I don’t mind, generally. My romantic side might have taken a beating over the last few years – after half a decade of skimming our pool, if I never see another autumn leaf skittering in a gentle breeze again, it’ll be fine with me – but the sound of church bells has never lost its charm. They normally ring at seven, morning and evening, and then give an abbreviated little ding every hour on the hour during the day. It’s a gentle sound rich with associations, a regular reminder, even if my fingers are tapping and my head is enmeshed in the white noise hum of the digital world, of the extraordinary real world that persists just outside my window.

Now and then, however, it rings a different rhythm. It goes on and on, as if the bellringer (which, like most church bells these days, has been modernized and rigged to a timer) has short-circuited. It beats like a pulse for several minutes until it becomes almost maddening, and then it falls silent.  In the old days it served the practical purpose of the village tomtom, getting news out to the outlying farms, but that function too has been thoroughly modernized in our village: the cantonnier keeps us up to date by driving around putting little slips of paper in mailboxes. The bell ringing out the news lingers on only as a tradition now, a relic, and we are free to indulge ourselves in the metaphorical implications of the ringing and the silence that follows. Either way, the little slip of paper that will show up in the mailbox will only confirm what today’s manic clanging has just told us, that someone in the village has died.

With the guns of the hunters popping in the distance, I could imagine that some tragedy has occurred. Could be – if you set a dozen tipsy armed men loose in a forest with a brief to kill anything big and hairy, then you must expect things to go wrong now and then. But around here, where the young move away to find jobs and the old come to retire, we’re usually pretty safe in assuming that we’ve lost one of the oldies.

Even in such a small village, most of these old-timers are strangers to me. They live quietly on their farms, and now and then I’ll see them at the bakery or a village fete. I might have heard a name, might have seen a face, but more often than not I’m unable to connect the two. And among those I do know, half of them I can’t communicate with on any meaningful level. I’ve mastered the quirky patois-laced French of Madame up the road, so I get more or less full benefit of her stories about life here half a century ago. Stories of children walking to school through the woods, of her late husband crafting skis out of felled chestnut trees one winter. Stories of the funeral processions that used to pass, on foot, along the rutted forest path down in the valley behind her farm. But with many of the others, I’m reduced to smiling and nodding and hoping they haven’t just informed me of a loved one’s tragic demise in a freak helicopter accident. We pass in the baker with a simple bonjour madame, bonjour monsieur. With those I know better we trade a few words, they in their very regional French, me in my halting, accented, schoolbook version of the language, and move on, happy to have understood what we could of each other.

I was reminded of how much I’m missing in these polite, content-free exchanges this past Thursday we went made our way to the village, as we do every year, for the Armistice Day celebrations. It was touching, as usual, with the Mayor’s traditional reading out of the names of the thirty-odd men who gave their lives in the First World War (and the two who died in the second) – names we all know, families of friends and neighbors we see every day. The familiarity of those names, and the recitation – “mort pour la France” – after each of them always makes the war feel close.

But this time Jean-Pierre added something. He announced that we were also here to honor one of our fellow villagers for his service in the Resistance. And with that, he called up Marc.

I’ve talked to Marc a few times, mostly about the weather. It turns out he was a baker’s son, and spent his evenings during the Occupation sneaking sacs of flour along footpaths to make bread for the Maquis hiding in the hills. I’d love to talk to him more, now that I know a bit of his past. Sadly, he falls into the category of people I can’t understand, but in his case it’s not so much the accent as the voice. Perhaps he smoked too many Gauloises to keep warm during those cold winter nights up in the hills.  He might have had major surgery on his larynx, or ruined his voice when singing for a rock band in the seventies for all I know. But when he speaks, his words sound like builder’s rubble grinding out of his mouth. He’s always friendly when we cross paths at the bakery, though, and until I get better at deciphering the scraping noises he produces in place of speech, that will have to be enough. Knowing a bit about his past, though, knowing the incredible stories this man must have to tell, makes me want to try a little harder next time.

And it makes me wonder what other stories hide behind the friendly smiles and bakery counter chitchat about weather or the strikes. There is so much history here in the churches and castles and old stone villages that it’s easy to forget the hidden history that still shuffles through farmers markets or sits wreathed in smoke at the cafes. Their stories won’t all be as extraordinary as Marc’s – he had the benefit and misfortune to live through more extraordinary times – but it’s good to be reminded now and then of what the old people here are carrying around inside them, the stories that give all this beautiful architecture and idyllic landscape meaning. Those people, and their stories, are slowly vanishing.

I don’t think the bells are ringing for Marc today. Most likely it’s someone I don’t know, one of the many old farmers holed up in the countryside, someone whose face I glanced over during a village Loto night, maybe one of those guys I get stuck behind on windy roads going half the speed limit. A familiar family name, someone’s grandfather, but not someone for whom I’ll personally mourn.

After hearing Marc’s story, though, I can’t hear those bells anymore without a little pause to wonder what has been lost.

The problem started in late May, when after a promising beginning spring turned damp and cold. For several weeks it seemed to rain nonstop, and when the temperature finally improved, the rain kept falling. We complained, we endured, and when the sun finally reemerged, we rejoiced.

When we began to spot cars parked here and there along the smaller woodland roads, we knew the mushrooms had arrived. The cars are usually white Renault 5′s – I think Renault must have been commissioned by some shadowy French Ministry for the Promotion of Rural Citizen Solidarity through Clandestine Mushroom Hunting to produce white R5′s in massive quantities and distribute them free of charge. Fair enough: not only do the mushroom-hunters rarely bother us – the law here dating from the time of the Revolution is that people can look for mushrooms on your land unless you post a sign to the contrary, and our neighbor has enough “Ceuillete de champignons interdit” signs posted to keep them away from our land as well – but they help enormously by functioning as a sort of alarm. We see those white R5s parked dangerously on the roadside and up dirt tracks in the woods, and we know to start searching.

We have three good patches that produce edible mushrooms. The sickly chestnut grove next to the holiday cottages produces fair quantities of girolles (otherwise known as chanterelles). The lawn in front of our house sprouts with white salad mushrooms in most years. And as a rarer but more prized treat, the playground in autumn gives us the occasional Cep de Bordeaux, better known as Porcinis. There are hundreds more varieties in the woods all around, including the lesser Porcini known as Ceps du Pin, but we leave pretty much everything else alone.

But our live and let live attitude towards the other mushrooms is not mutual. They grow, they rot, and they stink. We’ve gotten used to this – it’s an unpleasant smell, but it helps knowing what it is, and it never lasts long. Like wood smoke in winter, hay and BBQs and lavender in summer, it’s a familiar reminder of the time of year (usually autumn, but all bets are off this year, and we’re eating Cep omelettes in June).

But this spring we smelled something else – a dead animal near the kitchen. We thought nothing of it at first. Our cat Oliver gets kind of rough with the local mice and doesn’t always finish what he’s caught, so we assumed it would go away in a day or two. It didn’t. Some days were better, some worse, but on and off for a couple of weeks we avoided walking out the kitchen door to avoid being assailed by the mild but persistent reek of rotten flesh.

Mushrooms, for all their fragrant charms, never really crossed my mind as a possible culprit, but there it is. The Phallus impudicus is variously known as the “common Stinkhorn,” the “Devil’s Egg” or the “Stinking Satyr” mushroom. Pick your name, they all work. Depending on your sense of propriety, it looks either like a white penis with a glistening, almost melting dark brown tip thrusting out of a scrotum lying on the ground or, well… no, there is no other way to see it. This charming little piece of God’s creation spreads its spores through its symbiotic relation with flies, so rather than smell lovely like a flower, it reeks of rotting meat. The smell is strong enough to hit your nose from a distance of twenty meters.

My French field guide to mushrooms helpfully advises that the stinking penis part of this mushroom is not edible. The scrotum bit, or the egg if you prefer, can be eaten, but is not particularly tasty. I’ll have to pass that on to our mushroom-hunter friends in their Renault 5′s.

Phallus impudicus (aroma not included)

We don’t often get snow here. Most Quercy winters are mild, with frosty nights and days that almost always rise well above freezing, and maybe every other year a few inches of snow that quickly melts away in a day or two. It’s the sort of warm-climate snow that cold-climate people will smugly assert doesn’t really count. I spent too many years as a California boy living in Boston to publicly confuse it with the real thing.

But this year it was real by any standard, a solid foot of fresh powder too dry to make snowballs and too cold to melt away in the weak winter sun. School would remain open because La Maitresse lives close enough to walk, and would consist of a handful of kids throwing snowballs in the village square. Sebastian was willing to walk many a mile to be part of it. Our pretext had arrived.

Monday morning dawned sunny and bitter cold, -7°C, and the atmosphere in our house was like base camp an hour before the final assault on Everest. Turtlenecks – check. Heavy sweaters – check. Parkas, hats, gloves – check check check. We didn’t have any snow boots to speak of, but Wellingtons and two pairs of socks do the trick just fine, and for Sebastian a pair of homemade gaiters fashioned from plastic bags and rubber bands. Sophia filled a backpack with a bottle of water, a cell phone and some spare clothing in case Sebastian got wet at school, and waved us off as we boys embarked on our big adventure.

The road was an ice rink, so for the first 15 minutes or so we shuffle along carefully at the edges until we reach the head of the dirt track that descends into the valley. The crystalline silence that surrounds us is broken only by the occasional cascade of snow among the branches and by our own chatter. Every few minutes we stop to inspect some animal tracks. I try to be fatherly and didactic, to speak with calm authority about each line of prints in the virgin snow. Bird, dog, cat, and deer I manage just fine, but beyond that my urban roots hold me back. We decide that one track was a hare – long narrow prints and grooves marked in the drifts where the animal seemed to have hopped – and another a fox. The wide dragging marks we optimistically decide has been caused by a passing badger. My suggestion of Gruffalo is treated with the contempt it deserved. Sebastian plans on being a scientist, after all – he has no time for Gruffalos.

At the bottom of the hill, the path crosses the valley floor past a poplar grove and a vegetable patch. The valley was mostly marshland in the Middle Ages, I read somewhere, and still gets pretty boggy in wet weather, so our crossing takes forever as we navigate through icey mud and stop to tap at every frozen puddle with our sticks. Eventually we cross the stream and reach the road, beyond which we begin to climb again towards the village along a rocky path overhung with overgrown snow-laden box trees. Well over an hour after we set out, we emerge into the village square, Sebastian gently cradling a two-foot long icicle he collected on the ascent.

We spot La Maitresse and half a dozen kids in the courtyard, and suddenly Sebastian’s world swallows him. He trots to the gate gingerly over the ice and snow, and his classmates run to greet him. The icicle-wielding arctic tracker is transformed back into a second-grader. The village is animated – so I spent the next half hour chatting with the mayor and getting bread at the bakery before making the trip home. Come early, La Maitresse suggests as I go, we’ll be having hot chocolate at 4:30.

The way home is quicker and quieter on my own. I don’t need to crack open the ice-crusted puddles or speculate on tracks in the snow. At least, not all of them, although one set does catch my attention. They speak of a funny little creature larger than the badger, smaller than the Gruffalo, and shadowed by another member of the same species roughly twice the size. Adult and offspring, making their way through near-virgin snow.

I stare at the tracks for a thoughtful minute or two but then hurry on, looking forward to the warmth of the fire and the prospect of returning for hot chocolate in the school cantine.

One thing I’ve always admired about the school is the meals. Danielle, who among other things is in charge of feeding both children and teachers at lunchtime, doesn’t cut corners. There are no ready-made box lunches here, nor is there junk food cafeteria fare. She cooks everything from scratch, three courses, with local ingredients when possible. When we ask Sebastian about his day at school, he invariably responds with a commentary on the day’s lunch menu.

“It was GREAT. We had, um, canard, and a really good salad, and a sort of, I don’t know, a gratin, which I didn’t eat, and then for dessert, tarte aux poires.” Sometimes the poisson is the good poisson, sometimes it’s the horrible poisson. The lentils are wonderful, the haricots are just okay. Some dishes have too much gras, but most pass inspection with flying colors. They are the benchmark against which all restaurant food is compared, and almost all declared to be better than anything I produce.

So when Danielle told Sophia that she was hoping for some feedback from parents, and that she would love it if a volunteer would come eat with the teachers and tell her what he thought of her cooking, I felt duty bound by my Official Capacity to, please forgive me, step up to the plate.

The school lunch menu comes home in the little red notebook every Monday, so that we know for the week what Sebastian will be eating and can plan evening meals to complement whatever Danielle has whipped up that morning. When told that I would be a willing parental guinea pig, Danielle asked Sebastian to inform me that I was welcome anytime, but to give a few days warning. Fair enough – I checked the menu, carefully avoiding the unpredictable poisson, and opted for Thursday.

The school occupies the same building as the mayor’s office and the town hall, located right in the middle of the village square, just opposite the church and the Monument des Morts, in place of what used to be the medieval covered market. The left door, with “Ecole” written neatly on a wooden plaque above it, leads into a narrow hallway lined with child-height coat hooks. To the right is an unmarked and closed door leading into the Mayor’s office, and to the left, the doorway into the classroom for grades three through five. Down at the end of the hall the left door leads into the first and second grade classroom, and to the right a thickly painted wooden flight of steps leads up to the school dining room, kitchen and library.

There is something effusive and almost maternal in the way Danielle greets me, although she can’t be more than a few years older than I am. This is her domain. I’m half tempted to reply “oui, madame” when she directs me to wait in the library, where a little table is set for four.

In the few minutes that pass before the arrival of the children and the two teachers, I have a chance to look around. The library is the one part of the building that is resolutely 21st century. One side, shelves of tattered children’s books stare awkwardly across the room at a row of new laptops and a digital whiteboard, all courtesy of a grant to rural schools. Staring out the window, I look past the 14th century church belltower and see a house in the distance, perched against a hillside, surrounded by trees. Our house.

Suddenly a loud clatter on the stairs announces the end of class, and thirty kids roar into the little dining room. Once the clattering of chairs settles down and gives way to mere laughter and squealing, I peek in hoping to wave unobtrusively as Sebastian.

“Enfants!” bellows Danielle, and instantly the children fell quiet. “We have a visitor.”

“Bonjour monsieur,” intone thirty solemn little voices, accompanied by a few shy smiles and waves from Sebastian’s closer friends.

“Bonjour tout le monde,” I answer, doing my best not to embarrass Sebastian. Thirty little heads pause for a moment before returning to more interesting subjects. I get a proud little smile from my son, which is the only reason I’m here in the first place, so I disappear again to the library as the dining-room explodes into chatter.

The teachers appear a few minutes later. La Maitresse is a short, round pleasant looking woman somewhere in her thirties with a strong aura of authority, a good sense of humor and an obscure passion for American country line dancing. Quick to laugh, quick to yell, she manages to keep her pupils in line without terror and to make them feel loved without any treacle-sweet displays of affection. She’s the ideal teacher for this little band of troublesome and innocent country kids. And not a bad lunch companion.

Danielle arrives with the first course, a vegetable and noodle soup, and shortly thereafter our fourth lunch companion Dédé makes an appearance. Dédé is the cantonnier of our neighboring village, Cassagnes. Each village has one of these guys. Essentially they are the village handymen – they look after the plants, fix whatever needs fixing, fill in the occasional potholes and generally do whatever needs doing. Dédé is scrawny, muscular, weatherworn and utterly incomprehensible. Sitting down next to me, he takes command of the soup and the conversation, which turns to a variety of subjects that I only now and then manage to follow. Trees, I think. Or possibly taxes.

Soup is followed by beautiful slices of roast beef, done rare, accompanied by green beans cooked in plenty of butter and garlic. For dessert, chocolate cake – two slices, since Sebastian, for reasons best known to himself, is not fond of this particular recipe and has asked Danielle to give me his share – followed by coffee. It would have been a good meal in any local restaurant. Had she brought out a carafe of wine, I don’t think I would have blinked.

Just as we are finishing clearing the table and stacking plates in the kitchen, Danielle suddenly loses her apron and transforms herself into the school librarian. The chairs in the dining room all start clattering again and a swarm of children pour into the library ready to exchange last week’s books for a new selection. Dédé vanishes, after giving me a broad smile and muttering something that sounds like he’s challenging me to a duel.

It is time to go, but I don’t really want to. Sebastian is at a table in one corner with his friends, looking at books and chattering in French. The teachers are turning their attention to grading papers. This is his world, their world, but part of me wants it to be mine as well. I can’t help thinking that the wisps of memory I still hold of my own school days seem very poor compared with the vivid present of Sebastian’s. Is this tiny school, with all its charm and all its limitations, better or worse than what I had as a child? Better or worse than what we could provide elsewhere. I don’t know, but what is clear is that it is real and now and good. And most of all, it is his.

I wave goodbye, but he is already deep in discussion with his friends and doesn’t see me. That’s okay. He’ll be home in a few short hours, and then we can compare notes about Danielle’s roast beef.

After two weeks vacation on the Mediterranean coast, eating seafood, wandering around Montpellier’s apparent contradiction of clean streets and old French charm, tasting wine and soaking up the dry warmth of the southern autumn sun, I’ve been having a hard time mustering up the energy required to be back home. The list of annoying jobs waiting for me seems endless. And to top it off, the school bingo night (the infamous Loto) is this Saturday, which means we organizers must go from house to house asking our fellow villagers to cough up a prize, like a bottle of wine, or some cash with which we can buy more prizes to offer to the winners of each round. I’m as eager as the next guy to raise money for the village school, but I have to admit I fell slightly short of being thrilled.

The lore here has it that this operation is best done in teams of two, so I paired up with Sylvain. I like Sylvain. We have nothing in common whatsoever, apart from a shared residency in Montcabrier and the looming specter of male pattern baldness. But he’s open minded, good-natured and armed with a lively sense of humor, so gathering prizes with him would mean a couple hours of wisecracking peppered with gossip about village life and cattle rearing. One could do worse.

“I’ll get there as soon as I can, some time after 10:30,” he told me the day before. “As soon as I have all the animals fed. Then we do what we can before lunch, and finish up later in the afternoon.”

Sylvain rolled up in his French farmer’s standard issue white Peugeot a little before noon, and off we went. First stop, Fabrizio and Claudia. They were already having lunch, but no matter. They pledged a rabbit and a wheel of cheese, thankfully to be delivered on the day of the Loto. I wasn’t surprised that we ended up chatting there for a good 20 minutes or so; it’s rare to escape from Fabrizio and Claudia in under a half hour and without having a cup of coffee and carrying away a bag of vegetables.

But it did set the tone for the day. Sylvain of course knows everyone, and being the gregarious sort he is, every house was an excuse for a long conversation. I knew a fair amount of the people we visited, happily, but in a way the strangers were more interesting. When Sylvain dove into intense discussions about livestock and agricultural equipment with other farmers I just did a lot of smiling and nodding, but I learned all sorts of things. Badgers, for example. Turns out they are even more destructive to crops than wild boar. A small deer can fit through a one foot square hold in a wire fence. Fabrizio’s cow cheese is made with milk from Sylvain’s cows. There is no longer such a thing as French made tennis/sports shoes (was there ever?). French agriculture is financially unviable. You can buy a brand new Chinese tractor for 7000 euros. Chinese shoes fall apart quickly. And yes, the Chinese are taking over the world.

We had only covered maybe a dozen houses when Sylvain suggested lunch. So we pulled over next to an abandoned barn and had a picnic of bread, homemade wild boar pate, homemade plum jam and roasted chestnuts, while Sylvain told me about all the feuds being fought among the various old-timers of the village. There are a lot of people who hold grudges for things that happened decades ago, he explained. One family will never give anything for the Loto because of a dispute with a former mayor that happened some time in the 1980′s. Another woman won’t set foot in the village because of a long list of people she considers to be “conasses” (you can guess).

Sylvain just laughed. This is his world. He is a farmer who has hardly ever even ventured as far as Paris, much less set foot outside France, and yet he is as broad minded and curious as the most educated and well-traveled people I know. He sees the humor of the live chickens and rabbits people offer as prizes, the sadness of the elderly widows whose minds were no longer in a state to quite understand what we had come about, the silliness of the feuding neighbors. He can appreciate the different but equally poignant beauties of the painting offered as a prize by the respected artist who gave us a tour of his workshop, and of the box of instant mashed potatoes and bag of macaroni given by the elderly woman who used to own the village bar.

His world is a village and countryside called home by a little over 400 people. But it’s a complex and beautiful world nonetheless. I’ll never quite do it justice.

Autumn has arrived, and taught us its bittersweet lesson. Nothing lasts forever.

It would be very easy to let this get me down. Every time I go outside I eye the workshop where my chainsaw waits impatiently to begin its winter long feast. I see the pool collecting leaves and the absurdly heavy and cumbersome winter cover waiting to be dragged over it. I try to ignore all the garden furniture outside our newly-hibernating holiday cottages that still needs to be brought indoors. If I feel like indulging in a bit of early bah humbug, I’ve got every opportunity.

But it’s such a beautiful time of year that I can’t help loving it, despite its pervasive  reminders of mortality. It’s still sunny, and the days are still warm enough, even if the nights are flirting with frost. The leaves, though they collect into enormous items on my ‘to do’ list, are turning gentle shades of red and yellow. We get none of the fierce New England colors here – our autumn is far more subdued, as if while working on the leaf color it had paused for a long lunch and after the second glass of wine decided that mellow oranges and yellows were just fine. The rest of nature seems to have come out of hiding now that the summer visitors have gone. I found deer tracks in the garden yesterday when I harvested the last of the eggplants, and the trees are buzzing with dark little squirrels. Every time I pass by the barn of Monsieur Dutoit, the village roofer, he’s under his walnut tree with a basket collecting the nuts before the squirrels beat him to it.

One of my favorite things about autumn is that Sebastian is back in school. I mean that in the nicest, most fatherly way of course. Yes, we lose having the little guy around the house all the time, but what we gain in stories from school more than makes up for it, assuming we can pry them out of him. The lunch menu at least we now get as a printout at the beginning of the week – they had mussels yesterday (I’m dying to know if Danielle cooked them in white wine), and escalope de veau the day before. Last week filet of salmon was the highlight. And of course we always know what he’s working on in class because of his homework – “Justine” has been replaced this week by “Gaspard le Cafard.” Even his cartoon cockroaches have names like Gaspard. Sometimes I feel like his teacher does this stuff on purpose just to pull my leg.

But any other tidbits from his school day require a certain amount of interrogation.

“What happened at school today?”

Shrug. “Nothing.”

I fish. “Was it a good day?”

“Yeah, great. Can I watch television?”

“Come on, something interesting must have happened. Why was it great?”

“Don’t remember. Papa, Yugioh is coming on soon. Can I watch?”

These are the hard truths of globalization: you can take a kid and hide him in the remotest corner of the French countryside, give him farmers kids to play with and a garden to tend, and he’ll still get addicted to Japanese cartoons and their associated merchandise.

At first I blamed television, but it turns out that the Ecole Primaire de Montcabrier doubles as a subversive indoctrination facility for something called Yugioh. For those of you not already obsessed with what Sebastian insists is “the most famous game in France,” Yugioh is a card game, but rather than having a standard pack of cards, there are hundreds of different cards. Part of the “game” is collecting your deck. Sebastian tried to explain the rules to me as he showed me various cards he had been given by friends. Each monster has attack points and defense points and a star rating and special abilities. Some are “infini” (infinite) meaning that they are unbeatable, except by other cards that have certain powers seeming, to my unenlightened mind, to derive from their belonging to bigger kids. When I questioned any of this, I was immediately treated to the dreaded “oh papa why are you so dumb” look that I’d hoped he wouldn’t develop for another few years.

Meanwhile, the kids in Montcabrier were all experts. They were busy knowingly trading their cards back and forth (“we all echanger every day at recess”) while Sophia and I pathetically researched the game on the internet. What we found was a massive body of lore that made the Code of Justinian look like the rulebook for checkers. There was no way these kids were actually playing Yugioh.

As Sebastian’s share of Spanish and Chinese versions of the cards grew, we began to become suspicious. “Oh, Jimmy told me that the Spanish ones are really powerful.” The Chinese ones also had certain magical abilities when used against smaller kids, but not against bigger ones. This was clearly going wrong.

Finally one day after school I asked the baker’s daughter what she thought of it all. She shrugged. “They just make up the rules as they go along. It’s just the big kids trying cheat the little ones out of the good cards.” Luckily the all-imposing figure of La Maitresse intervened. The headmistress – a funny title in a school with only two teachers – is still a personality who inspires awe even in adults in rural France. Ours is firm but fair, and decided in one fell swoop that Yugioh would be officially banned at school. We were relieved. So was Sebastian.

The contentious Yugioh cards were replaced, rather touchingly, by marbles. With the weather still fairly warm, the children went out into the courtyard every recess and played billes. Sebastian was thrilled. He’d traded a few of his own for some very pretty ones. The idyllic world of Montcabrier was restored to its natural timeless order.

Until the other day.

“You’re not bringing your billes today?” I ask in amazement just before the school bus arrives.

“The answer to that papa is N O N. No. “

I was shocked. He had been obsessed with playing marbles for a couple of weeks now. Why the sudden turnaround?

“No one plays. All they want to do is echanger. Maitresse said if there is one more dispute, billes will be banned.”

Just another hard lesson for the second graders of Montcabrier. Nothing lasts forever.

When we planted last spring, we were all about enthusiasm, pest control and fertilizer. Then the first radishes started to swell up, two rows of twisted little red and white bullets sticking out of the soil, and we were ecstatic. Sebastian would pluck a few every night, whether they were ready or not. But what we really had our eyes on was the tomatoes.

And then they struck. With a vengeance. An unusually hot and sunny summer, combined with my expert watering from our quaintly unpredictable cistern pump and the occasional dose of homemade nettle fertilizer gave our tomatoes the perfect growing conditions. They grew by the hundreds. They wouldn’t stop. The courgettes also went wild, and even the usually tricky aubergines thrived. All over the Quercy, in every village and every valley, the talk was about out-of-control vegetables.

If the spectacle of crusty old French men comparing the size of their courgettes disturbs you, you’re not alone, but rest assured it’s part of a venerable Gallic tradition of talking for hours about pretty much anything, but especially about food. I sometimes suspect that it’s one of the main motivations for the French obsession with vegetable gardens. Sure, people have got to eat, and yes, this is a poor agricultural community, but survival itself as a priority seems to come only just ahead of being able to combine food and the weather into one discussion. It all goes back to a time – in the Quercy, that time was a matter of a few mere decades ago – when farming was communal activity and the heart of village social life. Everyone would help out with everyone else’s crops, particularly at harvest time, and afterwards gather in the village bar or café to talk. And like a bunch of lawyers who once they’re off work can talk about nothing but their deals, the French farmers presumably sat around over a jug of cider and talked about their ‘taters.

So in June we all talked about how wonderful our fresh tomatoes and courgettes were. All through July everyone compared notes about how hard it was to keep up with the watering. And as the long hot days of August wore on, the same question must have started to nag at the minds of vegetable gardeners all over southern France – what am I going to do with all these tomatoes? The press can talk all they want about health care reform and swine flu, but around here the summer of 2009 will be remembered as a summer of too many wasps and too much damned ratatouille.

There really is such a thing as too much ratatouille. I first learned this during the only period in my life I ever had a cook. During my two years in Guinea, Mr. Dabo cooked for me most nights. I didn’t really want him to – I had hired him more or less out of a feeling of obligation – but Mr. Dabo had been a cook in Nigeria, and his pride was at stake. I’d get home from work and there he’d be, back from the local market, stirring something in a pot and launching into another convoluted story about whatever had happened in the neighborhood that day. His traditional Guinean chicken in groundnut sauce was a particular favorite – it was not unlike a mild chicken satay – served with fonio, a tasty local grain that falls somewhere on the spectrum between couscous and coarse sand. But apart from mangos, palm oil, cassava leaves and the occasional very skinny chicken, the most readily available ingredients were tomatoes, onions and courgettes. So a couple times week, Mr Dabo would make ratatouille. It was good too. Night after night.

Of course there are other things you can make with tomatoes – salads, sauces, stuffed tomatoes, gazpacho, we’ve done it all. We’ve even tried giving them away. In past years we’ve been given so much fresh produce from others with gardens, we were really looking forward to being able to give something back this year. But forget it – everyone else has the same problem. We’ve managed to give away some plums and hazelnuts, and we were very happy with our neighbor’s figs and fresh eggs. But offering someone a tomato these days borders on insulting. Even Sebastian, who a few weeks ago was inhaling cherry tomatoes all day long and proclaiming that he wasn’t interested in eating anything that didn’t come out of our garden, now can hardly look at the things. These days he’s all about bread and scrambled eggs.

The garden is starting to look ragged now, and even as the dark green pumpkins begin their fade to light orange, the tomato plants are drooping. It’s a relief. As much as we’ve enjoyed the luxury of a constant stream of fresh summer vegetables, I’m looking forward to a change. Pumpkin dishes. Potatoes. Spinach. Heavier, wintery food. We just have to get through a freezer full of ratatouille first.

It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. I earned my California driver’s license when I was 16, and never a moving violation since. So when we moved here, I didn’t worry too much. Our other foreign friends – British and Dutch mostly – had eventually gotten round to filling out a form and being granted a French license on the strength of already having passed the test in their own countries. So I figured there’d be nothing to it. Merely one little bureaucratic hurdle to jump. In France. What could go wrong?

So a few months ago I finally got around to visiting the Prefecture in Cahors to pick up the relevant forms. America? the man behind the counter asked, as if I’d told him I was from Vanuatu. “Don’t get many of those. Which state? After much consultation and a few phone calls, I was informed, with a genuine show of sympathy, that my California driving license did not entitle me to a French one. I could drive with it as a tourist, but now that I’m a resident, I would need a French license. And for us benighted Californians, that means starting from scratch, like any 18-year-old who had never sat behind the wheel of a car before.

Perhaps my understanding of things has acquired a Gallic tinge after four years of living here, but it seems clear to me that this is all about wine. Had I, when I lived in Guinea, simply paid a small fee for a Guinean driver’s license, I could have exchanged it for a French one without any hassle (except, perhaps, for a few raised eyebrows). If I had a Virginia license, I could have exchanged it. Kansas? No problem. But California’s a different story. We’re the competition. No offense to the undoubtedly lovely wines produced in Virginia or in Kansas, or for that matter to the fine tradition of palm-wine production in Guinea (an acquired taste, but it has its charms if you can ignore the inevitable bits of dirt floating in it and its unsettling resemblance to dishwater), but I can’t help suspecting that this spiteful bit of bureaucracy has a whiff the cellar about it.

So for the past few months, off and on, as time permitted, I’ve been sitting in classes with the youth of the surrounding villages learning, inter alia, what all those obscure-looking French road signs mean. And I have to admit, it’s not a bad thing to know; signs like this can be kind of alarming if you’re not prepared for them:

Ignorance is potentially expensive too – this one let’s you know that you are now leaving a zone where parking is permitted on one side of the road for the first 15 days of the month and on the other for the second half of the month. Can’t say I would have guessed that one.

Others, well, a little guesswork only gets you so far. I knew that a red circle meant that something was forbidden, but what exactly am I being warned not to do here?

Worrisome. And here? No big tacky yellow Hummers? (If only…)

Or this? Tanker trucks filled with ketchup not allowed to drive on water?

Still, for the past few months, I’ve started identifying with this one:

But my brief stay in automotive purgatory is at an end. Monday morning, 7:45, I joined half a dozen other youngsters at the bus stop next to the train station in Cahors, and waited patiently for the examiner to show up. We all stood there, fidgeting, looking at our watches, and as I felt my stomach doing little flips something rather grim occurred to me. Despite the 21 years that have passed since I too was a nervous 18 year old, with all the experiences I have under my belt and all the education I have supposedly acquired, I can still quaver in fear at the thought of a driving test. Two more decades of acquired wisdom, and I haven’t learned a damn thing.

I got the better of my nerves in the end, and I passed with flying colors. Good thing too – it was taking up way too much of my time. And maybe now I can get back to doing some of the other things I keep not managing to get around to. Like writing about my own classic car.

Soon. Really.

And with all of these tourists and summer-house-owners come the cars.

This sounds like a negative, and to some degree of course it is. The roads get more crowded, there are lines at the gas stations, and sometimes you actually have to look around for a bit before you find a parking place. Many newcomers here aren’t used to narrow country roads, or are overawed by the scenery, or are just plain lost. Or just plain bad drivers. Or in the general excitement have taken too much or too little of their meds. Hard to say, but between the ones going half the speed limit, the others going twice the speed limit, the lost Dutch motor home drivers who stop in the middle of intersections to consult their maps and the enthusiastic English new arrivals who forget about that little matter of driving on the right, summer in the Quercy becomes largely a question of getting from A to B alive.

That being said, the Quercy and surroundings are ideal motoring country. Not just driving, but motoring around in a car you love because it’s old or collectible or stylish or convertible (and please notice that “fast” was not in that list) just for the sake of watching the scenery go by and knowing that, in your snazzy car, you are an interesting part of it.

This draws a lot of unusual machines down here in summer to stir up the everyday selection of 1950’s tractors and tattered 1990’s Renault 5’s. As with dogs, the interesting thing about cars is often their juxtaposition with their owners. There are a few patterns. There are the gay couples celebrating their youth in their well-tended little convertibles. There are the retired English couples celebrating their second youth similarly well-tended and slightly larger convertibles. There’s the occasional elderly couple in something outrageously classic like an old Bentley, or sleazy middle-aged guy with salt-and-pepper hair and dark sunglasses in his Ferrari, or smug overgrown boys in dune buggies. Recently one sees more oddly-matched couples in motorcycles with sidecars, the ultimate way to travel with someone without actually having to speak to them.

I think my favorites though are Aston Martyrs. They all tell the same story. He is an old car buff. He wasn’t when he was younger, but at some point he became obsessed by classic cars and acquired a vintage Aston Martin. He learned everything about it. He knows all the trivia, much of the mechanics, and has poured his soul into restoring the old beast to pristine condition. She at first found this charming. Oh, Richard and his old cars, she’d say to friends, but it was more boasting than complaining. She found his enthusiasm charming, and was relieved that it was directed at something attractive and stylish.

But as the years went on, she realized that the Aston Martin had become part of their marriage. It was his mistress, they had become a ménage a trios. And now their trips to the Continent are all the same – instead of flying down to the Mediterranean coast, instead of a city break somewhere in Italy, every year the Aston Martyrs have to drive all the way south through France. They always break down somewhere, and always have to attend another interminable classic car rally somewhere else. She smiles, makes the best of it, and of course looks utterly charming in that classic English way sitting in the passenger seat of a vintage roadster driving through the French countryside. But it is a grim, enduring sort of smile.

I can’t help but smile back at her. Every year the Quercy offers its visitors a very full schedule of markets, festivals and concerts to liven up their holidays, but she is part of the unscheduled summer entertainment that visitors bring here with them. Even though we’ve tucked ourselves away among farms and villages of France profonde, we are given a regular glimpse of the outside world as the tragicomic parade of humanity marches by for a few months every year. I would feel bereft without it.

And next week, if all goes well, I’ll write about my own classic car.