Marie- Jeanne’s cradle stood under a broad-canopied olive tree some people claimed was over eight hundred years old, something the tree would neither confirm nor deny (at its age, one did not comment on how old one was).

She was giggling at the silvery rustling of the leaves, which were smiling in the gentle Pontias breeze. The wind was a local phenomenon, a last taste of magic in a century seemingly shorn of it. It was the steady breath of the four mountains— Essaillon, Garde Grosse, Saint Jaume, and Vaux— that shielded the town of Nyons like sentinels. The mountains breathed out in the morning, filling the valley of the river Eygues with the scent of herbs and the cool air of upland nights, always at the same time of day for precisely half an hour, and inhaled again after sundown every evening. This cool stream of air seemed to rise in the calanques and salty bays of the distant sea. It brought with it fragrances of lavender and mint and drove the searing heat from the day.

From the large kitchen— the main living space in every mazet in the Drôme Provençale, a place for cooking, chatting, staying silent, being born, and waiting for the end to come— Aimée was able to keep an eye on her granddaughter’s cradle as she shuttled back and forth between the wood-fired stove and the table.

Aimée placed sliced potatoes, black Tanche olives, eggplants, and fresh pink garlic in a well-worn fluted baking tin; drizzled the vegetables with silky, hay-green olive oil; and scooped chunks of the local fromagerie’s fresh goat cheese from a clay dish. Last, she rubbed some sprigs of lime-scented wild thyme she’d picked the previous evening between her fingers.

A pan of milk was cooling on the windowsill. It would soon be time. Marie- Jeanne was quite capable of making her feelings known if her grandmother was too slow getting lunch ready.

Every time Aimée turned her face toward her granddaughter, her thousand sharp wrinkles softened into a far younger complexion…

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