Perpetual state of awe.
And exhaustion.
My train pulled into Antibes on Saturday afternoon.
Everything between that and my settling back into the striped TGV seats last night is a windstorm of activity, patterned with the faded olive greens of desert mountains, and the video-enhanced too-brilliant colours of the cote d'Azur, the turquoise of the ocean, the tropical skittles rainbow of flora, fauna, and slimy things reaching curious tendrils towards my sneaker sole.
We hugged and laughed and fell into the easy talk patterns of five years ago when we galloped along the trails of the Vercors, the sunlight streaming through the glass wall of their sunroom, the olive trees and lemon trees and rose bushes and plum trees and cherry trees and orange trees of their garden painting our hands and smiles with crinkles.
Minette is still a happy cat.
I slept in the same bed as five years ago, only it was two hundred kilometers displaced.
It carried its warmth with it.
Saturday evening we wandered the Promenades des Anglais and squirmed at the sight of the casinos and american-flag waving hotels, losing ourselves along winding cobbled alleyways to escape the tourist stench of the Nice boardwalk.
We found a theatre with all of thirty seats and squeezed our knees in along the benches to laugh deep belly-laughs at the mock-the-parisian-bourgeoisie play.
Sunday I was up with the sun and the chirruping birds, helping Andre prune the cherry tree while we waited for the coffee to burble its call to breakfast.
From there we were off into the paysages where Provence meets the Cotes d'Azur, roaring past Vence and St-Paul-de-Vence and up into the Col-de-Vence where we met up with Irena and her husband Michel for a four-hour rising hike in desert mountains, the white-capped peaks of last weekend blowing breezes at us in the distance, the hundred-year-old olive trees now sparse and waning, laughing at us from the steppes around us as the sun beat down on my bare shoulders, running rivulets of sweat amongst the sunscreen.
We hiked until my knees were jelly, my legs screaming, my ankles aching from every stumbling rock in these pale olive deserts. At the cairns we stopped for breath and water, and when I couldn't hop mountain-goat like down the boulders anymore we stopped for lunch of fruit and tuna and cheese and hot, sweet tea.
Afterwards, we waved goodbye to the misty view of the Cap d'Antibes in the distance, the rollerbladers of Nice invisible at our height.
We drove ever higher, into the tiny village of Coursegoules, sat down for homemade cider and lost ourselves amongst the impossibly winding narrow ways of the town, where from the top of the street the bottom disappeared into a maze of arches and alleyways, all the same pale yellow and gray shades of the mediterranean.
Working our way back to the church took us ages of laughing wrong turns, and once there we climbed back into the cars for a trip to St-Paul-de-Vence, the ancient town now become as tourist-ridden as Old Montreal, where Dali and Mancini and a thousand sculptors used to hide their muses.
Helene bought me earrings on a spurious whim, when I explained to her that the moonstones in them were to reflect joy.
"You reflect joy to us that way" she said.
And this was an even greater gift, as we stood gazing up at the bleached-white ramparts of St-Paul.
Returning home I was too tired too sleep and finished my book in the bath, only to get dressed again and go wander beneath the olive trees with Minette.
Somewhere in there we had the time to stop at another cafe for more tea in leopard and zebra painted cups, where the bathroom was hidden behind a secret door shaped like an armoire filled with books.
Monday morning we let Andre sleep and Helene and I ran off to explore the shops of Antibes and Juan-les-pins, the streets filled with wannabe movie stars escaping the manicured golf lawns of Cannes, the stores filled with the sort of things that Paris has begun to acclimatize me to.
I went shopping in the European equivalent of Hollywood, and my skin didn't bristle thanks to the proximity of one of the warmest, most down to earth women in the world.
Dragging me into this or that italiano shoe store, I emerged with the sort of staggering-heeled sandals that my mother wishes she could wear. I clicked along the street feeling surprisingly comfortable in them, my ragged converse hanging off my shoulder and my soul somehow at ease, not railing against the materialism.
Monday afternoon we were hiking again, the sandals stashed in my bag and my sneakers slipping along the rocks of the cap d'Antibes, neck craning to find the lone olive tree at the top of the Blaquieres climb from the day before...
Here and there I'd slip along a seaweed-painted rock, look down into the turquoise depths jutting with sharp teeth twenty meters below me and my fingers would dig in harder to follow my cousins the mountain-goats up past the private beaches and into streets lines with cherry trees showering us with their pink fragrant petals.
A hyacinth landed in my hair and I learned the french word for it, as Helene and Andre and I chatted breathlessly about geckos and Dali sculptures and the telecom industry and a million disconnected things that all went together somehow, blended together by that serene gust that had settled itself in my spirit, heated into place by the sun but churned by the sheer wonder at my entourage.
Such brilliant people, so warm, so kind, so open and curious and open-minded despite their towering house surrounded by rich vacationining condos, despite the stress of raising three boys my age, despite the news on the radio that morning of the synagogues burning to the ground in the three biggest french cities, and the radio announcer's explaining that it was okay, it was just local arab citizens reacting to the Israel conflict.
ANd so burning down buildings is okay?
At the train station, the train so full that I paid the extra handful to ride first class rather than standing-room-only, we hugged goodbye and smiled with the faces of people who are comfortable with what they've said to each other, thanked each other for the company, for the wonder, for the moments.
And of course, I promised to return with my canadian tourists like I did when they lived in Grenoble, and promised to practice driving standard because they enjoy doing things like lending their car to friends and family while they push themselves at work, and hearing the stories generated about the dinner table.
Perpetual state of awe, and in an hour I'm hopping the train for Limoges, my backpack emptied onto the floor to be repacked with neater clothes and reams of project-related paper.
I am tired, so tired, so wonderfully, thrillingly, exhausted.
And still listening to my phone messages, rifling through the megabytes of e-mail, looking at my icq list and missing a certain important part of my life.
This week, France is seven hours away from America, and I feel the extra hour so poingnantly.
And if you're wondering, I'm staying at the Hotel de la Paix in Limoges.
Have a good week, les copains, I will be back in time for the aids fund-raising rollerblading marathon on Friday, where your goldilocked heroine has been elected to hand out condoms and smile for the cameras.
The cameras I'll avoid, but I'll be cheering just as hoarsely as on the ski team.
For as long as I can stand upright.