where the heart is

i love the sensuousness, the lavishness of the writing. The homeliness, the contentment, and, paradoxically, the sheer aching longing for home, for a place to call our own.




from 'Lavender' by Andre Aciman


The house where we're staying near Aix-en-Provence is surrounded by lavender bushes that seem to billow and wave whenever a wind courses through the fields. Tomorrow is our last day in Provence, and we've already washed all of our clothes to let them dry in the sun. I know that the next time I'll put on this shirt will be in Manhattan. I know too how the scent of sunlight and lavender trapped within its folds will bring me back to this most luminous day in Provence.

It is ten o'clock in the morning and I am standing in this garden next to a wicker hamper that is filled with today's wash. My wife doesn't know it yet, but I've decided to hang the laundry myself. It's meant as a surprise. I've already brewed coffee.

So here I am, hanging one towel after the other, the boy's underwear, their many T-shirts, their socks flecked with the reddish clay from Roussillon which, I hope, will never wash off. I like the smell. I like separating the shirts on the line, leaving no more than half an inch between them. I must manage my pins and use them sparingly, making sure I'll have enough for the whole load. I know my wife will still find something to criticise in my method. The thought amuses me. I like the work, its mind-numbing pace which makes everything seem so simple, so complacent. I want it never to end. I can see why people take forever to hang clothes out to dry. I like the smell of parched wood on the hanging pins, which are stored in a clay pot. I like the smell of clay too. I like the sound of drops trickling from our large towels onto the pebbles, on my feet. I like standing barefoot, like the sheets, which take forever to hang evenly and need three pins, one at each end and one for good measure in the middle. I turn around and, before picking up another shirt, I run my fingers through a stalk of lavender nearby. How easy it is to touch lavender. To think I fussed so much and for so long - and yet here it is, given to me, the way gold was given to the Incas, who didn't think twice before handing it over to strangers. There is nothing to want here. Quod cupio mecum est. What I want, I already have.

Yesterday we went to see the abbey of Senanques. I took pictures of my sons standing in front of a field of lavender. From a distance, the lavender is so dark it looks like a bruise upon a sea of green. Closer by, each plant looks like an ordinary overgrown bush. I taught them how to rub their hands along lavender blossoms without disturbing the bees. We spoke of Cistercian monks and the production of dyes, of spirits, balms and scented extracts, and of Saint Bernard de Clervaux, and of medieval commerce routes that still exist today and that spread from these tiny abbeys to the rest of the world. For all I know my love of lavender may have started right here, in an essence gathered from bushes that grow on these very same fields. For all I know this is where it ends, in the beginning. And yet, for all I know, everything could start all over again - my father, my mother, the girl with the perfumed wrist, Frau Noch Einmal, her little boy, my little boy, myself as a little boy, the walk in the evening snow, the genie in the bottle, the Rosetta stone within each one of us which no one, not even love or friendship, can unburden, the life we think of each day, and the life not lived, and the life half lived, and the life we wish we'd learn to live while we still have time, and the life we want to rewrite if only we could, and the life we know remains unwritten and may never be written at all, and the life we hope others may live far better than we have, all of it, for all I know, braided on one thread into which is spun something as simple as the desire to be one with the world, to find something instead of nothing, and having found something, never to let go, be it even a stalk of lavender.


(from The Best American Essays 2003, edited by Anne Fadiman)
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