James stuck his nose into the bouquet of fresh herbs and breathed in deeply. Lavender, basil, thyme, rosemary reached into his nostrils and filled his head with heady spices.
“This is Provence,” he murmured.
“And you go away too much,” Mado replied, hurling herself down on the blanket next to him. “We’ll have to send you back to California with a pot of herbs and a couple bottles of Memée’s lavender oil so you don’t get homesick.”
James grinned and tossed the herbs down with the rest of the food spread out on the blanket. They were at the beach, and the Mediterranean crashed in the background, a rhythmic cadence that was at once soothing and exhilarating. James and Mado were the only one of the group of five cousins who were not in the rich blue water. Instead, James was tending to their lunch, knowing that soon enough his cousins would be ravenous. They had stopped in at the market before leaving the town to buy fresh fish, and he was roasting them in the coals with some butter, lemons, herbs and scallops. There was also fresh bread from the Memée’s kitchen, several bottles of water, some ripe tomatoes and melons. All good fare, the kind that was geared towards enabling active children to grow while still thinking the food was good. James had been old enough long enough to recognize the tricks.
“I love the beach,” Mado said, leaning back and turning her face up to the sun. “I love the sand, and the sea, and cooking here, and drying off on the blanket. I love the way everything smells.”
James laughed, something that caught him off guard these days. “You should be a pirate.”
Mado giggled. “Captain Mado, Queen of the Mediterranean. And it’s only like this in Provence! I don’t think that anywhere else in the world could smell like lavender and baking earth and the sea all at the same time.”
“And fresh fish,” James remarked, nudging the foil-wrapped specimens out of the coals and onto the edge of the fire. “Lunch!” he bellowed in the direction of the waves, and instantly his cousins came spilling out of the water like so many merfolk, running up the sand towards them. Lunch was something they took very seriously, especially when James was cooking.
“James, you made mussels!” shrieked Lucie.
James grinned, doling out the tiny black shells onto the plates Memee had packed for them. He had bought several pounds back at the fishmonger’s stall, but this fact had somehow gone unnoticed by his cousins.
“To go with the skate,” he said cheerfully, peeling back the edges of burnt foil to reveal the succulent white flesh inside. “Bon appétit.”
If nothing else, perhaps, the best part of summer was eating good food you had cooked yourself over a fire, after playing for hours in the azure sea. Certainly, fish caught that morning and eaten piping hot was heavenly. The cousins sat sprawled around the blanket, eating with their fingers as they would never have done with adults around, popping bits of shellfish and bread into their mouths and washing it all down with swigs from the honey-flavored white grape juice that the wine merchants sold to children.
“We should do this all the time,” said Bertram contentedly as he mopped up the juices of the fish with a hunk of bread. “No adults, no babies, just us and the sea and good food.”
“I miss Colin and Audrey,” Lucie said softly, and they all went quiet. “They’d have liked this.”
They looked at James uneasily, but he just looked down at his hands. He had been thinking the exact same thing.
“They wouldn’t want us to be sad,” he said at last. “And Audrey hated shellfish.”
They all laughed at that, and the moment passed. Julie, the youngest of the “older cousins”, leaned on James’s arm and dozed off, worn out by swimming and felled by a good meal even before they had gotten to dessert. James tipped her over onto the blanket gently and stuck a folded-up towel under her head for a pillow. Lucie helped Bertram clean up, sticking all of the utensils in the big mussel pot and stowing it in the picnic basket. While they tidied, Mado took a knife and cut up the luscious tarte aux fraises that Memée had packed, then flicked spoonfuls of thick cream over it all and passed slices around. James sat back and watched it all, humming softly. It was common knowledge that whoever did the cooking was exempt from the clean up.
Later, when the food was all gone and the five kids were lying mostly asleep on the sand, Pepé came in the big car to take them back to the farm. Five deliciously tired, sun-tanned bodies climbed in and drowsed all the way back home, leaning against each other. They were all encrusted with sand and sea salt, and there would be cool showers before dinner and bed. Pepé surveyed his grandchildren over his shoulder and smiled to himself.
When James crawled into his bed that night, slipping between the cool bed sheets, he felt so wondrously exhausted that he thought he would be asleep as soon as his head met the pillow. Instead, he lay awake for a while, staring at the moonlight playing over the walls, drowsily smelling the spicy lavender that drifted through the open windows, listening to the distant roar of the sea. He felt that if he reached his hands out on either side of him, he would feel the warm sleeping bodies of his siblings where they should be. Of course they were not there. But tonight, for perhaps the first time ever, he did not feel the loss of them as keenly as he always did. Instead he felt closer to them than he had since the day they died, and this was intensely comforting. It was enough, for now. Life goes on, he thought, and with that, sleep claimed him and he thought no more.
*
By Me.
(Photo from Pear Tree)
