Fête de la Lavande

For years, evenings at my grandparents ended early. Once the plates were rinsed and stacked, we rarely played board games or watched a movie— those were afternoon activities. Evenings swelled instead with meandering conversation, about bumping into a neighbor at the pharmacy, or about a man who won a donkey at the village lottery. In sharing these anecdotes, my grandma turned her voice down to a whisper, gave a knowing look, and in her smile, the same smile with which she greeted churchgoers every Sunday, popped the faint yet conspicuous hint of mischief. Grandpa often nodded along until the movements of his head rocked him into a slumber. Catching himself at the last minute, with just enough consciousness left to say two words, he sprang upright, took a quick look around, checked that his slippers were on and proclaimed: “Good night.”

I never lingered in the living room. Generations of furniture tracing back to the 1800s, with a sharp detour by the 1970s for colorful plastic and vinyl, crammed the space. A large, towering clock, the most precious item my grandparents owned, growled and ticked uninterrupted, its voraciousness only growing louder by nightfall. Sitting was uncomfortable. Layers of fine broidery coyly covered the armrests of each seat and seemed to warn 9-year-old me against spills, accidental tearing, or nose snot drippings. It is only as an adult that I perceived, in the china and the broidery and the august clock, the projected dignity and quiet pride, of two lower-middle-class village dwellers who’d known the war, one of whom had never worked, while the other retired from civil service at 52, and who took comfort, in spite of not owning much at all, in preserving a proper-looking living room.

Grandma was a concerned woman. As she described it, the lush garden that enveloped her house was a forbidden forest. Sprawling terraces, fallen branches, unstable staircases and chestnut burrs, spoke to me of adventures but conjured in her images of broken limbs, hospital trips, or, worse, gossip from the neighbor. Grandma not being the assertive type, I frequently succeeded in negotiating a compromise, the terms of which included, for me, an allowance to run and play for just an hour, and for her, a watchful station on the terrace, facing my games, where she played crosswords but looked up, worried, and calling my name, when she heard a frightful sound.

The garden was a cantilevered maze of elm, chestnut trees, and roses. In the fall, its sloped grounds softened with thick, mushy moss, which Mom peeled off with a kitchen knife for her nativity scenes. The air smelled of lichen and mushroom, although we rarely found any. In the spring, rose and cherry trees bloomed in the southern section, which my great-grandfather had designed like a poor man’s Versailles. Diamond-shape alleyways delimited by black rock, took me in between the trees, and though the walk was short, its design was intricate enough to excite my imagination, and fancy myself the Minotaur.

Everyone’s favorite season was summer. In the evening, strange, unearthly songs from birds I had never heard before would fill the air, replacing, for the rest of the night, the heady scent of lavender coming in wafts from sun-basked fields. Once our bedroom door was closed, my sister and I silently opened the shutters to let cool air in, careful to not alert Grandma, who lived in constant fear of thieves. I slept in bursts of deep slumber, separated from my sister by an uncanny, head-to-toe bump in the age-old mattress. We took trips to the bathroom in the red hue of the wood fire stove, and the restless ticking of the clock.

Every summer culminated in fête de la lavande, a village tradition dating back to the 1980s although the blue flower, originally imported from Persia and the Canary Islands, dotted the Provençal landscape since the 1500s. Preparations for the festival started months ahead. Mom bought purple and yellow crêpe paper at the Sunday market, that we spent the afternoon cutting and shaping into decorations Grandpa insisted on hanging by himself to the outside walls of the house— children were not to be trusted with stools. Mom also brought clothes and accessories from the market, a lace-trimmed, embroidered headdress for my sister, a printed velvet waistcoat for me.

The day of the festival was Grandpa’s time to shine. Dressed in a traditional linen shirt, with brown velvet trousers and a felt hat, he walked at the very top of the procession in his official role of marching band leader, an honor bestowed upon him by frequent acts of volunteering with the mayor’s office throughout the year. For one day, with a silk ribbon around his neck and an embroidered cotton waistcoat around his chest, Grandpa reclaimed the gravitas and civility he likely exuded in his working years. Chin and forehead up, with dark, ceremonious brown eyes and a sympathetic, warm smile, he walked with studied slowness through the streets of the village, his pace unaffected by the joyous, explosive beats that followed him.

The rest of the procession was a messy, smelly, chaotic affair. A dozen horse-drawn carts brimming with packs of freshly cut lavender, painstakingly made their way up the cobblestones, bumping into just about everything that could stand in their way — pedestrians, other horses, fallen packs. My sister and I, dressed in traditional attire, sat joyously in the blue lavender heaps, our hands busy with assembling bouquets we threw at onlookers, when they did not ask for a photograph. Under the beaming August sun, sweat, lavender, and horse poop mixed.

My grandmother is largely absent from the memories I keep of that festival, her image merely imprinted as a soft, out-of-focus background to the event. I imagine her helping hand guiding mine as I cut the crêpe paper. I imagine her fixing my hat, or watching anxiously as I climbed onto the horse-drawn cart. Her face must have been at every turn of the procession, her calm presence the silent beat of the marching band.

I hope she and Grandpa still watch us quietly.

Our visits to the village have become rare. Recently, the tenant who rented my grandparents’ house after they passed ended her lease, and Dad decided to spend the summer there, with Mom, to renovate. I imagine them standing in the balmy sun, the wafts of lavender still rising from the surrounding fields, their hands busy with tools.

They plan to build a veranda.