Mamies

When I first bought my place in Argelès, I was fascinated by the mamies. They were the older women maybe in their sixties and up who formed almost a subculture. They had lived in the same neighborhood since they were in diapers.

On good days, their chairs would be dragged in front of their houses on the narrow street and they would talk and talk. Beans were snapped, grandchildren watched, sewing and knitting done. They were clothed in what my own New England Yankee grandmother wore when she didn't leave her home, house dresses, multi colored and shapeless. They often wear aprons too, again like my grandmother.

Some 30 year later, there are few of the mamies left. One uses a walker to go a few feet from her house. She has dialysis three times a week. Another still makes it about town, but is often found sitting on her front step knitting. A third, whom I thought died, sometimes makes it as far as the corner. I remember the day she told me the history of each of the houses: this one was fisherman, that one had an olive grove.

The village has lost some of its fabric with the deaths of these women. Their daughters are more modern, busy with jobs and children. They will never bring their chairs and chores to the street and share their daily events with each other.

I am old enough to be mamie. My life has been different from theirs. I try and talk with them, but their Catalan-laden French is difficult for me to understand. They never mined repeating when my eyes show total incomprehension. I am accepted as someone who they will share with as they did their departed friends, but in passing, not while sitting in chairs.

I am lucky to have been a little part of their lives to see into a bygone world.