“We’ll call it an extended visit,” I said. “I’ll pack sensible shoes.”
We sublet my apartment to a visiting professor who left me a note about my excellent taste in novels.
I left the philodendron’s moods with my neighbor.
Pierre flew ahead to make a place for us in a place that had always been his.
France, the second time, felt less like a dream and more like a calendar.
Marcel met us at the small regional airport with a bow and a joke I was proud to understand without translation.
The drive wore late-September light like silk. The vines had shifted from green to a tired gold, heavy clusters of grapes bending them down.
We walked the vineyard before our coats were off. The rows ran straight until the land told them a better way to go.
Pierre showed Richard the winery, steel and stone, hoses and yeast and patience.
He talked about barrels like elders, about how a cool year changes how a grape wears its sugar, about the stubbornness of certain slopes.
Richard listened like a man who had found another language he’d always spoken without knowing.
“So you don’t try to force the grapes to be what you want,” he said slowly. “You figure out what they already are and build the process around that.”
“Exactement,” Pierre said. “Like people, non?”
Life at the Chateau
We learned the schedule of a place that had been home without us for generations.
Sunrise combers of vines, the unproud hup of the tractor, the way night smells sweet and damp in September even when the day runs hot.
We learned the village. Madame Arnaud who insisted I take an extra apricot “pour la chance,” the priest who was also the volunteer EMT and could set a wrist in a storm.
The café owner who called Richard “le fils” before he knew where to put his hands.
Evenings, we ate in a small dining room because large rooms are for strangers.
Pierre pulled bottles with dust older than some countries and told us harvest stories that had set his spine.
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