Traveling to Experience Community
March 24, 2012
Tags: traveling with kids

Kids can open doors wherever your adventures may take you.
This is the second trip that our family has made to the rural village of St. Pierre de Maille, a small community never mentioned in the guidebooks that lies about an hour south of the Loire Valley. The first time we came, the house we rented was made available to us as a writing retreat while I worked on a project. Saoirse was only 18 months old, the winter we were here was particularly harsh (our neighbor, Mme Pelletier, still recalls it as the year the ice froze on the river), and we met very few local people. Truth be told, Bob and I remember it as one of the loneliest winters of our lives. We fell in love with France, but felt deeply isolated from the village that surrounded us. We imagined neighbors staring out at our strange foreign family from behind curtains as we carried baby Saoirse on our backs up to the corner store to buy fresh milk, or to the bakery to buy croissants. If we were out at dusk, the French practice of using shutters for evening privacy and winter insulation left us feeling even more closed out from the community.

We saw lots of chateaus, however. And museums, churches and Roman ruins. We also managed to visit 5 countries during our time on the continent. But if there was one lesson we learned on that trip, it was that admission tickets, turn-styles and guidebooks travels were not exactly what we were seeking in foreign travel. We wanted to feel part of different places. As temporary residents we could never fully join a foreign community, but we wanted to connect with people and be part of the daily pulse and life of a place, even if only for a while. This, I believe, was Bob’s and my unspoken goal in returning to St Pierre de Maille. We wanted to do it differently.

With two gregarious children in tow, thrilled to experience village life for the first time, this is actually happening. Saoirse and Ula will not let a single village resident pass by on the street without staring them in the eye, smiling brightly and exclaiming “Bonjour, Monsieur! Bonjour Madame!”

Madame Pelletier lives next door on the other side of our shared courtyard. She is recently widowed, and the girls think about her constantly. We go for walks in the evening and they pick flowers for her. If she leaves her kitchen door open, they walk over and visit. Neighbors who come to check on her inevitably wind up in pigeon-French conversations with them, then find themselves meeting Bob and me. They tell us bits of the village history, they ask us to keep visiting Madame Pelletier, they remind us which farmers’ markets are the best ones to visit.

I know many people in the United States who traveled prior to getting married and having children, then quickly dismissed the idea once they had “settled down.” Bob and I seem to have done the opposite. During our courtship, we rarely went farther than to his old stomping grounds in Maine. Now that we have kids, we find ourselves following our family’s curiosities and saving our money for big trips every few years. We can’t imagine traveling without our kids. They are our passports to good will from citizens of the world. They get us more smiles on the streets, more visits with local folks, more new friends, more community connections than we ever thought possible. Saoirse’s and Ula’s insistence on connecting with other people pushes Bob and me to advance our language skills, to overcome our own inclinations to adhere to the unspoken adult code of disengagement with strangers. Because of them, St Pierre de Maille is opening up to us in a way we had only dreamt possible.

There are still castles and museums on our travel itinerary for this trip. But just as important on the schedule are our daily walks through the village, seeking out new strangers to engage in conversation and friendship. My adult brain frets about this somewhat….the more we engage with this place, the harder it will be for us to leave. But then again, the more we engage, the more it will stay with us throughout our lives.
Comments
March 26, 2012 3:21 PM EDT
It’s just so amazing to hear about your experiences traveling with your children. This is my dream. And while my children are still very young (16 months and 4 years), I KNOW that an extended stay in another country is in my not-so-distant future! We did travel to Mexico with our daughter when she was 14 months, and it was incredible how much the doors opened for us in terms of connection. I look forward to hearing more about your adventures abroad.
– Teri
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