Healing at Saint Onenn’s Holy Well, Brittany

words + photos by Elyn Aviva

It was a place you couldn’t find unless you’d already been there—or unless you found someone to take you there, someone with permission to cross from here to there….

While my husband, Gary, and I spent the day in Paimpont, our traveling companions visited a holy well in the nearby village of Tréhorenteuc. By chance, they had met someone in a bookstore who told them about it and led them to it. They had dangled their feet in the water and meditated, one by one. It was a lovely place.

Eager to visit it, I asked them where it was. Just up the road from the bookstore—easy to find, they assured us.

The next day Gary and I drove to Tréhorenteuc and followed the road out of town. Soon the pavement ended and the road narrowed. We nearly high-centered the car as we crept over humps on the farm lane that led to the top of a hill. We were sure that at any moment we’d see a sign announcing “Ste Onenn’s Well.” After all, our friends had walked there from town. How far could it be? Maybe it was over to the right, in that clump of trees. Or just over the horizon.

Half an hour later, defeated, we carefully turned the car around and drove back into town. We parked and walked back up the hill. And down, and up again. I followed a trail into the woods. No luck.

We walked over to the tourist office and asked for help.

Claudine looked at us uncertainly. “It’s on private land, not open to the public.”

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The Black Virgin of Rocamadour

words + photos by Elyn Aviva

She called to me just as I was falling asleep, exhausted from too much travel. We had had a long, twisting drive to reach her sanctuary, perched on the side of a sheer bluff in the Lot region in southwestern France. My husband, Gary, and I had gone to bed early, around 9:30 p.m., too tired to enjoy a night stroll through the tiny medieval village of Rocamadour, which sheltered her chapel.

I was almost asleep when I heard her loud and clear, as if she were standing next to me. “Get up!” she commanded. “Come visit me in my sanctuary! That’s what you’re here for!”

I groaned. I was tired. Besides, I’d already visited the Black Virgin of Rocamadour in her sanctuary just a few hours earlier, right after we had arrived, because we’d been told her chapel would close at 7:30 pm.

I turned to Gary, lying next to me in bed. “She’s calling me.”

“What?” He mumbled.

“The Lady is calling me to visit her. You want to come?”

He muttered something. Then, “You go ahead.”

Suddenly energized, I sprang out of bed and got dressed. After all, when the Goddess calls you, you have to go. I knocked at the room next door where our friend Anne was staying. I knocked again, louder. After a few minutes she opened the door, looking sleepy.

“The Black Virgin is calling me to go to her. Want to come?”

She nodded. “Give me a minute.”

Soon we were on a night-time pilgrimage to the Goddess, walking through the silent, deserted streets, climbing the 223 steps of the Grand Staircase that lead up to her cliff-side sanctuary. We followed the Rue de la Mercerie to a small square, the Parvis de St-Amadour, center of the holy precinct. Then we walked up to the upper landing and stood in front of the chapel doors. They were locked.

I shook my head, disappointed. “I know we were told the sanctuary would be closed, but I’m sure the Black Virgin told me to come and see her.” Maybe it had just been a daydream, I thought, or a moment of confusion as I drifted off to sleep….

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Poetry is for sissies

Poetry is for sissies.

Or so I thought.

If you had told me two years ago that I’d not only read a bit of poetry, but I’d write some, as well, I would have scoffed condescendingly. But take one English poet, add the allure of a French countryside and open an often closed American mind a little, and it’s possible to turn even a jaded and cynical hard news journalist into a believer.

photo by Guillermo Fdez via flickr (common license)
The setting was the French House Party located in the Languedoc region of Southwest France. Carcassonne, a 400-year-old medieval World Heritage site, sits nearby, adding to the appeal of the area. The French House Party “Experience” is an all-inclusive creative arts vacation retreat that offers a variety of courses in such topics as painting, movie-making, singing, cooking and creative writing.

As a longtime newspaperman, I knew how to write. Stringing sentences together in a coherent and concise manner is easy for me. What’s difficult as a crime reporter – my job in my previous life – is dealing with the horrors of society without letting them affect your psyche. Writing about rapes, robberies and racketeering were staples of my day. That was my life as a crime reporter. Dealing with death and destruction daily for nearly 20 years definitely hardened my view of the world. And I guess I took some of that cynicism with me when I turned my back on that era to write about less grim and solemn subjects.

So, just 18 months removed from my life as a newsman, I decided to venture out of my comfort zone, take a trip to Europe and check myself in to a creative writing retreat. I had no idea what to expect. Not only was it my first trip overseas, but it also was my first foray into creative writing. I figured character development, setting, dialogue and other novel-writing topics would be covered. And they were.

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In A Pig's Ear

by Dorty Nowak

There are 72 recipes for animal body parts I have never eaten in Le Meilleur Cuisine de France. I purchased the cookbook, a staple in French kitchens, when I first moved to Paris, and over the past five years it has become a trusted guide for my culinary adventures. However, the section titled “Les Cochonailles et Les Abats” (Pork Products and Offal) remains untried territory.

It’s not that I’m a vegetarian.  In fact, I’m a regular customer at  my neighborhood butcher shop, La Boucherie Daguerre. The front half of a cow, with black paint chipping off its metal hide, hangs above the door and inside a small army of butchers in stained white smocks moves swiftly across the sawdust floor filling customers’ orders.  Even though the cuts of meat are different, I have no trouble finding the beef,  and I’m particularly fond of the marvelous roast chickens. Here too is a vast array of food I’ve never tried. Each visit, my glance would skim with practiced ease over the motley-feathered chickens, heads and feet attached, the trays of rognon (kidneys)  cervelle (brains) and tripe (intestines), to settle on something safe. Indeed, I felt confident about my ability to navigate the perils of the butcher shop until the day I went to buy a roast for dinner and found myself eye to eye with a dead boar, grinning at me through his enormous tusks. He was draped over the counter above the roasts. I fled, and we had pasta for dinner.

Avoiding abats is easy enough when cooking at home, but much more difficult when dining out.  The French have a fondness for them, and it is rare not to find at least one  dish on a menu. As I am averse to spending a small fortune for a meal  and then not being able to eat it, I purchased a pocket menu master, a handy  French-English dictionary including most common menu items. Unfortunately, the menu master didn’t save me from the andouillette. Andouillette, a prized delicacy, is a sausage made from, pigs’ intestines, and it smells just like you would imagine pigs’ intestines to smell. I know because one time I ordered it by mistake, thinking it was andouille, the delicious, spicy Spanish sausage. Fortunately, the fries were good.

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Chasing Fairy Tales In The Dordogne

words + pictures by Kimberley Lovato

Dreams are often born from the most unsuspecting places. Incredibly, mine happened to be delivered by an editor. The assignment that landed in my lap was to head to the Dordogne region of France and follow a chef and her new culinary tour company guests around for a week. No convincing needed, I immediately got in my car in Brussels and drove 10 hours south.   En route I stopped to fuel up and a postcard caught my eye. A picturesque village was enveloped in fog and huddled against a cliff at the edge of the Dordogne River, with a dilapidated rowboat tied to its shore. On the back of the card, in small black and white print, were the words, La-Roque-Gageac, Dordogne.  If fairy tales were depicted on postcards, they would look like this. I bought the card and tucked it behind the visor of my car.

I arrived in Biron, a village of 140 people, at an old priory that sits in the shadows of a 500-year -old castle.  I recall knocking on the weathered wooden doors of the Priory, and hearing the metal against metal slide of the bolt behind it, then a slow creek as the door opened.  Half expecting Frankenstein, I was greeted, instead, by the face of my host, Florida based Chef Laura Schmalhorst. Since then, Laura and I have met up in the Dordogne every year, bonded by our love of a good adventure, good food and wine, and seduced by the convivial people, their passion for the food and their willingness to share it and their stories with us.

While I prefer to travel by bus or local rickshaw, in the Dordogne, a car is essential.  The 2-lane roads are well marked but signs can be miniscule, especially the hand-painted ones directing you to local farms. Be warned: some signs, like those of a walnut farm I was seeking, lead you like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs only to completely disappear. I have learned not to get worked up over this loss of time. We as Americans are programmed for efficiency and if we don’t get where we are going in a reasonable time, our springs pop out and the brain shuts down, reducing us to cursing, yelling idiots.  In the Dordogne, time itself is on vacation. When you live in a fairytale there is no reason to rush, someone once told me. Sometimes it’s good to get off the time track, or be knocked off.

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A Sixty-Year Love Story from Morocco, Israel and France

by Bethany Ball

Marco and Aliza descended on our house in Nyack New York with their irrepressible energy.  Aliza, who is visiting from Israel, is the mother of our dear friend Sagi. And Marco is her boyfriend visiting from his home in Bordeaux, France.  They were staying with Sagi in his tiny apartment in Williamsburg and had come over to cook a meal for Sagi and his friends. Marco immediately settled in, a spry, fit man in his early seventies, making the most of our ill-equipped kitchen (I asked myself: Where are my kitchen scissors? Why do I not have large cutting boards? Or serving dishes?). Marco speaks French, Portuguese and Hebrew. Everyone who came for dinner spoke a smattering of one or several of those languages. If we got stuck, Marco spoke to Aliza in French and she translated in Hebrew or English. There was moule (en francais), moulim (b’ivrit) or mussels with a butter sauce that we were instructed to drink. Our friend Anthony (a native New Yorker married to an Israeli) brought lamb kabob and sharpened knives. Kristen, a native Alabaman chopped parsley. Sagi worked the grill, along with my husband. Anthony’s Israeli wife Abi and I chased after our not-quite-two-year olds and filled in the gaps--like searching for kitchen appliances and washing dishes. Abi set the table and tore and folded paper towel for napkins (why do I never have napkins?). Kristen’s boyfriend Etay played DJ, chopped vegetables and teased Marco. “Marco! I put on French music! Just for you.”

“Bah!” he said, making a face, “It is Carla Bruni. She does not sing. She talks!”

“Give us some Yves Montand,” Aliza called out.

Marco served my grilled fish, branzini or Mediterranean Sea bass. He called it by its French name, Loup de Mer.

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