A Pig in Provence Read Online Free

one of the larger farms. They lived in a hamlet next to their vineyards.
    “I remember when my parents had goats, and my mother made us fresh cheese. After the war she got rid of them. No one has goats anymore. I hear you are going to make cheese.”
    “Yes, but I’m having trouble finding out exactly how to make the cheese,” I laughed.
    “Do you want to meet my mother and ask her? I don’t remember myself. I never made it, she did.”
    I accepted this very kind offer, and we arranged that I would come by her house that afternoon about four o’clock and go together to her mother’s house.
    Mme. Lacroste was sitting on her porch, knitting, when I arrived. She got up immediately to greet me, putting her knitting on the chair.
“Bonjour, Madame,”
she said, and shook my hand.
    “Shall we go?”
    “Yes, yes, I’m ready.” She was friendly, but seemed more abrupt than other people I had dealt with thus far, brusquely buttoning up her rust red sweater over a blue printed dress and picking up a willow basket lined with newspaper next to her chair.
    “This way. My mother lives just down that road,” she said, pointing, “at the edge of the hamlet. In the house I grew up in. And my grandmother too. I was an only child. Good thing I married a farmer. Those are our vineyards.” She swept her arm in gesture that brought in all the vineyards in view, now shorn of their grapes and their leaves mottled with red and yellow. It was a large vineyard for the area, maybe four or five hectares.
    The sky was a brilliant blue, as it often is in Provence during November and December, and a recent rain had washed everything, rendering the colors sharp and clear. It was strange to be walking down a dirt road with the wife of a Provençal farmer to learn about goat cheese. Not so long ago I was walking with other graduate students at UC San Diego, heading for lectures or classes across a new campus with modernist buildings of concrete and glass. Eucalyptus, bougainvillea, and long green lawns were the backdrop of conversation, not vineyards, olive trees, and forest.
    As if she reading my thoughts, Mme. Lacroste said, “It must be very different here than in California. Is your family there? Your parents, I mean, and grandparents?”
    My French was good enough for general conversation, but I lacked the vocabulary and nuances of the language to talk about personal experiences or abstract ideas. I haltingly explained that my father was dead, as were all my grandparents, three of whom I had never known, and that I didn’t see my brother very often.
    “My mother married again and she lives in Texas now,” I concluded.
    “How sad for you to have no family. Or almost none. I’m so happy to have my mother right here, so close, and my grandmother too, although she’s blind now. Look, there she is.”
    Standing next to a sprawling two-story stone house was a woman in a bright blue scarf, holding her weathered face to the sun. Her black dress was indistinguishable from those worn by all the older women, remnants of a period when widow’s weeds were required, I suppose, but her sweater was deep pink and her heavy gold necklace reflected the sunlight against her thinning skin.
    “Mémé!”
Mme. Lacroste called out, “I’ve brought a visitor to see
Maman.
An American. Remember the Americans? They came during the war.”
    Both hands were resting on the top of her cane. As we drew closer, I could see the gold bracelet on her wrist and a thick, worn gold wedding ring. Her eyes, covered with a bluish film, were set deep in her wrinkled face. Her thin cheeks rounded as she smiled.
    “Ah, ma petite! Comment vas-tu?”
She leaned her face slightly toward what she must have sensed was our direction, and my companion kissed her grandmother on both cheeks, and then introduced me.
    “C’est Madame l’Américaine.
She’s keeping goats and is going to make goat’s-milk cheese.”
    The old woman let go of her cane with one hand and stretched it