Long As I Can See the Light

The second chapter of Peter Mayle's iconic A Year in Provence, to which this space owes both its subtitle and its spirit, begins with a description of the ho-hum daily content of Le Provençal, the local paper.  Mayle continues:

This traditional mixture was put aside, one morning in early February, for a lead story which had nothing to do with sport, crime, or politics: PROVENCE UNDER A BLANKET OF SNOW! shouted the headline with an undercurrent of glee at the promise of the follow-up stories which would undoubtedly result from Nature's unseasonable behavior.  There would be mothers and babies miraculously alive after a night in a snowbound car, old men escaping hypothermia by inches thanks to the intervention of public-spirited and alert neighbors, climbers plucked from the side on Mont Ventoux by helicopter, postmen battling against all odds to deliver electricity bills, village elders harking back to previous catastrophes -- there were days of material ahead....

That was the only mention we’d heard of snow since embarking on this adventure – lost among warm reminiscences of sunny January afternoon lunches in the yard and laughing assurances that we’d never need snow boots here. Sadly, we’d resigned ourselves to a leaf-clinging, Mistral blowing, rain spitting, smoke curling, blanketed gray green brown winter of thick wine and hot-potted leek and fowl and apple of the earth and, perhaps, more wine after that. All of that changed Wednesday.

The Midi Libre, our local paper, proclaimed, THE MIDI IS PARALYZED BY SNOW! detailing the *one thousand* cars that were stuck on one of the main roads leading out of Nimes, just to the south of us. Compounding the matter, no doubt, was that yesterday was the first day of the “soldes” – the bi-annual government-authorized sales that rival any Black Friday madness back home and brought surely no less than thousands to the commercial sprawl on the southern outskirts of the city in search of that most-precious pair of boots at a price too good to be true. We too joined the masses and came away with a not humble trove before turning into the gathering storm and driving north for what should have been a twenty minute drive home. Two hours later, having detoured to the East and weathered roads that would have been better suited to take the kids for an afternoon skate than to navigate in an outdated rear-wheel drive faded luxury wagon, angry north winds whipping white across each roundabout in what even the most literal meteorologist would have called blizzard conditions, we arrived at the dark, cold, old, powerless stone farmhouse that is our home.

The lack of a functional electrical system was, of course, a surprise. We would spend the next 26 hours learning how the men, women, and children who build this old house actually lived in it some 400 years ago, mind you in much smaller rooms, and with far less concern for fire safety or knowledge of air quality issues. 

While we waited to see whether the power company could manage to get a truck to our side of the hill in any reasonable timeframe, Ellie and I put on our warmest boots and thickest mittens and took off into the snow to document this Provencal rarity and throw a few snowballs at each other.

The whole dramatic event left but an inch or so on our hillside, barely enough for a proper Bonhomme de Neige, though we did our best, makeshift beret and all.

Restoring power was a greater challenge than one might have expected. After a few hours and with the day fading quickly, I walked to one of our two neighbors to see if they had power. They did, which meant we were in trouble because the problem was likely isolated to our house. This neighbor speaks no English so I fumbled through a bit of a conversation and he tried calling the power company for us, to no avail as, surprisingly given that all of the South of France was being ravaged by a winter storm the likes of which had not been seen in recent memory (they haven't seen any snow in four years in our village), all operators were busy at that time. Without a phone ourselves, thanks to the electrical needs of our IP phone, and without a functional cellular signal in our snug little hillside hamlet, we were dependant on friends and acquaintances to do our bidding for us. They did and the man with the headlamp and bag of black tape and fuses finally arrived like a tradesman's comic book superhero this afternoon to find the rogue fuse that had caused us to sleep in three layers and find every blanket in the house last night for the kids.

After spending a night by candle light, playing cards, and chatting, it was with a twinge of regret that we saw the clocks on the appliances flicker to life... a twinge that lasted exactly as long as it took us both to get our computers booted up and our noses firmly buried therein.  Ahh, life in a rural farmhouse in the South of France.