A few weekends ago, I took my bi-weekly trip to Sospel to spend some quality time with my favorite people in this country, Patricia, Roland, and the family. Lucy (the assistant from New Zealand teaching with me at the Lycée) joined me for a weekend of adventures that we will both remember for the rest of our lives. As we drove home, I realized that with each passing visit, I end it with the declaration, "This was the best weekend EVER!" I don't believe there is a limit to the number of "best weekends" one can have when one is surrounded by such splendor and warmth of spirit.
With cooking lessons and nature trips upon each visit, I find it increasingly difficult to pull myself from Sospel's niche in the Maritime-Alps at the end of each weekend.
This trip was particularly meaningful because it held my very first personal experience in the places I had only seen until then in my grandfather's black and white souvenirs of the Second World War. Of these historic places, I knew their names, their stories, their men, but I had never seen them in person, let alone in color.
Et quelles couleurs! Manifiques! Splendides!
We had celebrated the liberation of the village of Sospel just the day before our voyage into the mountains in the WWII relic of an American jeep, and at certain moments, the sensation of walking the path of my grandfather's footsteps 65 years later gave me chills.
I was feeling the hallowed ground beneath my feet at nearly the exact moment that he was doing the same over six decades before, and it was though I was seeing the mountains through his eyes and the eyes of his comrades, my heros, luminous with the changing of the colors, as if nothing had changed.
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