The Full Basket

Well, I'm back in Valenciennes! The holiday went by so quickly. Seriously, the tomato in the refridgerator didn't even have time to go bad.

I wish this could be a really long, insightful and entertaining post about La Grande Bretagne (Great Britain) and our travels there, but I'm feeling a bit sick. This is just a quick message to let everyone know I'm back safely and tell one story from the day.

This afternoon, after work (a day that included a possible gas leak at school), after riding the bus and the tram, I was not thrilled to be back in France. People here speak French. It doesn't seem as enthralling now as it does the last time I left an English-speaking nation. Anyway, so I'm shopping for dinner. [One of the fun things about France is that there's a store for everything. Notably, the butcher, the baker, and the produce stand. My favorite stand, Le Plein Panier (the full basket), stands on a nearby corner. It's there that this story takes place.] At the Full Basket this afternoon, I told the man I was making a soup, and he and his wife gave wise council on how many of which vegetables to put in it. When the last turnip had been place in the sack and everything weighed, the man walked over to the celery, reached out and broke the top of a leafy stick off and tucked it in the sack. "It's nothing," he said, "Just a little something." And that single little snap set off a chain of little snaps from my head to my heart and made me genuinely happy to be back in my mid-sized, non-touristy, slightly-backwards French town. Because not many people around the world are blessed enough to have a produce vendor who thinks that a pinch of celery greens are essential to seasoning a soup and who cares enough to give that sentiment away.