There’s a little sign that starts going up on doors around here in the third week of July. Fermé or fermeture annuelle. Some are printed, though most are handwritten and taped up crooked, with a reopening date in September that reads a bit more like a wish than a commitment. The boulangerie, the pharmacy, the dry cleaner, the bookshop, the little grocer, the man who was supposed to be building our pool. Gone, all of them, and all around the same time, like the whole country picked a date and I’m the only one who was out of the loop.
The first summer, I didn’t really get it. Now, I know to duck.
We found out the hard way last August, when we were in escrow on the château and trying to get a loan out of a French bank. I’d finally gotten one to take us seriously. Finally! They asked for documents and I would fire every one back within the hour of each request, aggressively American about the whole thing, and then asked when I might hear something.
“Well,” she said, “I’m off on vacation the first two weeks of August. But once I’m back, I can review the file.”
“Okay! No problem!” I said, with a forced smile I had to assemble from spare parts.
I waited, and then followed up mid-month, once she was back (all sun-kissed and refreshed). She told me she’d reviewed the file, but there was just one thing - she now had to bring it to her boss, who was, as of that week, off for the second two weeks of August. So, earliest reply would be the first week of September, probably.
I did the American thing and assumed there had to be a workaround. Some colleague standing in. Perhaps even just one other human being at that bank with a functioning email who was not, at that particular moment, on a beach.
“Everyone is on vacation in August,” she told me, kindly and with a hint of sympathy.
And that was that. Even the bank empties out, and apparently nobody stays behind to keep an eye on things while it does. It delayed the purchase of our forever home by about a month, and we waited it out like the obedient foreigners we are (eventually they said yes, and we got the castle. Ultimately a happy ending).
This year I went looking for a cleaner for the coach house. We’d just finished it and put it up on Airbnb, and I needed someone dependable for the changeovers between guests. Found a local company that does exactly this (cleaners just for gîtes), called them about August, and still somehow managed to be surprised.
“Well, most of them are on vacation in August.”
So August is the month everyone in France wants to come stay at your place, and also the month you can’t find a single soul to clean it, because the people who’d clean it are off being somebody else’s guests.
The pool has been its own saga. The heatwave really did slow things down, I’ll give it that. But the deeper problem was the calendar. It was supposed to be finished by the end of July, which felt safe right up until I remembered what July is followed by. A couple of small delays (which every project has), and there we were in August. August barely counts as a month on the work calendar here. It’s more of a...rumor. Nobody would be building a pool in August. Nobody builds anything in August. It’s the sort of thing every French person already knows and every American has to work out eventually.
July is the really fun part, actually. That’s the month when you keep running into your neighbors and everyone is buzzing with pre-trip energy, dying to tell you where they’re headed and for how long, and there’s a real chance you’ll be handed a phone and walked through the entire Airbnb they’ve booked, room by room. Then, the country takes a breath at the end of July and holds it, and comes back in September with fuller cups and more relaxed shoulders.
One person on holiday is one person on holiday. Sixty-some million of them at once is a different thing, and you can actually feel the energy of it, this drop in the collective blood pressure. The striving and the hustling just stop (so does the bank, apparently).
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The part I kind of love is that everyone is in on it, and nobody apologizes for taking the time. Nobody sneaks it, or pretends it’s a few sick days. It’s expected, employers included, and the law itself is on vacation’s side.
By law, French workers get five weeks of paid vacation, and it doesn’t stop at offering it. The law also makes you take a big continuous chunk in summer, somewhere between May and October. You are, on paper, legally required to relax. Imagine that! Back home (in the U.S.) there’s no such law. None. Zero required paid days off, and the average American takes around eleven days off (and even feels it’s a triumph using nine of them).
For us, the sweet surprise has been the magical vibes of a French summer.
I remember first discovering something different about the light here. It does not quit in the evenings. Still going at 9/9:30pm, and it’s very hard to send anyone to bed while this gorgeous light is putting on a performance. We don’t have the fancy summer camps I’d probably have defaulted to in California, so the kids have just been with us, all day, all summer, and it’s turned into one of my favorite stretches of the whole year. Family is coming this month to spend their holiday here, which means a lot of long dinners outside and, if the pool people ever resurface, a pool.
We even took a trip, which we hadn’t planned to do. Just a small one, to Brittany, eating our way through restaurants and swimming in the pool of the place we rented and making new friends who were visiting from across the world, all while getting a little sunburned. We almost didn’t go, because we’ve been so far down the renovation hole that a trip felt indulgent, almost irresponsible. And then not going started to feel wrong, which turned out to be the best peer pressure I’ve ever caved to. When in France.
The summer evenings we mostly spend on simple things. A bit of fishing in the river (results pending), walks in the forest, board games, long dinners outside. Some nights we just read out loud and draw at the table until 10pm, which is almost certainly bad parenting, and which the kids have loved more than most things we’ve actually planned for them.
The dry cleaner is still shut and I have no idea where the pool guy went, but I’m focusing instead on the relaxed shoulders and the light and the long dinners.
À bientôt,
Kamille
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I remember an English gentleman asking 'what do you mean they are closed?' Nope, not a siësta. A whole month. He thought it a miracle anything happened in France. Well, between the siësta hours and August, it does. 🤣
I love France for exactly THIS. Right now, I am in Greece, and they even top such relaxed life every single day, with big smiles at that. Southern Europe is restoring my soul.