French Kids Eat Everything

husband’s perspective, it would be rude not to bring the entire family, as well as unfair to Sophie and Claire to exclude them. “Plus,” he argued, “how do you expect them to be able to handle long dinners well if they don’t start now?”
I realized that he also had a point here. French kids have more stamina at the table than do most North American adults. I remembered our wedding: dozens of children had come, and they had all sat patiently throughout the entire meal. As we danced until the wee hours, they gradually disappeared without fuss. I later found that their parents had been discreetly bedding them down on a pile of coats and sweaters in a corner, where they slept blissfully while we danced right alongside them.
In contrast, many of my relatives began retreating before the night was over; they couldn’t quite believe that the eight-course meal started at 9:00 P.M. and still wasn’t finished by midnight. Some of them missed dessert, and quite a few missed the dancing. One of the few exceptions was my eighty-nine-year-old grandmother, who had a strict sense of duty and a secret love of glamour that belied her staunchly Calvinist upbringing. She sat proudly upright in her chair, nodding approvingly as Philippe and I moved onto the dance floor for the opening bridal waltz (one of the few “Americanisms” that I insisted on), and then surprised everyone by spryly accepting her own turn on the dance floor.
Thinking about the French kids at our wedding, I began to change my mind. It’s true, I thought. Sophie and Claire need to be able to keep up with the other children if they’re going to fit in to French society. Philippe had won the argument.
Although I didn’t want to admit it, part of me was looking forward to the reunion dinner simply because I was feeling lonely. I hadn’t made many new friends in the village yet. Most people kept their distance.
True, Philippe had met some old acquaintances. One night when we were out for drinks at the local brasserie, the burly bartender thrust out his hand in greeting. It turned out that he was Philippe’s “cousin” (although that term seemed to be used very loosely in Brittany to refer to any blood relation, no matter how distant). One mother in the schoolyard turned out to be the daughter of one of my mother-in-law’s childhood friends. Another turned out to be the nurse who had given my husband his vaccination shots as a teenager (“and not in the arm,” he grinningly told me). And there were some other faces I recognized, like the mayor’s deputy (charmingly named Madame L’Amoureux) who had signed our marriage certificate a few years back. But we never got beyond formal, guarded conversations with people, whether old acquaintances or not. The casual complicity between neighbors that we’d had back home just didn’t seem to be happening. French people, I was learning, were not open to divulging much to people with whom they didn’t share a long personal history.
Another reason I wasn’t meeting many people was the fact that the weather had changed. Strong winds whipped dark dense clouds across the bay, and stinging rain and fierce squalls were interspersed with the sunshine. At first, this was exhilarating; a welcome contrast to Vancouver, where low, gray clouds could stack themselves up against the mountains for months on end, and where the winter rains were like an endless, cold monsoon. But as the days got shorter, the sun disappeared. Autumn storms whistled through the house, sometimes so strongly that the walls shook and the wooden beams moaned. We stuffed small rolls of newspaper and rags in the cracks. The old stones grew cold and wet to the touch. Mold grew on the doors, the walls, even the windows. We wore wool hats at breakfast. The romance wore off fast. Our friend Andy had stuck to wandering in southern France for good reason, I realized. In the village, windows were shuttered, and there were fewer and fewer people outside.
It wasn’t just the weather, however. I had to admit that I didn’t have much in common with the villagers. This particular corner of Brittany is extremely traditional, rural, and Catholic. The French have the largest families in Europe, and the Bretons lead the pack. Most families had at least three children. The record-holder in our village was a woman who looked about my age and was the proud parent of fourteen children. Never raising her voice, and never smiling, she drove around town in a school bus with her alarmingly well-behaved offspring—the girls immaculately dressed, like their mother, in twin-set sweaters and sober skirts. Our Dennis the Menace children were not on their list of approved playmates.
“Maybe,” I said brightly to my husband, “they just don’t have time to socialize.”
Apart from Eric and Sandrine, the only other friendly acquaintances I had met were at the local farm where we had started buying most of our food. Sandrine, who was a close friend of the owners, had brought us there one day. The farm, a short walk from the village, had never been “modernized.” On a picturesque plot of land overlooking the river, they raised cows, pigs, chickens, geese, turkeys, and ducks, plus market garden vegetables. This enabled a steady flow of goods for sale throughout the year, as well as a relative degree of food self-sufficiency. Hubert and Joseph—two shy, sweet, bachelor brothers—seemed amused by the fact that their previously “backward” farm had now been labeled “organic.” But they were savvy too; the farm had become a distribution center for organic produce from across the region. And the food they provided was incredibly fresh, and surprisingly diverse: cheeses, vegetables and herbs, fruits, fresh bread, dairy products, dried sausage, and homemade jams were all apparently being grown, picked, caught, and made within a twenty-mile radius of our house.
Our visits to the farm soon became a weekly routine that made me feel slightly more at home.