks like yogurt and is using a spatula to stir and spread the thick cream on the pie discs. One is the morning milk he explains, the other crème fraiche. On top of that go alternating versions of sliced onions with lardons, or slabs of a muenster that smells like something kind of indescribable but definitely not good.

Two of their kids are around the age of our kids and the third, 24, has a baby boy born last spring. All of us are in the kitchen with the hot oven going, the mandolin slicer, bread knives and a massive Australian shepherd named Rocket, who has just eaten a flammkuchen that flopped onto the floor when Nanou took it prematurely out of the oven and got reprimanded by Laurent in French for being in the kitchen I think.

Laurent works in some legal government type capacity I don’t understand, a clerk for a minister of the court for some European council thing in Luxembourg. The country is so wealthy transportation there is free he explains. Trains, trams, buses: all of it super efficient and free. I assume they speak French in Luxembourg but Laurent describes it as more old German, Flemish and French. It’s Luxembourgish. He says we can go there by train on Sunday.

We eat earlier than normal at their place, maybe 2130. And when I wake in the morning I know it will be some time before anyone else is up downstairs.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, travel