Monbazillac
We know she’s going to die soon,
so we’ve started clearing out her house.
We spend our evenings sorting through
Granny’s photos: Mum throws all the albums
from her trips with her club into the bin
because none of her friends have visited
her since she’s been in the nursing home.
We find a cardboard folder on which she
wrote: Travels with the girls. Inside, leaflets
on archaeological sites, brochures on châteaux,
entrance tickets to the Lascaux cave. Below,
scattered snaps from our trips to the southwest
of France: the streets of Carcassonne
where I pout like a typical teenager,
the Cathar castles of Occitanie so steep
that my mother was afraid to drive there,
the medieval villages of Dordogne
almost entirely inhabited by English expats.
Granny and I are always together.
We pose in front of the fortress of the troubadour
Bertran de Born or in a prehistoric park with
replicas of Cro-Magnons ambushing a mammoth.
She sews while I unearth dinosaur bones
out of a clay modelling kit. She wears
a waterproof bonnet to protect her perm
while we climb the Montségur pog
in the rain. We dance together laughing
and she sticks her tongue out at the camera.
In almost every photo I’m clinging to
her sleeve or snuggling against her, though
I don’t remember her being a tactile person.
At the bottom of the cardboard folder, I find
yellowed paper napkins on which Granny
wrote the menus of the restaurants we went to
in Périgord: Julie = foie gras poêlé,
Maman = gizzard salad with walnut oil,
Mamie = grilled magret. Granny and Mum
often enjoyed a glass of Monbazillac,
a local sweet wine with aromas of apricot,
acacia and fig that linger on the palate.
No dessert for Julie and Maman, Mamie =
profitéroles. Granny’s sweet tooth later led
to diabetes and dementia. Julie = tagliatelle
with black truffles, Maman = omelette with
ceps, Mamie = duck confit with potatoes
à la sarladaise cooked in goose fat.
She wrote these menus down as a reminder
of our excesses in the manner of our ancestors
who painted aurochs on the walls of Lascaux
so that they could be found twenty thousand years later.