Le Rural Sud de France
le 8 juin 2021
It’s been, well, a year. Quite a year. Like others, the Covid pandemic had a decisive effect on my personal and professional life. Without warning, teaching at the university turned into an array of synchronous Zoom meetings with frantic students and frazzled faculty who weren’t sure how to make sense of the world we woke up to. Zoom bombing became a thing. With grades due, graduation ceremonies uncertain, and grant reporting deadlines encroaching, I began to think seriously about a better (in my view) quality of life. In May 2020, I de-registered from Hyflex training sessions and crossed off “drop in with the deans” from my Microsoft Teams calendar. No offense.
Like others’ exodus from crowded urban spaces into more rural communities, I, too, sought refuge and solace in rural spaces, but maybe not for the same reasons. As a scholar of rural, place-based education, over the past two decades I have increasingly relished in the near-quiet of rurality, the vast landscapes, and even a slower pace of life. Birdsong in the morning is mantra. These images invoke bucolic scenes that, I’m aware, don’t capture the complexity and diversity of what is ‘rural’. But more important to me was the need to embed myself into a different culture where I could explore community strengths and knowledges, connections to the cycles of the land, the terroir, and the social ecology of the area. Although my professional work has taken me to diverse rural communities from Florida to South Africa to Ireland, my dreams weren’t in those rural places—they were staunchly and squarely in rural France.
I have dreamt about rural France for decades, having lived in France twice before — first as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris (obviously not rural), but again as a young professional with my husband and two children in the Provence region. It was a confluence of events — the pandemic’s reminder of our fragile existence, my daughter’s move to France, time made available from my sabbatical, and the fire of desire to experience a place where language, culture, and rurality come together to feed my soul.
Which brings me to the blog. After spending much of the past year in the rural south of France in a wine, farm working community, I have learned (and am learning) a lot about life here—different cultural concepts, like the fluidity of time itself, how a modern day town crier keeps the community connected, and historicity of a local ecomusée. And every day feels like a new language lesson — I admittedly mix Spanish into French a little too often, which doesn’t seem to bother many people from this Languedoc-speaking [lenga d’òc] region. Over the next few blog posts, which will likely be quite irregular, I’ll share what I love and learn about this sp/place.