Accidental image of our kitchen table Provençal

I perked up at our welcome dinner last night: an exquisite tapenade of olives, garlic and olive oil, with tiny toasts to spread it on (with the continuously refilled pichets de vin rouge I could have made that my whole dinner); a fresh salad with tomato, mozzarella and balsamic vinegar; chicken breast, tender and moist, with a creamy velvet sauce, accompanied by petite roasted new potatoes and a pile of colorful vegetable sliced paper-thin then cooked and seasoned to perfection; a fruit and cream tart with whipped cream and mango purée; and, finally, espresso for those who wanted it. Maurice and I sat with the five lovely ladies from Georgia. Farm girls, one of them said. I didn’t know stories about poultry could be so hilarious. Not Southern Baptists, Maurice noted, because they poured the wine freely. Methodists, said Wendy. Southern Methodists, said Maurice. Our waiter Francois occasionally stepped aside from serving and sang to us. I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You. I Did It My Way! As dinner was winding down he brought me an extra pichet de vin and asked, “What do you want me to sing?” “He’s sweet on you,” said Jerry. “What should I pick?” I asked Maurice; I don’t really know pop ballads and he probably wasn’t going to sing Audio Adrenaline’s Sound of the Saints. “Love Me Tender,” said Maurice, so Francois stood behind my chair and crooned away.

Francois et moi

By bedtime the cortisone had kicked in and I could–carefully–lie down without pain and sleep.

I managed to get dressed by myself this morning. I can move my arm an inch or two farther out before the awful pain kicks in, and I’m almost pain-free standing still. Now I’m feeling the injury I got to my right hand a few days before we left home, which I hadn’t even noticed when my shoulder was screaming. It was pretty funny the other day when Maurice tried to put up my hair after I washed it; the Chez Maurice Salon is not a success. But he’s doing an excellent job washing all the dishes and hanging out the laundry. It might take longer than I think to recover.

Exterior of Venasque’s fortress-church

We were late getting to the day’s selected painting town of Venasque, as we had to go back for my hat, then there were two road works stopping traffic, and finally, at an uncertain turn in the road where Maurice was backing up and going forward, and doing it again, he almost hit a taxi. But we arrived in the village perche’ of Venasque, high on a rocky precipice, “virtually impregnable from earliest times,” said the guidebook, and declared one of France’s most beautiful villages.

It is also one with vestiges of Christianity from at least the late fourth century, the age of the old church under the newer 13th-century one, whose chancel is slightly off-kilter from the nave, suggesting the bowed head of the dying Christ. The church’s information sign inside the door is not just a description of historical and architectural facts but was obviously written by someone who loved the Lord and hoped to welcome the visitor into His presence too.

The church also honors a beloved 15th-century painting of the crucifixion, rediscovered in 1932. When the painting was sent to the Louvre in 1937 for restoration, the great museum declined to return it, eliciting the protests and petitions of hundreds of noted artists and historians; somehow politicians helped return the painting to its rightful home in Venasque–saved from the Louvre, which ought to have enough other great works of art by now!

Jenelle and Dewey

I ran into Dewey hanging out with his artist wife Jenelle. Dewey is an orthopedic surgeon from Alabama who just retired last month and Maurice had freely shared my misery with him, so I gave him an update. “There isn’t much cortisone won’t fix,” he said. “You can see a real doctor when you get home. You’ll know if you need more treatment.”

In the tourist office I met Dan, a retiree from Santa Fe living in Venasque for five years; he sold me a booklet of local hikes and recommended a short one of only five kilometers. A group of artists had repaired to the Restaurant des Remparts for lunch so I visited them to use the WC and refill my water bottle. Then I kissed Maurice–painting by the fountain in the square and worried that I would get lost–and set off.

Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun. And the woman at the well. And American women of a certain age who just can’t get their act together. Down a gentle wooded road I strolled, past walls and hedges enclosing villas of the new part of town. The lane soon turned into a rocky path and descended more steeply. Heavenly-scented ginestra appeared, the yellow flowers I loved in Umbria last year. Among the sturdy growth of shrubs and low plants all around were mini-daisies and little yellow flowers and cheery pink and purple blooms. For a while the air was perfumed with the aroma of wild herbs and heaven.

The directions encouraged me to admire the ascent of the rocks of the Ascle. But I was too busy watching the rocks skittering underfoot, as I had left my hiking poles at the apartment in our morning dash out. I only wrenched my shoulder once (well, once right then); there was no one around to hear me scream. “You’ll climb steeply for a few minutes,” said my guidebook, so up the road in the Provençal sun I went. The writer’s definition of “few” seemed different from mine, and I had forgotten my sunscreen too. Up I climbed, broiling, past cliffs affixed with climbing hooks. Finally at the top I followed a path where the view to the right soon opened up to grapevines. Above the vineyard, across the valley I had just traversed, was Venasque on its ridge, stretching lazily up the slope from church to ramparts under a blue sky. Beyond Venasque the mighty form of Mont Ventoux (of Tour de France fame) dwarfed the village as it morphed into the hazy clouds above. Magnifique!

Venasque; Mont Ventoux ascends to the left and out of the picture

I came to a signpost at an intersection of six paths arrayed roughly around a traffic circle of a scraggly thicket of holly trees. The signpost identified towns ahead on three of the paths, none where I wanted to go, and the other paths were a mystery. This was the worst of several instances that the directions were unclear, and I am not the orienteerer in the family. I spent many minutes trying to match up the written directions and the topographic map and the listed villages and the surrounding terrain (having learned to try to pay attention to what is around me from my many years of marriage to an Army cartographic engineeer) and they would not fit. I ruled out several paths and walked a short distance down a couple others before making a final choice, which eventually got me to where I was supposed to be but the long way. What’s a few more minutes in the sun? Soon I was down to the chapel of St. Siffrein, now “disused” (an understatement). Just across the road was the path back up to Venasque, or would have been, had it not been closed due to rock slides. I carefully studied the posted directions in French for an alternate ascent, which required many more meters descending the hill before accessing another path “just behind the old cherry market.” Of course any foreigner would know the old cherry market. But there were other clues, and one of them matched the terrain, and soon I was trudging breathlessly up the mountain. The 1 1/2-hour walk had turned into 2 3/4 and I thought Maurice would be worried. On a breathing break my borrowed French cell phone miraculously opened up to my understanding to allow me to send a text to our new overseas cell phone that Maurice had (another tale of woe; Chris says we are every cliche of old people trying to use cell phones and he has just the one to recommend–it’s called a Jitterbug). “Climbing to village arrange iced drink,” I typed, to my mortification (as a lover of proper English usage) without punctuation because I couldn’t figure it out. Up and up and up, then up the path from the church to the central square where Maurice was chatting. “Did you get my text?” I asked. “Text?” he said. “I guess if I turned on my phone….”

We slipped into the bar for Perrier on ice. I refused the waiter’s kind offer that I sit on the sunny terrace overlooking the next ridge. Just liquid refreshment in the shade, please. Then I visited Dan at the tourist office to complain about the directions. He apologized and gave me a printout of his updated detailed directions (picked up when he went home for lunch) which the town hadn’t published yet (and he isn’t quite sure they ever will). The revised description definitely would have helped at the six-road crossing (which I wasn’t supposed to be at in the first place), plus I missed the best part of the walk: ascending a natural staircase in the cliff instead of walking on the hot and dangerous road. I went back up to the square where the artists were debriefing in the shade and slipped into the patisserie for a Paris brest.

The artists were still en classe so I walked back down to the far end of town where a local cherry distributer had a stand behind a gate in a patch of flowers and bought a big box of cherries and two jars of cherry jam.

I was tired but Maurice talked me into a stop at our local bakery Marie Blachere (“le bon gout du savoir-faire”), a modern building on the edge of town with its own parking lot. Customers regularly bounded into the door on the right, got in line at the end of the long display case packed with breads and pastries, gave their order to the next available and quite cheerful clerk, moved along, paid and went out the far door. Maurice got my opinion on what he should get on his morning bakery runs, and we went home with a couple of fruit tartlets to eat after our spaghetti supper, a good choice indeed for a fine end to a day 100% better than the one before. “Not to us, O Lord, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness” (Psalm 115:1).

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