On Rue Tatin by Susan Herrmann Loomis Read Free Book Online Page A

paperwork and signing where necessary. On my last night before going back to the United States we celebrated. Christian and Nadine came for dinner bringing a dish of richly flavored braised pigeons from their farm, where they raised eight hundred of the squeaky birds for local restaurants.
    Edith and Bernard opened champagne. Christian made a toast. “To Suzanne and to Michael, who have just bought a house in the Marseille of the north,” he said with an evil smile. “That your car doesn’t get stolen nor your windows broken.” My heart stopped. Marseille, a lovely city, nonetheless has a reputation of being full of
voyoux
, hoodlums. Was there something I should know? They all burst out laughing. “He’s just trying to scare you,” Nadine said.
    I left the following morning for Paris, where I was to spend a few days before returning home. I met an American friend for coffee and showed her the picture of the house. “It’s gorgeous. I’ve lived here fifteen years and always wanted to buy a house,” she exclaimed. “How did you find the perfect house in one week?” I told her I didn’t know. I was in a dream, pinching myself. We were really going to do it, I thought.
    I returned home and Michael and I prepared for our move. We loved our house in Maine and decided not to sell but to rent it. After all, we imagined, after two to three years in France we might return and, meanwhile, it was a good investment.
    We were busy packing and organizing, trying to decide what to take and what to leave. After doing comparative studies of moving costs, we decided we would bring the bare minimum—my kitchen equipment, which included a collection of heavy copper pots I’d amassed over the years, knives, baking dishes, scales, and dozens of other small necessities in the life of a cook and food writer. We would also bring my office chair (a luxuriously comfortable one), file cabinets, and computers. We would bring Michael’s most essential tools, a futon couch, Joe’s stuffed animals, and as many of his toys and treasures as we could fit. We decided to send our Subaru station wagon over and gave it a complete overhaul.
    An American friend of mine (also a food writer) was moving back to the States from Paris and she made a list of things she wanted to sell, which included lamps and bookcases, chairs and a table, and an impressive array of coffee grinders that she used to grind spices. We bought what we thought we would need and she threw in many things she didn’t want to sell but didn’t want to ship back either, and arranged to have it all moved out to Edith’s. Yet another friend, warning me of how expensive everything was in France, listed all of the things in her attic that she was planning to give away but that she would save for us if we needed them. With all of that we figured we could get to work immediately. What we didn’t have we would gradually acquire.
    We sold or gave away just about everything we weren’t going to take with us, which accentuated the feeling that we were embarking on a huge adventure, a new life. Joe observed all the activity and it made him nervous. Children don’t generally like change and he likes it less than most—I had to scheme to get rid of anything belonging to him, for the minute he would see something leaving he’d say, in his two-year-old English, “I love that, I just love it!” and try to grab it.
    Meantime, Edith and I talked regularly. She described the garden, the size of the apples on the gnarled old tree in the yard. The hydrangeas turned out to be purple, one of my favorite colors, the roses were pink, red, and white. She and I planned the garden and talked endlessly about the house. I would report what she’d said to Michael, and then he and I would plan and scheme some more. He spent a lot of time with paper and pencil sketching out ideas for the house, all based on the photographs I’d taken. We never talked about the financial aspect of it, which seemed