Filling my Cup

The two months of the year that make the other ten possible

“Put your crutch up,” I said to my best friend, A, whose foot is broken. We were at the beach, and her son and I had been playing catch with a soft ring frisbee when I saw A standing for the first time that afternoon. When she was ready, I tossed the ring and she tried to jab it with her crutch. “Almost!” I said. “OK, let’s go again.”

This is the kind of moment I live for; not that I want my friend’s foot to be broken, but I want this. A silly game of catch where her son spends more time trying to boomerang the frisbee back to himself than throwing it to me, interrupted by a dumb game we’re going to make up, injury be damned.

When I’m meeting someone new in France and they find out I’m from California, one hundred percent of the time, they ask one of two questions: “Do you miss it?” Or, “Do you regret it?”

The answers are: yes and no.

I’m used to being away from the place, but I miss the people. Everyone understands this. French folks tend to hold tightly to their extended family and childhood friends. For a foreigner, it can be a little hard to break into a social circle, because many French people work long hours and fill every vacation day with trips to reunite with old friends and family. When I tell a new French acquaintance that I miss my people, they understand, probably better than the people I’m missing do.

The answer to why I don’t regret leaving is twofold. First, I love living in France. Second, I spend summers in California, laughing like crazy with my oldest friends and drinking coffee with my mom.

“Your mom must be excited,” people say to me as summer approaches. Sure, mostly. She’s thrilled to see us, but it’s feast or famine. We don’t see each other for ten long months. We catch each other on the phone as best we can; my mom misses us very much. Then, school ends, the plane lands, and we move into her two bedroom house, me in her guest bedroom, the girls on a pullout sofa in her living room, and my mom can’t get away from us. In August, my husband joins for a few weeks, straining the house’s capacity even further. I do all the shopping and cooking, filling her fridge and cupboards with the food I like, making her eat quinoa and eggplant. I take her car, use her cash, fail to mind my own business. So. My mom has made peace with our living abroad and periodically invading her home, but I’m sure she would much, much rather we just lived a reasonable drive away.

It’s feast or famine for me with my friends, as well. Yes, my husband’s family is in France, and that’s very important to us. And we’ve made friends—some of whom have moved away, because when you’re a bicultural couple who like to travel, you attract those sorts of people into your orbit, and those sorts tend to take jobs in China or Montreal (or New York, England, or other regions of France). So our friendships in Paris tend to be newish; I can and do call all on any number of people to help out in a pinch, but we’re not vacationing together.

Which is fine, because we have California.

We jump right back into our lives here in Santa Cruz, and it always seems no time has passed. I’m lucky that my cousins, who are about my age, are still in the area and have kids about the same age as my kids. Ditto one of my best girlfriends, ditto my best friend who recently moved to Puerto Rico but who comes back over the summer like we do. This is not just my secret other life, but it’s my kids’ other life, too.

My girls and their friends snuck out of church early yesterday to go play on the swingset, though they still managed to hear when church was out—like a bell ringing to say cake is being served. One of my mom’s church friends asked after my husband’s uncle, who was recently transferred to a palliative care center in Paris without air conditioning. I told her and asked if she would pray for him, and she said, “Oh, we’re praying for him every day.”

My former second grade teacher, who goes to our church, pulled a photocopy of our class page from the yearbook out of her purse. “See if you can find your mother,” she said to my girls, and they pointed to me almost without looking. “Oh, you’ve seen this before. I’ve carried this around for a long time.” She and I can still name many of my classmates without reading their names, which are printed to the side. “That was a good class,” my teacher said. It was thirty-eight years ago, and she taught for at least forty-five years…I’m only now realizing how young she must have been when I had her. It was my first year at that school, our family had moved from a town a half hour away. Perhaps it was one of her first years as well; maybe I’m important to her in a similar way that she’s important to me, which I’d never considered before.

At the potluck the weekend before to celebrate Independence Day, my former fifth grade teacher, also a church member, served homemade coffee ice cream. I said it was probably the best ice cream I’ve ever eaten, and the people I was sitting with agreed, but my mom said, “I don’t know, Bob’s raspberry ice cream was pretty good.” Our tablemates, J and K, paused and said, “Oh.” Bob was J’s grandfather and K’s father-in-law, and once a year he used raspberries from his garden to make enough ice cream to feed the whole congregation.

This is what home is, it’s people who remember your dad and your grandfather, who’ve tasted his homemade ice cream. People who’ve watched you grow up, who and now are watching your kids grow up. It’s irreplaceable.

When I say to my French friends that these two months in California make the other ten months in France possible, they say, yes, tu peux te ressourcer. I love the use of the word resource; it’s much better than the English phrase, to recharge. Recharge makes me imagine I’ll come back from summer and endlessly whizz about, beating a drum like the Energizer Bunny. Whereas resourcer makes me think of mining precious metals and placing them in my pockets, little gems for me to pull out when I need them—enough to last the whole year. I’ll hold one and think, here is me eating my teacher’s ice cream. Here is me camping with my friends and their kids. Here I am in my place with my people, where I am fully and completely loved. What a treat. What a necessary delight.

Where would I be without these people and this place? In a French heatwave, counting the days before a vacation to the beach, or the mountains. Sure, we’d get to explore more of France and Europe without our annual visits home, but those trips would mean so little without my people, my little gems, tucked into my pockets. So in summer, all I want is to swim at the local high school, play tennis at the neighborhood courts, play game after game of Sorry! with my kids and my mom, and make up stupid games at the beach with my best friend.

A and I soon had the attention of our whole group gathered on the sand. They watched us make another attempt, and another. I was getting closer to the right toss, she was better timing the thrust of her crutch. Finally, the ring sailed through the sky, A raised her crutch, caught the ring, and held it high. We erupted in cheers. Hooray, for us and our stupid game!

It was nothing, it was everything. It was home.

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• In other news, the French heatwave just won’t quit. Many are now “A/C surfing,” going from cinema to shopping complex, lounging for hours in the IKEA, willingly heading back to the office. The Odyssey is coming out this weekend—three hours of A/C is you need it (the French are already flocking to De Gaulle, 2h40)

• France lost to Spain in the semifinal of the World Cup. We were astonished! How about you?

• And sometimes, the best thing you can do on a Sunday is go grocery shopping and chat with strangers. But not in France, because the grocery store will be closed. So, hit your Saturday market at peak hours—and get those earphones out of your ears (talking to myself here. Talking to myself.).