Chartreuse

While living in France is an adventure, it is an adventure that takes place in reality. I am distant from my home and I encounter new situations to deal with every day, but the newness is minor and mostly more difficult than interesting. I have had to use my Frankenstein French to ask about Internet prices; I have never fought a dragon or chased a witch. The mettle of my character has never been tested in a battle to the end. My daily life is pretty comfortable. Being a teaching assistant isn't really that hard. But every once in a while, I find myself in a situation that is new in a way that lets me feel the newness; every once in a while, I do find myself in a fairy tale.

Yesterday was one such while. I was already feeling happy because I was in the company of a really delightful couple, family friends. We were driving in the foothills of the Alps near Grenoble, in the southeastern region of France. After two and a half months in the relatively flat Garonne valley, I was thrilled to be surrounded by hills and to have beautiful snow-tipped mountains in the background. As we got farther from the city, the snow we started to see on the ground put me in mind happy trips to the Sierras. By the time we parked to go on a walk we were quite high in the mountains. We parked in a little valley protected on three sides by raggedy hilltops. It was cold, but clear, and the trees that lined the path at regular intervals (in a very French fashion) were bare of leaves but covered in thick moss. Before we had walked a hundred meters up the path, my hosts pointed out the steep slate roofs of the Chartreuse monastery among the trees.

We continued to climb up the path alongside a little brook, talking of other pleasant spots in the world we had visited; we walked up alongside the walls of the monastery until the path steepened up a grassy hillside. We stopped at the base of a statue of Jesus on the cross and the two Marys at the base that was alone upon the hillside. I felt a childish joy at tromping through the mud to get there. What I felt at the top upon seeing the view was not magic or infinity, though it smelt of both. It was quiet contentment at seeing a truly beautiful thing in a distant corner of the world that nevertheless resembled what I am used to calling beauty at home.

I cannot finish this post without attempting to describe that view. Below me was the monastery: orderly rows and squares of buildings, gray and rectangular. I could most easily see their steeply pointed dark slate roofs: tented triangles and thin pointy geometric towers. Smoke rose from several chimneys, and I could just see between two walls the carefully cropped hedges of a garden à la française. The orderly blue roofs made a sharp contrast to the ragged rock tops of the hills above. The sun was setting as we observed, making the tops of the hills pure gold, and then rosy-gold. Back the way we had come, the moss shone green in the sunlight above the deep shadows that the branches made and the shadows in the crevice of the brook; above, in the distance, the snowy tops of the mountains shone white.