Issue No. 13

But that doesn’t explain why we’re here, les
Américains. Or why we traded our life
savings for a second house in a part of the
world we’d never heard of. We have no
historic ties to France, no family members
living in the “old country,” no vivid
memories of cycling through the ripening
vines during our gap year. More to the point,
we can’t just “pop down” like our British
friends. We have to slog 7,000 miles
through nine time zones and five types of
transportation to get here.
No. The reason we ended up in France is
much less obvious. We came by mistake.
We thought if we bought a house in France,
we would—as night follows day—become
French.
Now I know what you’re thinking: Wow,
these people must be loaded. Who buys a
house in France on such a whim?
It wasn’t like that. There were no silver
spoons in the kitchen drawer. We started
our marriage as mere children, barely
twenty, already raising a child of our own.
To pay the rent I peddled handmade
greeting cards from the back of an old
Volvo. Eileen fed our little family with food
stamps. When the greeting card business
failed, I set up shop as a freelance designer.
Little by little we built a life - I, designing ads
and logos, she, keeping the books and
running the house.
For the next twenty years, travel was out of
the question. But we kept the idea alive—the
idea that someday we might visit a few
foreign countries, even learn another
language. And maybe, just maybe, if we
worked hard enough and spent next to
nothing on clothes and cars and meals in
restaurants, we could afford to live in a
foreign country. Why not? It doesn’t cost a
cent to dream...
Read the whole story by Les Americains,
Beginning French, available from Amazon.