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Arrival

Our home in Provence

A banshee-like cry brought us upright and awake. It was followed by confused hissing and screeching and the sounds of chaotic scrambling at the foot of the bed. Furious scratching of claws across the tiled floor and out the open door onto the balcony had us on our feet to investigate.

“They’re at it again,” said Marie-Hélène.

Dawn had barely arrived, but it provided enough light for us to see Tabitha standing aggressively at the edge of the balcony with her tail thrashing, gazing fiercely down the olive tree at another cat descending rapidly to the ground. The ear-splitting shrieks were being replaced by quiet, deep growling, which suggested the row was at an end.

“Well, at least Myrtille didn’t bring in any live mice last night,” Marie-Hélène said as we returned from the balcony to the bedroom.

“I thought they might have learned to get along with each other by now.”

“I think you’re still dreaming. After the fights between those two last summer?” . . .

“I’ll make the coffee.”

French doors in the kitchen opened onto the balcony, where Tabitha was now sitting with her tail twitching back and forth. I walked out and stood next to her at the railing. In the cool and now calm, if not peaceful, morning air, the pale blue sky was crisscrossed with contrails from jets making early morning flights. The sun broke over the hills to the east, spreading light in the valley. Aside from a cock crowing in the distance there were no sounds—so different from the constant city traffic in Vancouver.

The previous day we had travelled from Vancouver to Lyon, a twelve-hour flight, and then driven for two hours from Lyon to our house in Nyons. We arrived at four in the afternoon, which, with the change in time zones, was then seven in the morning Vancouver time. In effect we had lost a day’s sleep. After having stopped to buy groceries en route, then carrying in the luggage, opening the shutters and letting Tabitha out of her travel cage to reacquaint herself with the place, we had had a bite to eat and gone to bed early. The weather was warm and the house needed airing, so the windows and balcony doors were left open during the night.

Marie-Hélène pulled at the fridge door and reached inside to lift out bread, eggs and bacon. This was not going to be a typical French breakfast, but we needed food to help us adjust to the time change and to ease our travel stress. We had learned that not eating properly only made the process more difficult.

The blue sky was glorious compared to the dull grey clouds of Vancouver in April. I walked onto the balcony and looked over the railing to see Myrtille, the neighbour’s cat, at the base of the tree looking up. Tabitha emitted another growl.

“Myrtille wasted no time finding out that we were here,” I said, trying to make conversation out of the situation.

“Since we made this her home two summers ago, she must feel she has property rights ahead of Tabitha.”

That was too true. Myrtille had moved herself in, and then won us over with her affectionate ways and loud, demanding cries for food. She was a demonstrative thing. Acting at first like a lost waif, she later wouldn’t leave, and brought gifts in the form of mice and birds in the middle of the night. Unfortunately some were still alive, and they would turn up hiding behind furniture over the next few days.

It took nearly two months to establish where Myrtille had come from. A couple came walking by one day pushing a baby carriage and asked if we had seen a cat. After listening to their description of “une petite siamoise, beaucoup de miaow-miaow,” we produced Myrtille, who had at that moment been sleeping on our sofa. Apparently she had gone missing just days after their new baby came home from the hospital. Our house was on the hillside and her owners’ villa turned out to be just at the foot of the hill.

We would become friends with Yvette and Gilles and have apéritifs at each others’ homes from time to time. Gilles made a joke of the situation by saying that Myrtille would spend her vacances d’été, or summer vacation, at our place, then return home in the fall when we left for Canada.

The problems started when we arrived with Tabitha the following spring. Territorial warfare began occurring at all hours of the day and night. There were times we felt we were living in Lebanon. Rescuing either one or the other eventually seemed futile so we gave up and left them to sort it out—which didn’t happen.

I turned on the gas burner on the stove and began to boil water to make coffee.

“The house looks great,” I said, searching for a tablecloth and plates. “Let’s eat on the balcony.”

“In our pyjamas? This isn’t the Riviera, where nude bathing is okay. This is Provence, and they are plenty conservative here. All the drivers going by on the road below will stare at the open shutters.”

“Live dangerously,” I said.

“Thanks, I’ll change. They can laugh at you,” Marie-Hélène added drily.

I moved the iron patio table and chairs we had stored in the living room over the winter onto the balcony and set the table. A car drove by and I could see the driver looking up at me. Feeling self-conscious, I went inside to unpack a T-shirt and a pair of shorts.

Coming back, I looked over the open kitchen and living space we had created. A dividing wall had been removed between the rooms, so that the sun and fresh air streamed through the two sets of French doors that opened onto the balcony. Eating outdoors is one of the pleasures of living in Provence, and we took full advantage of it. The awning over the balcony was as much for protection from the harsh summer sun as for rainy weather. With it extended, the balcony was like another room, only outdoors.

The house and garden had been a work in progress since we purchased it from an old widower. He had built the house and raised his family here. He stayed a few years after his wife died, but lost interest in the day-to-day upkeep and gardening, so he put it on the market and moved to an apartment in the village.

When we first saw it, the house had been unoccupied for some time and needed a lot of attention. Marie-Hélène had thrown herself into the job that spring with amazing energy. Wallpaper covered every wall and even some of the ceilings. The bathroom was dark brown. We disliked wallpaper. It all had to be stripped off and the walls washed, sanded and then painted. She did this alone, or at times with the help of visiting friends. I returned to Vancouver to manage my law practice.

In the midst of the work, Marie-Hélène’s friend Jane arrived on her vacation. A natural decision maker, she saw the scale of the work ahead and put herself in charge. She started by walking through each room with a paper pad and pen and making long lists of the things that had to be purchased. She looked at the curved mouldings on the ceilings and said that stencilling would act as an attractive transition between the wall and the ceiling. Stencils were added to the lists.

Marie-Hélène had wanted to paint several pieces of old provençal furniture. Jane said no. When Marie-Hélène persisted, Jane carried the pieces outside, stripped away the aged varnish and then waxed the wood. Marie-Hélène was first taken aback, then delighted when she saw the inlaid wood details.

Jane had enormous energy and worked tirelessly. Once, after a week of ceaseless work, she saw that Marie-Hélène was exhausted, so she told her to put down whatever she was doing, because they were going out for the rest of the day to relax.

Between the two of them the work had moved along quickly and efficiently. The next summer Marie-Hélène had renovated the kitchen, and this year we had plans for a guest suite on the rez-de-jardin or garden level.

“After breakfast I should telephone the Drouins next door. They’ll have seen our car by now and know we’re home.”

“Okay, I’ll bring in the rest of the luggage.”

Breakfast on the balcony meant looking at the garden, so when we were finished eating we began the process of settling in by pouring more coffee and taking a walk outdoors in the morning sun.

We had dreams for the garden, including setting a stone bench in front of an old stone wall with rich-scented blue lavender planted at each end, and building dry stone walls to improve the paths. Everything required time and money, neither of which we had in great supply.

The long-neglected and overgrown garden had needed weeks of weeding, pruning and replanting when we arrived. We both loved gardening, though, and this one grew on us the more we tended it. We wanted a provençal garden that would attract bees and other insects, so we visited a pépiniere and bought lavender and valerian. We tore out the meagre and neglected patches of grass on the level areas beside the house and replaced them with several truckloads of crushed gravel, to create two patios. The rest of the property sloped down to the road and had grown wild for some time. The slope gave the house elevation, so that we overlooked the red tile roofs of the village of Nyons and the forested mountains that surround it. These mountains shelter the village from the harsh mistral wind in the Rhône Valley and hold the warmth of the sun in winter, giving Nyons a better climate than the surrounding area and the nickname Petit Nice.

We sipped our coffee while inspecting the condition of each tree and plant, first by the house and then down the slope on what remained of the old garden paths. Returning to the house too early meant getting down to the work that needed to be done, so we lingered, sitting on a wall and talking, pulling at a weed or two—having a time-out.

We learned in Provence how to create all sorts of time-outs. One was with a bottle of rosé wine, fresh from the fridge, that would be put on the table at lunch. We rarely drank it in Vancouver. However, it made a perfect fit in the dry climate of Provence. We bought various Tavel rosés, and then on long, warm afternoons sat in the garden sipping and offering personal opinions about how they compared. These wines are born of a hot climate and soils of limestone, clay and quartz stones. This permits the winemakers to fashion from a half-dozen varieties of grapes a wine with structure, solidity and density capable of power and mellowness, yet retaining intense floral aromas and touches of fruit. The exceptional freshness and vivacity of a Tavel was a delight on hot summer days.

A screeching sound emanated from near the house. Tabitha must have ventured into the garden and met Myrtille.

“I suppose unpacking is in order,” Marie-Hélène said somewhat wistfully, and we walked back indoors.

Tabitha was a veteran traveller who journeyed in her own bag that I placed under my plane seat. She had turned up the first time in our garden in Vancouver as a kitten visiting from the neighbour’s yard. Her appearances became more frequent, and one rainy day she arrived at our back door asking in. We fed her and then she settled in to explore the house.

“She doesn’t purr,” Marie-Hélène observed.

“She may not know how,” I offered. “Her owners ignore her.”

As the summer passed, the kitten learned how to visit at night. She climbed the trellis giving access to the roof. We were in the habit of leaving the balcony door to the second-floor bedroom open for fresh air. One night we felt the slight thud of a weight landing on our bed, followed by a faint ”Che-r-r-up?” Then the kitten walked up to the head of the bed and pawed at the covers. One of us lifted the sheets. She crawled under, then pushed her way to the foot of the bed where she slept for the rest of the night. Marie-Hélène, a born animal lover, was won over.

Tabitha continued her visits over the summer and into the fall, coming and going at her pleasure. Then, late one cold fall night, Marie-Hélène woke up, saying she heard a noise. “I heard thumping sounds on the roof and then a cat crying.” We opened the balcony door and the cries grew louder. The balcony and the railing were coated with hoarfrost. In the eavestrough several feet below was Tabitha. She couldn’t seem to move, and her cries became desperate when she saw us.

“She’s hurt and we can’t reach her down there!”

Marie-Hélène looked around and saw an area rug on the floor. She picked it up and draped it over the railing until it reached the cat. Tabitha dug her front claws into the rug and tried to climb it, but without success. We slowly pulled the rug up until I could take hold of her and lift her over the railing.

“She must have slid down the frost on the shingles and landed in the eavestrough.”

I carried her into the bedroom and put her down on the floor. Her rear legs collapsed. “Look—she can’t walk.” I exclaimed.

She attempted to stand up, but her hind legs wouldn’t support her. I lifted her onto the bed. Marie-Hélène got some cat treats and the kitten avidly ate them and soon began to purr loudly. One leg was scraped almost to the bone. She just lay on the bed, eating and purring.

At the vet’s office the next morning we were informed she had a broken hip. The bones were so small surgery was out of the question. The prognosis for recovery was “fifty-fifty.”

Tabitha needed a place to rest and recover, so we folded a blanket on the floor next to our bed and set out bowls of food and water as well as a makeshift litter box. For days she stayed there, moving only when necessary.

Once up and around, Tabitha again spent her time between our house and the neighbours. The hip had healed so well it was difficult to tell she had been injured. Then one day moving vans arrived and the house next door was emptied. She was left behind.