The Joyful Fig—A Memory
My firstborn daughter’s small hand was in my grasp. At eight years old, she stood closer to me than usual as she took in the business around us: all the chatter in another language, the new sights and smells of a quintessential French marché. I remember the temperate summer weather, utterly pleasant with soft morning light filtering through the canopy of plane trees lining the village center. Rich aromas wafted from food vendors, both foreign to my North American nose and familiar from living in France as a teen. Standing for the first time with my daughter in the swirling farmer’s market was profound. From the outside, it looked unremarkable, but on the inside, it felt significant. I felt a deep fulfillment in sharing my love of the French lifestyle with one of the people most dear to me. I wasn’t just showing her a village marché; I was showing her something about myself.
Closest to us was a man clad in a crimson-smeared apron, stirring paella in a four-foot-wide shallow pan. My daughter’s eyes bulged at the cooking vessel’s enormous size. The man spoke in a rural dialect as he scooped up generous portions of steaming rice and seafood, the scent of saffron lingering in the air.
At the next stall over, we selected diminutive rounds of fresh goat cheese, only two inches in diameter, from a woman with a chalk-written sign in front of her cart reading "Frais de la Ferme" (Farm Fresh). I knew exactly how those little white gems would taste, my mouth watering with memories of the flavor. And because there is simply never enough cheese in France, we stopped at the sound of a gregarious Frenchman, belly-laughing and chatting up the locals as he dispensed briny, tender chunks of feta cheese. When I sampled it, I eagerly told the man in French that it was the best feta I had ever tasted. He replied with pride in his eyes, “Mais oui Madame, c’est de la Grèce!” Imported directly from Greece, which was just a hop and a skip across the Mediterranean. No wonder it was so fresh and tangy—so many fewer miles between the grazing pastures and my mouth.
“This cheese,” I told my daughter, “is begging to be eaten on a salad made of butter lettuce and fresh figs.” With that vision, we set off and easily found heads of frilly butter lettuce as big as serving platters and then hunted down figs. Just at the edge of the market was a stand offering fresh berries of all colors, a palate of summer, and figs, oh, sweet figs. I looked at the plump, larger-than-life fruits, oozing with sticky juice, and my heart began to sing. I gently placed one of the beauties in my daughter’s hand as if it were a palm-sized jewel, promising that it would be one of the best things she had ever tasted.
She had begun to feel hungry by then, so she and my husband departed down the narrow village streets back to the house while I stayed to buy a few more items. Suddenly, I found myself standing in the market alone. I looked around at the people, the colorful umbrellas and stands, a woven market basket slung over my shoulder more like a local than a tourist, and felt completely at home. Not home like a house or even a place, but an overwhelming sense of coming home to myself. I remember so clearly the solid feeling in my body of knowing I was fully in my essence.
Our essence. That peaceful sense that comes from being so purely ourselves.
I took a moment in the midst of the market’s lively movement to absorb this grounding sense of belonging, trying to store it in my body so that I could remember it later, my eyes pricking with tears. Tears because homecoming always evokes emotion, this time a bittersweetness, as this home is not the place I live. I know my essence goes with me wherever I go, that this version of me is intertwined into all the other versions. But tapping into it at the source is different from what I carry in my day-to-day. In America, I remember that it is integrated, yet still yearn for more. Could my family sense a difference in me here? Could my daughter hear the music in my ears and feel the world the way I do when I am in this place? Can she feel my aura change when I speak French, expressing myself not only with different sounds but also with new body language and a new way of connecting with others? I wondered if she sensed that the purest version of me I would ever be was in France.
Then, remembering the reason I had stayed behind, to find garlic for the salad vinaigrette, I happily maneuvered my way back through the crowd. Not hurrying, even though I knew those figs—heavy, palm-sized, laden with sweet juice and floral decadence—were waiting. Oh, those joyful figs, I thought to myself, humming through the market in search of the last ingredient for my family’s lunch.
Enjoy the slow- Heather