The Letters

Chapter One
The Chalet

Our families are with us always and are as intimately connected to us as the blood coursing through our veins. We have a shared tapestry, which together we have woven, its many colors and threads creating a singular work of memory in each of our hearts. We have strong bonds, ties of blood and history. I see in my three children that they have this link that comes from facing adversity, adventure, and growing up together to form a common wall of defense against anything that might come in from outside—or inside.
What is this tapestry? Is it a tangled skein of knots woven through the many colors of the warp and weft? Or will I ever decipher an emerging picture of the past as it insists itself into my present?
I’m probably entering the sunset of my life but everything feels new and original—as if I’m going through the doorway of a whole new world, a whole new life. I can look back over the years and it’s as if everything happened to someone else—certainly not me—I’m only an observer of my history now.
But how is it that a scent can trigger a set of memories so deeply hidden that when recalled, they overwhelm and surprise—as if this had all happened yesterday? I’d been trimming away some stray oregano that was encroaching onto the driveway, too close to the front wheel of Joe’s Lexus. He had just come home, so the engine was still warm.
And suddenly, I was in post-war Paris with my father, on the final leg of the long odyssey that had begun in Paris after I was born, and was finally ending nine years later, in the same place, as the family prepared for the transatlantic crossing at Le Havre. I had felt special because my father had treated me to a lunch of fresh asparagus in a restaurant, like a grownup. I can almost taste the vinaigrette, still sharp on my tongue. The grated hard-boiled egg spills over the stalks in a delicate white and yellow dusting.
The smell of the gas coming from Joe’s cooling Lexus catapulted me to a long ago time marked with fear and mystery—a time suddenly crystallized in snippets of memory, of images of my childhood in war-ravaged France. I always remember these pictures of my childhood in black and white, as if color might render them a Walt Disney fantasy.
I had been too small to understand the tension of the adults around me. But when we all had to duck into ditches to escape the strafing, and when we had to sleep in hay barns, and when I was finally so grateful to sleep in a bed with sheets on it, even I had understood that these were not normal times.

We sat out the last four years of the war in our chalet, so close to the Swiss border that RAF pilots often came for shelter as they made their way through the underground and over the mountains into the safety of Switzerland. My father played Bach and Beethoven on his grand piano as the adults sipped Chartreuse, the strong, pale green alpine brandy, while we children were given a rare sugar cube dipped in the powerful brew.
My parents had become farmers, with sheep and a cow and an occasional pig. Mama was a Wellesley graduate, and a New England Blue-Blood, she used to say with some pride, who learned how to spin wool, make soap, tend the livestock and do all the other complex and timeless work of a peasant farmer.
I even had a pet goat—though she eventually became a pair of shoes for me, and rare meat for a hungry family—and today, I use her name as a password on the internet. How ironic are some of the devices we use to recall and reinforce treasured memories.
In most ways, this was an idyllic childhood. Far from the storm of war and too young to appreciate any sense of privation, toys were non-existent so we made up games. Our friends were the Savoyard children who lived high on the mountain, our neighbors across the hills.
When my two older brothers, Paul and John, and I finally landed at the chalet, we had a little brother, Pierre, and baby sister Betty, as well. By the time the war ended, Rona came along as the caboose, eleven years younger than her oldest brother, Paul. So we were six, but almost two generations. Paul, John and I have visceral memories of the war, while Pierre, Betty and Rona only know the stories that have been told—almost as legend or folk tale.

September 2007: Joe and I visited the chalet, in celebration of my seventieth birthday. I hadn’t seen it since I had left as a child, over sixty years ago. As we drove up the hairpin, one lane road, I wasn’t sure I’d recognize it. My memory certainly wouldn’t be enough. All I really had to go on was the photograph that hung on the wall at home, a photograph taken about ten years ago by John, on his own odyssey to see the chalet once again. And yet, as we drove, so much was familiar. I even recognized the school where I had to learn to write with my right hand or get smacked on the knuckles with a ruler.
But I first heard the sound of the large cowbells echoing with one another across the hills. It was a perfect September day, my actual birthday. The sky was the deep gentian blue of high altitude, in clear contrast to the grassy hills that looked so soft that I would have loved to have run barefooted, as when I was little. I almost expected to see the cherry tree I used to climb to pick the cherries from, hanging the doubles over my ears as if they were earrings. Cherries which were so darkly sweet and ripe that they exploded in my mouth like some exotic drink.
As Joe and I approached, the cows ignored the sound of the car and continued to munch the sweet meadow grass, their large bells calling and echoing, as the melody of the mountains.
The chalet seemed thrown onto the side of the hills, yet almost growing out of the land, the rich dark wood of the upper story weathered and worn above the stucco first floor. In a way, chalets all look very much the same, designed to last a very long time.
The chalet was set back from a terrace, which was always where we all played, or where our mother washed endless diapers in a large cauldron, using her gritty soap as she rubbed on the washboard. The terrace was a gathering place where we could drink in the summer air as the sun warmed our backs. The first floor, as with all chalets, was thick stone, covered in plaster or stucco, to withstand the heavy winter snows that could rise to the second floor. The balcony that separated the first from the second floor was used mostly to dry fruit in the summer. The steep roof had a deep overhang, to provide shade in the summer, yet allow the low winter sun to warm the interior of the whole building, as well as to allow much of the heavy snow to collect as insulation in winter, then slide harmlessly down with the warming sun of spring.
The timeless design of these chalets, scattered over the hills like toys, is a function of the land and its people. They all face south, to get the most benefit from the sun; each has a terrace and a balcony for the life and the work of the farming peasants, and the same deep overhanging roof. There is always a cold room for curing meat and cheese. The animals are housed in a barn or stable behind the living quarters, backed up against the mountainside.