The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

This is a book I wished I had written. It is a wonderful allegory of modern life, the problems of aging, miscommunication, loss and life all done in beautiful language. 

Harold, a retiree in a sterile marriage, gets a letter from a former colleague who is dying of cancer. He answers but when he goes to post he decides to deliver in person by walking from the bottom of the UK to the top. Every time I wondered how she could keep the simple plot going, she brought in another detail.

Rachel Joyce, the author, weaves, the past, present, other peoples' lives, secrets in and out.

Change is constant

This is the front of the Reading Post office. I grew up in Reading, MA and a high school chum told me it was to be sold. Built in 1918, it is not a historical site, but could be . . .  any sale is to include preservation of the front paragraphs in the agreement. As a child I thought it a pretty building, a forever thing.

I have my own memories of the fountain burbling in the middle. Of being told to buy 103 cent stamps by my mother and given $3 (rates have changed) doing so then being too embarrassed to return them for for 100 three cent stamps with no change to keep. Eight year olds don't have a lot of courage for this sort of thing and my mother did it for me, letting me see how easy it was.

When I was engaged and my fiancé was at the Naval School of Music in Washington, DC we used to write each other every day. I had all colour and designed stationary with different colour inks. When I didn't get a letter in the morning mail around four in the afternoon I'd go to the post office. Bunny Clarkson (Bunny was male and I have no idea why he had that name) worked behind the counter and would check. More often than not he would appear with a small white envelope with my fiancé's neat printing. Of course, that meant no mail the next day, and the cycle continued.

No. 1 son here in Corsier has been told our tiny commune post will close in the fall. For all my complaints about our OCD postman, I'll miss him. I've learned to talk about running, the weather . . . anything to keep his mind off checking to make sure the writing on the envelope is legible.

In Corsier the post and the tea room are all that exists in the centre. 

Change, however, is constant. Wonder if we'll keep the tea room?

living statue video

Posted on my love's site http://lovinglifeineurope.blogspot.fr/

Milano

A day with clouds and sun, warm enough to be coat-free spent exploring museums in a castle in Milano. The courtyard was perfect for buying a sandwich from one of the vendors and watching the children try and catch the pigeons and the pigeons try and catch the crumbs.

Kites were given to children to play with  and they ran around the courtyard as they inflated a big fish balloon.

 My housemate loves to photograph reflections. I know she'd have done a better job with this out our hotel room.

To look at this, one would never, ever think it really was above the sinks in a woman's toilet at the castle.

What fun it was to look at musical instruments and how they were made, the medieval armour.

Because  this was a business trip which included a wonderful dinner (how can asparagus risotto be anything but wonderful?) with journalists, the touristy moments made Rick and I feel as if we were playing hockey, even though the events did not start until after our adventure.

Thank goodness he can spend hours investigating museums and has the historical background to put things into context.

The Tale of the Ogre (a not true story)

As Rick and I were walking in the woods, we decided the roots of the tree were really an ogre's face. Of course there was a bit of debate about open or closed eyes, tongues sticking out, Jay Leno chin, and fist or foot under the cheek. It is also possible to see more than one face. Rick is going to post his own version of this at his http://lovinglifeineurope.blogspot.fr/ eventually.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a handsome prince who lived in the land of Les Marecottes. It was a tiny land in the mountains. Although the prince was handsome, he knew it and he felt everyone should do whatever he wanted not because he was the prince but because he was so handsome. 

He married the beautiful Princess of Salvan, a land just down the mountain from Les Marecottes. 

Unlike the prince, she did not rely on her beauty but her good deeds, because she liked bringing pleasure to others. She was soon much beloved by the villagers of Les Marecottes for her all that she did: playing with their children, bringing the soup if they were sick, helping them with chores.

The handsome prince became very angry because he felt, and rightfully so, that his subjects loved his princess more than they loved him. Because even though she was beautiful, he was even more handsome than she was beautiful.

He issued a decree you will love me more than her, but no one obeyed.

Eventually he took it out on the princess and beat her badly. He told her never to help any of his subjects again.

A young woodsman in the village had become a good friend with the princess and she with him. They talked about ways to help the villagers who needed it. They found ways to make chores fun such as singing as they worked in the fields, or dancing down the street on a sunny day. 

He was very unhappy about the way she was treated by the prince.

His mother had magical powers and he went to her with his concerns.

"Never fear my son," she said. "If the prince hits his princess again I will turn him into the ogre he really is, but a special one. He will be the roots of a tree that must nourish that tree in contrast to how he didn't nourish his subjects."

That night when the princess came back carrying an empty pail which she had used to carry soup to feed an old woman who could no longer get out of bed, he was so angry that she hadn't obeyed him, that he raised his hand to hit her.

The curse took effect and he disappeared. 

People, when they were walking in the woods, noticed the face of the ogre in the tree roots, but they never associated him with the prince. And although they missed the prince, they were glad he was gone.

As for the ogre he hated how he looked and hated how his presence made the tree grow tall and strong while he was trapped at the bottom.

As for the princess she and the woodsman continued their kind deeds. 

(I bet you thought I'd make them a couple and they'd live happily ever after--they did live happily ever after but not as a couple but as great friends)

          

It doesn't have to be boring

As a bride in Stuttgart Germany, we put the trash out in silver-coloured metal cans exactly like our neighbours creating a line of identical trash cans identified only with a tiny, tiny nameplate.

Booooring!

I suggested to my now ex-husband, that we paint tiny red roses on them to make them pretty.

He said no.

That's not the reason he's my ex.

Computers used to be boring-looking too until Apple came out in colours. I bought a mini computer because the blue colour would be perfect with both my room in Geneva ANd my nest in Argelès. There was a dusty rose mini, but that wouldn't have worked colour-wise in Argelès. My current laptop has a pretty design etched into the cover.

Mailboxes usually rank high on the boredom scale. Over the years, on different walks, I've found a few that aren't. Yesterday in the mountains, I came across the these.

 

There is something heart cockle warming about the creativity of taking the mundane and giving it a twist to make it special.

Scrambled eggs

Had the bell on the electric gate rung two minutes later, I wouldn’t have heard it from the shower. 

Fortunately, I was still dressed as I ran downstairs to push the clicker to let in our egg delivery man. At first I couldn’t understand the horror on his face.

Then I saw as the gate swung open it was crushing the eggs he had just delivered and shoved under the bottom of the gate as it moved back toward the wall.

Only two eggs were shattered while the rest survived being pushed.

In French he said, "Wait," and went to his car and picked out six more eggs from the large box of eggs on his passenger seat and put them in a carton.

“Mais, j’ai besoins de que deux,” I said, showing him that only two eggs were smashed. I didn’t mention they were dripping on my hand.

“Non, non, six,” he said.

He asked how to prevent egg smashing in the future. I showed him where to ring the bell and reassured him that we were almost always home.

“Ah, bon,” he said. “I will do that.”

The race

 

It's about a twenty minute walk to Marro, our favourite restaurant in the next  village. When Rick and I learned the menu du jour was roast chicken, cooking seemed undesirable and cleaning up even less so. 

We set out on a rare spring day. Vineyards, mountains and yellow fields of rapeseed are on one side of the road. More yellow fields, the lake and mountains on the other. 

I do the walk often, but if I'm at one of the five bus stops between the house and the restaurant when a bus pulls up, I feel the universe is telling me to ride. We passed the Savonnière stop at 12:13. The bus was due at 12:17.


 "Do you want to wait?" I asked him.

"Will it be on time?"

"This is Switzerland," I answered.

Instead he challenged me. He would walk the rest of the way I would take the bus. There was no forfeit.


12:15 no bus.

12:16 no bus

12:17 no bus

I could see Rick in the distance, walking only slightly faster than we had walked together.

12:18 no bus. Rick was out of sight.

12:19 the bus came around the bend.

 

I hopped on for the next three stops. Rick was waiting for me. I've learned something new in our relationship. 

He can smirk, but at least he does it in a loving fashion.

Telephone memory lane

My housemate brought back an old fashioned telephone from the states after the owner passed on. It brought back memories of other phones. To use it, there is a dial on the bottom.

I still remember my childhood phone number (about the only one I do.) 944-0188. Back then there were private and party lines. We had a private one, but we gave an operator the number of the person we were calling. Being an operator was considered lifetime job security in the 50s. So much for job lifetime security.

The day I went for my driver's license, the first phone call I made, the operator, who was also in my driver ed class, asked "Did you get it?" 

Somehow mobile phones just don't have that connectivity--but they do have more privacy. Now it maybe the government listening in, not an operator.

A former housemate gave me a Snoopy phone to keep me from taking myself too seriously. It worked. Snoopy may be long gone from my telephoning moments, but I still don't take myself all that seriously.
 
 And then there were the princess phone both dial and push button. Push buttons were pretty snazzy not to mention that they came in different colours to match the decor of the room. This was long before you had portable phones much less mobiles. Now sometimes it is necessary to use the mobile to find the portable receiver and vice versa.

Then there were the old French phones that I used when I first moved to Europe. I'm not talking the elegant porcelain ones of the movies but the box kind that had an extra ear piece so that two people could listen at the same time. That was also the period of the Minitel, which was an ancestor of the web...sorta like a pre-Neanderthal is the ancestor of humans.

Thus this morning when I had to call up to the chalet where I'll be going tomorrow, I used the old rotary dial only to remember how long it took and the click-click-click the dial made as it went back to zero. All this for a woman that really doesn't like to talk on the telephone.

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