From the fall of 1995 until the fall of 2000, we lived in Limay, France, a small town on the Seine River, west of Paris. High walls enclosed our freshly renovated worker’s cottage and garden. A large cherry tree dominated the garden, and Markus hung a swing for the kids from its sturdiest branch. Grape ivy covered a shed and the former outhouse. In the spring, it buzzed with bees and chirped with sparrow hatchlings. Our first summer there, the tree gave us a huge, gorgeous crop of fat, dark cherries.
The kids were the right age for a walled garden. Helena was still sucking her thumb. Calvin was sleeping with a pacifier, and Celeste was still so little, Helena would push her around the garden in her doll’s stroller. We could throw open the front door and the living room’s French doors without a worry; they were safe running in and out of the house.
One evening after dinner, I noticed Helena, contentedly sucking her thumb, was doing cartwheels across the patio paving stones. I said to her, “Wow, look at you, doing one-handed cartwheels.” That stopped her. She said, “I can’t do one-handed cartwheels.” She had no idea that she was combining sucking her thumb and doing cartwheels. No idea of what she was capable of. She hesitated to try one-handed cartwheels with deliberation. But she placed her right hand on her tummy and executed a one-handed cartwheel with confidence.
After we returned to Switzerland from France, the kids learned to speak High German in the classroom. Around family and friends, they picked up Swiss German. Helena continued to speak with her best French friend every weekend, so she kept her French skills active, but for all intents and purposes, Calvin and Celeste lost their French. One day, Calvin was playing with friends near our little train station. A man asked the kids for directions. Calvin gave the directions and went back to playing with his friends. Hours later, at the dinner table, he straightened in his chair and said, “Did you know? I think I still speak French.” It’d suddenly dawned on him that the man he spoken to at the train station had asked for directions in French. Cal automatically answered in kind. Years after he assumed that he’d forgotten all his French.
Our kids are now grown. Helena lives in LA, loving it. Cal lives in a town on the banks of the Limmat River. And Celeste enjoys the urban life in Zurich with her boyfriend. When the weather agrees, she comes to Kaiserstuhl to join Markus on a two-hour Rundeli, cycling around our lush green hills. I join them on my e-bike. Her level of fitness is impressive: all those spinning classes at the city gym help her speed up the hills. Markus encourages her to lead, setting the pace. On one ride, as we ascended the Bacherstal, a slow-climbing valley, she called to me, “Are you okay with this pace?” My display showed that we were going 25 kilometers per hour. “Twenty-five k’s a good pace,” I answered. Distance grew between us, immediately. I tried to keep up, but her speed climbed to 26, 27, 28, and 30 kph. As soon as I’d told her our speed, her mind must have told her she really had to work to keep up the pace—ending up increasing the pace massively instead.
Lately, Markus has been suggesting that I try doing a cycling Rundeli on Celeste’s sleek new road bike. Top gears and brakes. Lightweight. “I’m sure you’d be fine,” he says. My mind tells me there’s no way I could keep a respectable pace without motorized support. But maybe I can do a lot more than I suppose I can. If I only gave it less thought.
Maybe all of us can do more than we think we can.
Meredith Writes 