My parents helped me to pronounce “Vendée”, the region of France where we had spent our summer holidays in 2001, so that I could correctly tell my teacher and classmates where I’d been that year.
It had been a super trip: three weeks on a campsite with a pool, playing tennis with my mum, and hanging out at a local skatepark.
My dad battled with an old school roadmap and even found a place called Avrillé. He drove us there so I could get a photo with the sign, my small frame barely blocking out the final “e” so that it resembled my name. In the years that followed, that Vendée trip remained a family favourite.
In 2013 I left Ireland, for six months, to teach abroad. Six years later I found myself in Paris, starting a new teaching post in a school in the centre of the city.
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Life had tossed me around – Spain, Gran Canaria, Thailand, Italy, England – but I had come to Paris with an idea to settle. Covid, which hit four months after I arrived, left me with little choice in the matter.
In the school I had friends, one of the many benefits of settling. Yohann and I found common ground immediately, though we argued often about teachers being underpaid or lengthy summer holidays being unnecessary.
During the course of one of those debates, I brought up Vendée and how much it had meant for our family to have this time together. We discovered that he was not Parisian, as I’d assumed, but Vendéen. He was from the town of Luçon.
[ Carry on camping, and save plenty of money doing itOpens in new window ]
He had grown up steps from where my family and I had gone on our holidays. He told me we’d probably passed him on the street skateboarding and I imagined that we had. He walked me to my Metro stop that evening and then every other evening that week.
We have just spent our first Christmas together living in Vendée, after six years in the capital. So much has changed in the intervening five years. Our parents have met. His wondered how mine had ever thought to holiday in this area, little known by even metropolitan French at the time. We bought a small apartment on the beach in Longeville-sur-Mer. We became parents.
I am grateful that our son is growing up here. When we can, we spend our afternoons outside. The beach is steps from the apartment. Luca had his feet in the sand for the first time here. Longeville attracts keen surfers year round and in the colder months when Yohann braves the water, I bundle Luca up tight and sit with a thermal flask of coffee between my knees on the shoreline, watching.
Luca’s grandparents – Mamie and Papy as they’re known here – come with us on Wednesdays to the playground not far away. Sometimes Yohann and I drink a beer on the terrace and admire Luca’s increasingly steady steps as he leads his Mamie hand-in-hand up and down the ramps of the skatepark.
Sundays are for eating with family. Yohann’s father begins preparing lunch early. He has a knack of finding out what French cuisine I haven’t yet tried and incorporating those dishes into the menu. Once he brought me to a butcher’s, pointed to a ceramic dish and asked, “tu me fais confiance?” (Do you trust me?). Thanks to him I’ve eaten pork intestines, home-made pâté, white beans (a Vendéen speciality), locally sourced oysters, pot au feu, and roasted rabbit, which he served whole and skewered into a running position. We mop up the meat drippings and his signature sauces with bread torn off from a baguette being passed around the table.
Though I can speak French, my accent betrays me as a foreigner. The people I meet around the village assume I’m American or English. I don’t think there is an Irish community here or if there is, I haven’t met them yet. Everyone has heard of Ireland though, and all of them tell me they’d like to visit one day. Someone usually has a niece or nephew studying a semester in UCD or Trinity; others will bring up Conor McGregor. My hairdresser said of Ireland, it’s very green isn’t it?
On weekends we now bring our son to the beach and then the local skatepark where, quite possibly, Yohann and I passed each other a quarter of a century ago.
Avril King is from Dunshaughlin, Co Meath. She moved to France in 2019 and lives in Vendée with her partner and son.
