A few weeks ago I made a phone call that rattled me, and not for any of the reasons a phone call usually rattles a person.
We still own a small property in California, which we rent out as a vacation rental. The glass in one of the windows had cracked, so I looked up a local glass company and dialed the number, already bracing. I don’t know what I was bracing for. I think my body just braces now before phone calls, out of habit.
A woman answered. She was warm and clear. She called me honey, with a little Southern curl. She understood the problem before I even finished describing it. She told me what it would cost, when they could come (an actual date and time), and what I needed to do, which was nothing. The whole thing took four minutes. I hung up and stared at Sean and said, out loud, with the astonishment of a woman who has seen a miracle: “Wow. That was so easy.”
And then I sat with the strangeness of that. Because there was a version of me, three years ago, who would have made that exact phone call and thought absolutely nothing of it. Booking a glass repair was not, back then, a candidate for the highlight of my week.
This is what France has done to me. It has made a competent phone call feel like Christmas morning.
Now don’t worry, this isn’t a sad post.
This is not the one where the American abroad tallies up everything she gave up and dabs at her eyes with a linen napkin she bought at a local brocante. And it’s also not the one where everything is bluebells and warm baguettes and I pretend the hard parts don’t exist.
They do.
The life we chose here is, in a lot of concrete and unglamorous ways, harder than the one we left. I am saying that out here because the pretty photos don’t. But it’s a choose-your-hard situation. Every life is hard somewhere. You just get to pick where.
We picked here. Let me show you the math.
The things that America made easy
America is, among many other things, a masterpiece of convenience, and I did not fully appreciate this until I no longer had it.
In America, the world comes to your door. Amazon arrives the same day, sometimes before you’ve fully changed out of your pajamas. Whole Foods delivers your groceries while you’re on a call. You can buy anything, in bulk, in a single trip, and it will keep for weeks, because a strawberry in America has been engineered to endure.
You can call a company and a pleasant person will answer and solve your problem in your own language and it will cost you four minutes.
You can, in short, live at a certain speed. The systems are built for it. The websites work. The customer service exists. The whole country hums along on the assumption that your time is precious and should not be wasted, and there is something quite wonderful about that, something I miss more than I expected to.
We gave the convenience up knowingly. But that easy phone call had one more thing going for it I haven't mentioned: it was in English. Which brings me to the part of this life that's hard for reasons we brought on ourselves.
The language (which is entirely our fault)
Here is the thing nobody likes to admit about moving to a country whose language you do not speak: it is your fault, and it stays your fault.
We could fix this. We could! We could, in theory, sit down and master the damn language and remove 90% of the friction from our daily lives. That we have not fully done so is fully on us. In our defense, we have been mildly busy: raising two small children, being our own bosses, building a new life, and now renovating a château (which is not, in fact, easy peasy lemon squeezy). But the language is the big one, and it puts us at a disadvantage.
For a long time, every phone call here was a miniature torture session. Fumbling, misunderstanding, the panic of realizing the person on the other end has asked you a question and is now waiting. My greatest rhetorical achievement in French for most of our first year was begging people, in broken conditional tense, to please just send me an email. The French phone call is its own genre of humbling, and I have starred in many episodes.
So when that woman at the California glass company answered the phone and simply helped me, in a language I could fully understand, my whole nervous system didn’t know what to do with itself.
But somewhere along the way, without noticing, I got braver. I now pick up the phone and dial a French number knowing it will likely be a small train wreck, and I do it anyway. That’s new. The old me needed things to be easy in order to do them. This me has made peace with the wreck. And we’ve improved with the language, probably more than we give ourselves credit for. It’s still not easy. but I’ve stopped needing it to be.
If you’re new here: I’m Kamille, an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband Sean and our two kids. Once Upon a Castle is where I write about the life, the renovation, and the ongoing education of two Americans who thought they knew what they were getting into. Subscribe to follow along.
Which brings me to the part I don’t usually get into: the actual trade, the one the pretty photos don’t show. What we gave up and what we got. The money, the exhaustion, the extravagant Christmas caroling costume I once pumped breast milk under in a parked car, why my berries now stage a full science experiment on the counter, and the reason we’d choose this hard all over again.
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