Raisins [Grapes]

Exactly two weeks ago from this moment, 5:34 am (Pacific Standard Time), I was sitting in the dim florescent light of SeaTac, drinking a Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks and reading the New York Times: a distraction to abet my nerves as I awaited my first flight that would carry me to France.

Two weeks later, it is 14h34 (Central European Time), and I am sitting in my tiny dorm room, watching the sunlight shine through a spiderweb and eating grapes that I bought yesterday at the marché en plein aire. I feel like that airplane didn’t take me to a different country; it took me to a different world.

These grapes are different than any that I ever bought in the United States. With a certain chaste sweetness, yet stubborn flavor, a taste that can only be described as grape-ness, they are somehow more natural, more uncivilized. Perhaps because they contain seeds; I sometimes suspect that all fruit modified to be seedless have staged a protest by ridding themselves of all discernable flavors.

These grapes taste exactly the same, however, as the grapes that are growing right this moment at my grandparents’ backyard in Oregon. Playing there as a child, my brother and would stage large make believe productions that always included scenes of Dionysian consumption of grapes. We were weary knights that celebrated a battle by eating the grapes we found on the trail home. Or we were prison breakouts hiding in the nearby tree, who would spend the winter drinking “wine” (grapes crushed into a slime-like pulp) and eating “grape stew” (grapes in water, eaten with a spoon). We’d spit seeds at each other (because ex-cons have no use for manners) and laugh until we almost fell out of the tree.

These grapes were a prop that took us to a world of our own making.

Ever since I arrived in France, I can’t shake the same feeling of surrealism. The possibility that any moment, I will wake up in my grandfather’s backyard, after one of my better dreams. That this mystifying reality will be snatched away as easily as my childhood fantasies were with a call to dinner.

I hope that by the end of this semester, I will have bridged the gap between the continents in my mind. That I will believe that both France and my small corner of the United States...Portland, the Tri-Cities, Ellensburg….that they could possibly exist in the same world. That the difference between us are some customs, some history, some words, but that there is also some core of unity hidden somewhere.

I’ll do this, or at least to begin this, not by calling on sweeping historics; not Descartes, nor Lafayette, nor D-Day, nor the fact that many of our great-to-the-twelfth-power grandparents came from Europe. That, I believe, will get me nowhere but to equally sweeping generalizations.

I will start small. With the grapes that I could have picked in the small backyard of my family, or here, in a place becoming a little less foreign all the time.


* Note: All times were correct when I first wrote this. It just took me another week and a half to edit it.

Debut

It started like this:

Ever since I was six years old, I have been one of those people with an odd infatuation with France.

I am sure you have met at least one before. Like girls that have an obsession with dance or horses, these people decorate their notebooks with meticulously drawn Eiffel Towers. They pepper their everyday speech with French words, not unlike Miss Piggy. Who sample the small fraction of France’s 300+ cheeses available at Yokes Fresh Market. Who against all reason, all practicality, take high school French classes so that they can order crepes at the mall with the correct accent, which, incidentally, sounds somewhat like flattened “crap.”

And so, as I entered what is technically my senior year at Central Washington University, I jumped at the chance to spend a semester in France.

Here I am in Caen, France, a place I had no idea existed before this little adventure (It’s in Normandy, near the English Channel, to save you the trip to Google Maps). Endless paperwork, a trip to San Francisco, a few nervous breakdowns, and unrelenting parental support have gotten me here.

Now that I am here, living the dream, what am I going to do? Well, I am going to do what any self respecting Journalism Major would do. I’m going to blog about it.