My grandfather rests in beloved soil — Mediterranean earth so fine and dry-as-dust that it dances away like smoke, roused by the slightest gust of mistral wind. Papy once saw, from the westernmost bound of the graveyard, the terracotta tiles of the hillside village, the tall golden grass, the endless rows of knotty vines, the occasional cypresses that broke the line of the horizon. It was a familiar view, its savage beauty almost mundane amongst Mediterranean landscapes — but one he deemed fit for eternity. He had claimed it as a burial site long ago. A centenarian olive tree offers the only shade in the modest cemetery; lizards laze in perfect immobility along the edges of tombs. When we visit, we water his grave so that life may sprount from its fissures, and leave a sprig of lavender from the garden.

Papy and I had worshipped this land in quiet unison, he with the stoic sentimentality of an old veteran (he returned to France after WWII and a decade in Gabon), and I with the boundless ferocity only a child could conjure. Papy disappeared shortly after dawn, surveying the flanks of the antediluvian hills as they woke to pale daylight, and returned hours later to a cup of steaming chicory coffee. I, on the other hand, was set loose only amidst the torpid heat of the afternoon, once my anxious fidgeting finally earned me an annoyed dismissal from the lunch table.

Feral in the dry brushwood, how I leapt! And ran! And climbed the holm oaks’ branches, and rained acorns onto the soil below. All at once I presumed myself a Dr. Livingston, an aboriginal queen, a runaway hostage and a preying lioness. In that dense flora a child could gambol in perfect solitude, cheered on by the cacophonic buzz of cicadas. My homecoming time often overlapped with Papy’s evening news program, and he would distractedly gaze at my filthy, sweaty and scratched-up self before returning his eyes to the screen. I would stand behind him watching TV for a while before my mother, with practiced consternation, shooed me towards the shower.

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We were nameless devotees in a long line of men and women who have adored Provence, this proverbial land of wild oats and savage figs, of olives and laurels and interminable vineyards. The garrigue, we call it, which in English translates drably into “dry vegetation of the South.” Southern, arid, ruthlessly beautiful — a Provence that was painted onto cave walls in pre-historic times, that inspired Occitan verses of medieval troubadours, that enchanted Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso, that was immortalized by the prose of Alphonse Daudet, Marcel Pagnol, and even Robert Louis Stephenson, who once rode through the rocky crests of our Cévenoles mountains.

Here lies the cradle of another kind of Mediterranean civilization: one devoid of the theatrical splendor of our Aegean neighbors, but one devotedly entrenched in rural life, in the thick accents of shepherds and farmers and wine-makers, in the torrential feast of goat milk and lavender honey and sparkling rosé, in etchings of countless summers, and in my mind, always, as my Provence.

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And dearest of all the river.

The Cèze (known simply to us children as la rivière) had, millennia ago, tenaciously carved canyons out of great white cliffs. Flat chalky gorges remain, smoothed by the force of the current. Every escapade inevitably brought me back to the river. I’ve memorized every nook of the limpid creek, with water so clear that it appears a rich emerald green from the fuzzy moss that coats the rocks of the riverbed. I know every submerged foothold of the lacerated cliff, every underwater cave where the schools of trout hide, every swampy corner where little frogs lie waiting, camouflaged by tufts of verdant algae.

When I grew older I came to the deserted cliffs in the pre-noon heat and flattened myself against the white-hot surface in only bikini bottoms. The flesh of my back would, after a second of pain, absorb the warmth of the stone into my body. Someone could have walked by, but I knew the bathers came only in the afternoon, noisy families with dogs and young children and inflatable kayaks. For those moments it was just me, sleepily incrusted into the cliffs, confident of my seclusion.

*

Last summer, my little Irish cousin, Alfie, came to Provence for a week without his parents. He was plagued by quiet homesickness as he sat through the lingering meals on the terrace, but perked up instantly when the adults finally took pity on him and proposed: “why don’t you go to the river and catch some frogs?”

Alfie was five and spoke about two words of French — soon three as he yelped at the sight of the fabled grenouilles — but he quickly banded together with a few local hunters, all about his size and armed with plastic buckets to detain their frogs. The boys were well-equipped but lacked terrain expertise, and I was called to the rescue. Accessing muscle memory from my own childhood summers, I carefully slid my hands through the stagnant water to scoop a few unsuspecting grenouilles from below, and transferred them to my cohort’s eager palms.

One little boy, holding his cherished frog in the cave of his fingers, asked me politely:

“And whose wife are you, Madame?”

Wife! Madame! And there it was — for these children, the world neatly divided into kids and grown-ups, and grown-ups were of course all husbands and wives. I was an adult who, obviously, would catch frogs with the same ease I drank coffee or filed tax forms.

Alfie, meanwhile, crouched by a particularly froggy clump of algae, brows furrowed and oblivious to the French babble around him. He was stinky and sweaty and covered with scratches. He descended into the warm green slime, alligator eyes fixed on his prey, tensely, slowly, silently closing in on the frogs, who must have been tired of being caught by children only to be set free and caught again the next day, just like their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents must have dreaded the little girl who charged towards their pond, gripping a bamboo butterfly net which, despite numerous tears, would carry on valiantly through the years.

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