The Road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, and I must follow, if I can ...

... pursuing it with eager feet, until it joins some larger way, where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say. - Tolkien, The Hobbit


I find I am something of a hobbit, myself, of late.

I was talking a few postings ago about life here in Prat, where I've been left to muse quietly on the variegations of cheese degustation. It's funny; it's as though after whining for ages about being discontented, Toulouse shook my sweaty hands from her apronstrings and dropped me into an isolated corner of the country, 'to think about what I'd done.'

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. Of course, I always do.

Another thing Bernard, my host father, is particular about is coffee. A man after my own heart, eh? They give me coffee - the lovely, excellent, perfect coffee from a drip coffeemaker that I have been craving for months - every morning, in a swollen cup like a bowl on a saucer, and I sit by myself and dip my bread in it and read my book and sip my coffee and look out the window at the foothills of the Pyrenees. But Bernard also has a little Nespresso machine that works with these little pellet things of espresso that he orders on the internet and of which he is charmingly proud. He loves to demonstrate the ease with which one can drop them into the machine, and then the two of us stand with folded arms and wait for the espresso to appear ('The pressure, the pressure is the thing, Avie,' he always says, and I nod as though I had no idea until he told me), staring anxiously at the spout as though waiting for an explosion.

He just walked in, actually, as I was writing this. 'Est-ce que tu veux un cafe, Avie?' No joke.

We share espresso a couple of hours after breakfast, again just after lunch, another around four or five in the afternoon, and the final cup after dinner. (After the first few nights of lying in my bed wondering how many verbs I could conjugate in my head, I found out there was decaf.) He loves to see if I can taste the difference between the ristretto, the arpeggio, the roma, and he was delighted when my preference was for the strongest one. I think my presence here is an excuse for the family to have all of their favorite things as often as he wants - if his wife notices how many pieces of chocolate he's had, or he flicks his eyes over her third glass of wine, it's all in the name of letting Avie try things.

I actually find myself lying quite a lot, for simplicity's sake. People are much happier when they can introduce you to something as though they invented it. And that's true, in a way. Everyone has their own manner of enjoying quelques choses, and thus, in France at least, each time is the first time. But more on that another time.

I do think that the quiet tasting of cheese, of wine, the appreciation of truly wonderful coffee - and indeed the insistence upon the necessity of such things - is quintessentially (attention: this is not to say *exclusively*) French, and is in itself a kind of resistance. We have a petit pause for a cup of espresso, and we have ten minutes where we sit on the terrace and talk about my studies, or the neighbor who insists on burning all his brush, or what lovely weather we're having even for the end of october, or how remarkably fine is the coffee.

Yes, it's irritating that the shops close for three hours in the middle of the day. It made it easier for me when I discovered this was irritating to the French, at times, as well. But one shrugs one's shoulders, raises one's palms, and says 'eh.' It's France. The culture of preservation and conservatism involves a distressing amount of navel-gazing, it's true. But it also cultivates a connosieurship that is built upon things that can all too easily be lost, or squandered. And it's incorporated into the rhythm of life with a minimum of fanfare.

It's a morsel of Zen, in its fashion. It's an ability to enjoy small things without impinging upon the rights or freedoms of any other person. And it supports itself, creating the space it needs to grow and thrive.

Life is nice in the little French garden of my mind. I'd like to stay and wear pink gloves and cultivate tomatoes and pansies. I'd like a little apartment three floors over the narrow street, with lavender shutters and rosemary in the windowbox.

I will also be happy to go, to get back to my cellphone and my literary theory, my madcap furious rush to learn everything there is to know from books, and in one day.

I will continue to take on too much, to try too hard, to fill my days too full of classes, works, aims, friends, troubles.

But life is long, and more than that, it's broad. There's room in it for the wrinkle between my eyebrows, for the callouses on my heels. You have to be willing to be unhappy, for a while. You're going to be anyway, from time to time. I would like, myself, to be able to see that not as a failure to live properly, as an affront to my sensibilities.

There's a French coffee press that's waiting for me in some box in some person's house, somewhere in Colorado. Sometime around three months from now I'll be living in my next apartment, my own apartment that's only mine, to which I have the only key. I'll be laughing at my students, laughing at my friends, laughing at myself again. Recognizing all the things I forgot I owned. And sometime around three months from now - it'll be quick because I'll tear through all the boxes looking for it - I'll find my coffee press. I won't make the coffee any differently than before; I like the way I've always made it. And it probably won't be French; in Boulder, I usually buy Mexican or Costa Rican. And I won't sit on the terrace, because in Boulder, in January, it's snowing and freezing.

But I will think about France, about drinking coffee in France. About how you can't see a thing until you walk away from it. About the pause.

I might even buy a cup swollen like a bowl, so there's room to dip my bread in.