A Letter Home

 

Autumn is different here in France, muted and muffled, pale yellow and silver-gray. The sun is pale too, and like a 19^th century Parisian courtesan, rarely appears before noon. In the park of the chateau next to where I live, the leaves of a centuries-old beech tree turn copper before they fall.

I spent October in Pottsville and experienced a Pennsylvania autumn for the first time in nearly 40 years. Now I pass my phone to friends in France, show them my photos. They can’t believe their eyes. In this part of the world, we don’t have the sunburnt blue skies, the riot of color.

Nor, in 2024, do we have the riotous politicians, real men, real women, but stranger than fiction when compared to America’s political past.

When I was a child, we were taught to revere the Founding Fathers. In our classroom, far above our heads, hung a portrait of George Washington, his head and bust buoyed by fluffy clouds. On Washington’s birthday, to celebrate, we went downtown and bought candy cherries. 

George Washington floats above my mother's 4th grade class in 1964

“Mother, I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree.”

When we asked our parents for a ride downtown, we were reminded of the example of Abraham Lincoln. From his family’s log cabin in the wilderness, he walked miles to go to school. We could certainly walk a few blocks.

In childhood, the history we learn in school is closer to myth, and in my day, we did not question dates or events. The Boston Tea Party (no taxation without representation!), the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the Spirit of ’76, represented in painting, defined as “general and individual liberty.” 

Archibald Willard, "The Spirit of '76," 1875

Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, the president who brought an end to slavery. Perhaps because I’d visited Gettysburg with my father, even witnessed firsthand the last surviving Union veteran of the Civil War, Lincoln held a special place in my heart. He was the President who allowed me to progress from myth to history. He was a real man who did real things of lasting importance.

On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring “all persons held as slaves…henceforward shall be free.” On November 11^th of that same year, honoring the dead on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Lincoln declared, “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

To mark the 100^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, on August 28, 1963, in a speech on the National Mall in Washington, Martin Luther King reminded his listeners, “… one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.”

As for women, their fight to gain the vote, ratified by the passing of the 19^th amendment in 1920, was a struggle that spanned more than a century. While the suffragettes organized and rallied for their cause, some American men feared (jokingly) that the Revolutionary War had been fought in vain. Surely, those patriots could have never imagined—nor wanted—women in the voting booth.

History is messy. Many things got smoothed over when we were kids.

In France, there’s a lot more history to learn! The ancient Greeks founded the French port of Marseille, and the Romans built their baths and an amphitheater in Paris, where ruins still stand. In the Parisian suburbs, in the basilica of Saint-Denis, at its very heart, is a chapel dating back to the 5^th century.

French school children also learn about the Ancien Régime, the “old order” of the monarchy. In 1655 King Louis XIV declared, “L’Etat, c’est moi.” I am the State. In the late 18^th, Louis XV, in a more cynical vein, whispered to his lover Madame de Pompadour, “Après moi, le déluge.” In simple American, “After me, all hell breaks loose.” 

Juste d'Egmont, Louis XIV (1654)

And with the French Revolution of 1789, which led Louis XVI to the guillotine, that’s what happened. 

The United States and France are two proud republics. In each the people led a revolution to free themselves from the chains of monarchy. “L’Etat, c’est nous”—we are the State, citizens of each nation can proclaim.

Legend has it that Marie Antoinette, upon hearing the people of Paris lacked bread, suggested they eat cake. Today in France, the price of a basic baguette is one euro, about $1.05. Other food staples, potatoes and onions, apples and pears, cost about half as much as in the US. During my October stay in Pottsville, I saw for myself that food is much more expensive than in Europe. On the continent of social democracy, government steps in to keep the price of basics down.

When I was a child, The Republican was an evening paper, delivered every afternoon to nearly every house on the block. Everybody read it, and the newspaper was a builder of community. 

In 1979, Gilbert M. Gaul and Elliot G. Jaspin of the Pottsville Republican won the Pulitzer Prize for local investigative journalism for their story on the destruction of the Blue Coal Co. by labor leader Jimmy Hoffa and organized crime.

 

Today most people depend on newsfeeds on their phones, tailored to their interests. That’s also where they search for virtual community.

Today in France, the arms industry is gearing up for greater production as the war in Ukraine moves beyond 1,000 days; farmers, earning less, paying more, are on strike; the mayors of France gather in Paris and warn of a crisis in local democracy.

Today in the US, events are moving almost too fast to keep up.

Today many people think with their emotions and believe the truth is what they feel.

Not since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when even children lived with the fear of nuclear war, have I “felt” so afraid.

Blazing Glory

 

April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom… Sounds so romantic, but what about Paris in October? What happens to the chestnut trees then? The leaves get brown around the edges and then they fall. No color, no drama, no romance. No one writes romantic songs about Paris at this time of year. Those chestnut leaves, the way they wrinkle and fade, they simply remind us about endings and getting old.

I moved to France a long time ago, in 1987. Already in the fall of 1986, I was there, scouting for jobs, contemplating a big move to another continent. That means it’s been 40 years since I last saw autumn, a Pennsylvania autumn, I mean.

During this month of October, experiencing autumn for the first time since 1985, I have the feeling the gods are looking down on me and offering me one of the best gifts of my life. “Paris is a moveable feast,” wrote Ernest Hemingway 100 years ago. Today I’d say it’s here in Schuylkill County, day after day, as I feast wherever I go on the blazing colors before my eyes.

In the beginning it creeps up on you. In early October, the hillsides were still lush with summer green, but if you looked closely, it was there: an impatient burst of red or yellow, a startling swash of purple. The colors were pure and bright. I admired them, but in no way did they prepare me for what was to come.

 

 Walking with my cousin in the woods at Locust Lake at midmonth, I asked her if it was like this every year. The question surprised her. She answered yes. For her, this was autumn. For me, a spectacle so bewitching, it seemed uncannily unreal. 

 

Uncanny and bewitching, these words also go with Halloween. When I was a child, like most American children, I went trick-or-treating. In school we learned Halloween poems and sometimes we had to recite them before we received our treat. It wasn’t enough to simply thrust our bag towards an unknown hand and hope some candy would drop in.

At home we carved a pumpkin. In school we put up decorations: black cats, jack-o-lanterns and witches. We even participated in scary painting competitions, decorating the display windows of local stores. I remember dressing like Snow White or Caspar the Ghost. Downtown Pottsville, just like now, had a Halloween parade. All this happened around October 31^st.

Until this year, I did not know Americans began decorating for Halloween in early October. I could never have imagined the bigger-than-life skeletons, the lights, the inflated pumpkins and Halloween characters that I can neither name nor recognize. We used to buy one pumpkin. Now I see mountains of them on display at a single home. When I first noticed a front door covered with yellow tape printed with the words “caution” and “keep out,” I took it for the real thing.

Some things, however, do not change. I see containers of chewy candy pumpkins and Indian corn at the supermarket, and the assortment of candies on sale for Halloween is strangely similar to those I knew as a child.

When I moved to France in 1987, during my first autumn, I lived in the South of France. To my Pennsylvania eye, there was no fall. Neither the cork oaks nor the olive trees lost their gray-green leaves, and the majestic parasol pines offered wide circles of shade all year round. The only tree to rain dead leaves down on us, looking bare and white afterwards, was the plane tree, a cousin of the sycamore.

As for Halloween, when I arrived in France, nobody knew much about it, and certainly children did not celebrate it at school. The big holiday in France was November 1^st, All Saints Day, the French equivalent of Memorial Day. It’s when the French travel to the town or village where their ancestors were born to place pots of chrysanthemums on their tombs.

In many cemeteries, members of “Le Souvenir Français,” a group devoted to keeping alive the memory of soldiers who sacrificed their lives for France, take up collections for the upkeep of the graves of veterans of French wars. 

In 2024 it would be hard to find anyone in France who has never heard of Halloween. Children dress up in costumes and parade around the playground at their schools. On Halloween eve, they trick-or-treat in their neighborhood. Pumpkins, usually used for making soup, are carved to make jack-o-lanterns. Adults organize costume parties and the night of the 31^st can be wild.

How did it happen? I’m not quite sure, but American Halloween has been a very successful export to France. Though I have never seen a single one, the “Halloween” movies have surely played a role.

Meanwhile the October days go by. The green has disappeared. The wild riot of colors of a week ago, a spectacle that truly deserves to be called “awesome,” has lost its insolent éclat but is no less beautiful. The hillsides glow copper.

Now I know what it means to go out in a blaze of glory. Schuylkill County, fall 2024, one of the most beautiful sights of my entire life.