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My Childhood in France Feels Like Someone Else’s Life
Revisiting my long-ago memories is bittersweet
The day we arrived in France, I didn’t know a word of French. Not even “Je t’aime” or “Merci”. I didn’t care to know. I was five years old, and all I could think about was how much I was missing two people I had left in my home country — my best friend and my grandmother.
In the yard of our French house was a low stone wall on which lizards, lured by the sun, were running all day long. Lots of green-gray lizards. I was too afraid to approach them. I watched them from a distance, surrounded by Mediterranean plants, my ears full of the sounds of crickets. To my left — a neighbor’s German Shepherd pacing along the wire fence. Above me — blue sky.
I don’t remember much about the inside of the house or the city. I remember an old stone bridge and how everything smelled like the sea. I remember we often visited an elderly man who lived in an apartment with dark wallpaper. He was an immigrant who helped my parents settle in. I hated going to his place — I had to be quiet and sit still on the couch while my parents talked to him about things I didn’t understand.
A year later, my father’s work took us to the east of the country, to a small gray town where nothing ever happened.
