Bordeaux and Palmiers

Everything in Paziols is connected.

It’s not a concept I grasped easily: I knew that there was a reason that we were watching Marcel Pagnol movies and taking walks in the vineyards, but the walks themselves never conjured the image of Manon des Sources, and watching Jean de Florette never made me think of the vineyards I knew so well.

This year, for some reason, it’s clicked.

I think a lot of it has to do with the group that we have this year: they’re so keen to learn, so ready to make connections to things that they learn in morning French atelier. I’ve never seen someone so proudly use the word vaisselle before–a term that refers to the act of doing the dishes, and something that everyone here is happy to loudly state that they déteste.

I recently wrote about our trip to Tautavel, home to the centre de la préhistoire. Usually, our one afternoon in Tautavel followed by the film La Guerre du Feu is enough prehistory for me, and I’m happy to move on to the next thing, but this year, it just didn’t happen like that.

First, there were the projects in the downstairs room: constructing mini spears from sticks and stones and a cabane like the one that we saw that was reconstructed from one that the prehistoric men used when hunting elephants.

The next day, one of our infamous lazy Sundays, was spent at the fontaine des eaux, home to a natural source of water that runs at the same temperature all year long. The fontaine des eaux is right next to the river, where we sometimes go to wade (it’s not really deep enough for swimming).

Of course, some of the girls just explored, sitting on the bridge and talking or swimming and playing games, but a few of them, especially the two boys we have in our group, decided to make good on the bamboo that surrounded the area and construct their own spears for fishing.

They were able to understand–much more quickly than I did (three years later)–how interconnected everything here is. One lesson runs into the next: we may try and put the atelier de français in the morning, but that doesn’t mean we stop conjugating verbs in the afternoon. The châteaux may be the perfect location for learning about the Cathars, but if the boys construct an elaborate game of knights in shining armor, the vocabulary my be reintegrated into the day.

I love to watch it happen before my eyes: watch as the girls remember the names of the different tools used by prehistoric man, listen as one of the boys compares the landscape here to the one we saw in La guerre du feu.

Of course, watching as the kids dress up as prehistoric men is amusing as well.

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