Nature in my country

For those of you who don't know, I also blog on CIEE's website. CIEE is my exchange program and I am a “blogger intern” which looks nice on college apps and stuff. I'm not going to link to it because the user-interface is terrible and I can't figure out how to make my posts look nice. But sometimes they give us homework, like “best experience so far” or, currently, “nature in your country.” I didn't like the last prompt so I didn't duplicate it here on my Wanderlust blog, but I liked this one better so I'm putting it here:

Rain, Mémé, and the Marais

 

Not such a bad topic for a blog post, in my opinion. Because not only is the nature a little different here, but it's a million times more important than it was at home.

The weather is similar-ish to NorCal weather. Ish. It's significantly colder and wetter, as I've been noticing recently. I even had to go shopping for warm clothes. Because we live next to the sea, it's a little cooler in summer thanks to the sea wind (compared to Sunnyvale, CA), and in winter it gets really cold but almost never snows, for the same reason. It can get down to -5º C (23º F) for a good week in the middle of winter, they tell me.

So far all I've been experiencing is the rainy season. In autumn it rains for about two months straight, before settling into a colder and drier winter. This is the biggest difference between lush, green Vendée and brown, desertish California. I love it. Here they hate the rain, because they grew up with it. But I love it because first of all, I come from a place where rain is pretty special, where everyone gets excited when it rains and posts statuses on facebook “OMG guysss look outside!!!” And secondly, I just plain like the rain. On the rare occasions when we get a full week of rain in Sunnyvale, I'm one of the few kids still posting happy statuses about the rain instead “OMG guysss when will it stop being all cold and wet?!?!”

The similar-ish weather means that the flora is pretty similar. I recognize almost all of the plants that grow here, with the exception of a few staple Vendéen foods like mogette beans:

The fauna, however, is quite different. The first week I was here I went for a run, trying to figure out the tangle of back-country roads behind my house. I saw what looked like a giant rat, or a beaver with a rat-tail, dive into a pond and swim away as I approached it. I had never seen anything like it. They are a common pest here, and their digging habits destroy buildings and farmland. I have since seen several more, but only in the form of roadkill. They are called Rogondin, and wikipedia informs me that it is coypu, river rat, or nupia in English, though I have never heard any of these terms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coypu

Other than that, the fauna is just different because there's so much more of it. I'm not used to seeing cows and goats and sheep and poultry just wandering all over. I guess it's kind of like that in the Central Valley, but certainly not in urban Silicon Valley. The only animals we have are squirrels, raccoons, and (usually domesticated) cats and dogs. There are also plenty of cats and dogs here, but in a more utilitarian fashion. My cat, Nuts, who likes to sleep exactly in the middle of my bed,

eats mice and bugs and other pesky things. Unlike my pampered Californian kitty, Shadow,

Nuts knows how to fend for himself. Similarly, dogs are usually kept outside, a custom I wholeheartedly agree with. (I hate dogs.)

Now that we've presented Vendéen nature a little bit, I'd like to talk about how it's important. Living in a department that is so rural, a very large portion of the population works in agriculture or ostréiculture. I don't know if there's a word for ostréiculture in English, but the etymology is clear: ostréi- → oyster, -culture → culturing (of), aka farming. Oyster farming. My host uncle is an ostréiculteur, my host brother works with him sometimes on the weekends, and my entire host family sometimes works selling oysters at the market. My first week in France, my host uncle, brother, and brother's best friend took me out oystering with them. (http://envikwedevoyager.blogspot.fr/2012/09/food.html) It's an incredibly important part of the economy here.

My host mom's normal job is as a gardener. She takes care of the flowers for our little village of Bois de Céné. She loves to work with her hands, and is proud of her work. She understands quite well that she already has much less education than her kids, and that her kids will never do the same kind of work that she does. This doesn't bother her at all – she just likes her work and feels very much a part of this land and of this community. She is a true maraîchère, born to the marais of Bouin (marais means marsh or swamp, but somehow all the English words have negative, ugly connotations and the French one doesn't, so I'm gonna keep using “marais”). Her parents were maraîchers, swamp farmers, and she grew up selling oysters and bringing the cows in and out to pasture. She knows everyone in Bouin and everyone in Bois de Céné. Like a true Vendéen, she has never moved more than 10 km away from her father's farm in the marais. The marais is a part of her and she is a part of it, and I can't imagine them ever being separated.

Now I have to describe Mémé a little bit. Mémé is a nickname for great-grandmother, just like how I say “Gramma” and not “Grandmother.” She is my host mom's mother's mother, and she is now a glorious 98 years old.

The first time I met Mémé was also during the first week I was here. We try to go visit her pretty often so she doesn't feel lonely and doesn't forget who her family is. We walked into the “maison de vie” – old folks' home – and there she was, not in her room, but perched on a chair next to the kitchen, chopping onions. More specifically, she was trimming onions – it was a box of old onions that were starting to rot, and she couldn't bear the thought that the kitchen would throw them away, so she was cutting out the rotten parts. I was already enraptured. This was so reminiscent of my Grandma Carol, my mom's mom who had Great Depression habits up until the day she died even when she no longer needed them. So we said hello, and I was introduced (in a very loud, clear voice that repeated all the information twice so she would understand it) as the young American. Mémé was pleased as punch. “It's not every day I get a visitor,” she said, “and especially not an American! What an adventure.”

The second time we met was yesterday. November 1^st, the day of the dead, is one of the most important holidays in France. Never mind Halloween, which, I might remind you, is a contraction of All Hallow's Eve. It's All Hallows Day that's important in a Catholic culture, even if very few people are still religious. We had a big family dinner with all my host mom's sisters and their kids, the parents, and Mémé. Lunch is the most important meal in France, not dinner. So imagine Thanksgiving, but at lunchtime and with French foods instead of American foods.

Mémé is getting quite deaf and a little forgetful and follows the conversations around her somewhat less successfully than I do. She's so old that she often can't control her motions, but she always has a smile on her face. So she'll be bobbing away, up and down, her head turning this way and that, but I often looked up to find her staring right back at me, a benevolent misty expression on her face as if she was thinking, Ah, the wonders of youth! So nice that she is having an adventure, coming to France. Young curiosity, young love, high spirits... those were the days... Lost happily somewhere between the present and her own youth. About the third time I looked up and made eye-contact with her, she smiled even wider, leaned over to her granddaughter my host mom, and said “Look how cute she is! She has dimples when she smiles.” The conversation that had been turning around us stopped, considerate as always for Mémé. They laughed and agreed politely with her. Yes, I am cute when I smile, and aren't dimples nice. I winced. I've always argued with my mom about whether or not I have dimples. I guess I lose this one. The conversation wandered back to whatever the adults were talking about, and Mémé and I continued looking at each other and smiling, each incapable of communication for different reasons, but equally pleased with ourselves for being around such wonderful company. I don't have any Mémés, although I have a dim memory of my mother's mother's mother from when I was really small – I want to say around 4 or 5, but I don't really know how old I was. But anyway, I felt an instant affection for little old Mémé as soon as I met her, and wouldn't hesitate to say that she's my Mémé. I need a family here, and this one is working out quite well. I'm sure Mémé doesn't mind the addition of another great-grandchild.

I swear, all of this was actually relevant to today's prompt. I'm getting to the point, just give me a few hundred more words. (Man, I wish I could say that in college app essays...) You can see Mémé's life written all over her face. Her nose was broken once and healed crooked. She's bent and wrinkled, well and truly battered by life, but far healthier than any other 98 year old I've ever met. (I've never met any other 98 year olds, but she's healthier than you could reasonably expect a 98 year old to be.) I feel like I can read the tale of her life on her face. The marais, the young adventures she must've had, meeting her husband, the marais, the affair her kids suspect her of having to produce a third, non-blue-eyed child with very different coloring, the marais, raising her kids, the marais.

Here you aren't a true Vendéen unless your family has lived here since the beginning of time. I'm a true Californian because I was born there, but by Vendée standards, I wouldn't be. My host family are true Vendéens and true maraîchers. Mémé lived and worked in the marais just as Mamy and Papy did, just as Maman did. And here the cycle is broken because my host sibs are going to move up from the primary sector to the tertiary, but at least they'll still probably live in the Vendée.

The point I was trying to get to is that nature has a huge influence on the everyday lives of these people. Looking around the dinner table yesterday, I saw the sun-darkened faces of the husbands, my uncle's scarred ostréiculteur hands, my host mother's dark callouses, Mémé's well-lived-in face. It's written all over their bodies, every summer under the sun, every rainy season that ground the mud of the marais into their skin, every long, cold winter, and every spring planting. A world so foreign to me, because my parents and my parents' parents worked inside. My grandfather's father was a vegetable seller in New York, and that's as “real work” as we get, not counting the military. So I love the rain, and that's part of what makes it obvious that I'm not a maraîchère. I've never had to harvest oysters in the rain, never had to bring the cows in in the rain, never had to stay out in the rain all day to make sure the flowers aren't damaged by the coming storms. True, I've done French camp, and we canoe in the rain, cook dinner in the rain, empty our tents out with bowls after the storm broke all our zippers

and sometimes don't even have dry clothes to change into. But that's only four weeks a year. It's not a lifetime of the marais.

I'm so in love with the countryside here. I'm in love with the fact that my family's everyday life is so tied to the weather and the marais, even if it's much less important than it was a generation ago. I'm in love with the fact that there's goats in the yard across the street from us, and that we have a pond in our backyard with ducks and chickens, and that we eat the ducks and chickens. I love the fact that people so tied to the earth are so much more practical, so much more real than indoor, germaphobic Silicon Valley-ers. When you buy a baguette, they just hand you a baguette. No bag, no paper wrapping to assure you it hasn't been touched by unclean hands. Just a frigging baguette. And if by accident you dropped the baguette on the floor, I'm certain they would pick it up, brush it off, and put it back on the table to eat.

Tl;dr: That was a really long post to explain two things: 1) The nature is really pretty here, and I like living in a rural place instead of the sprawling suburbs of San Francisco, and 2) Nature is a lot more important to everyday life here, and I think it's cool.