THE LONG VIEW
Bernadette Has Seen Things [Bernadette a vu des choses]
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Claude Monet died the year Bernadette was born.
Although Bernadette never grew taller than 4’8”, like Monet, she has lived a very big life.
In her 94 years she has seen the bombing of her French village during WWII, lived through the Holocaust, mourned the death of her beloved Charles De Gaulle, witnessed the end of the war in Algeria, and survived six world epidemics and pandemics that took many of the ones she has loved in her tiny long life—
Despite all of this, Bernadette is in the business of beauty, or maybe better said, Bernadette is born to a kind of beauty that the soul keeps in and through what the body endures.
Did you know Claude Monet paid a gardener to dust his water lilies? What curious things we humans do in our effort to maintain control. While Monet obsessed with capturing nature on canvas, Bernadette poured her whole self into nurturing it to life.
Bernadette’s hands are testament to a working life, straw hat tied just under chin to protect from the Provençal sun, body bent to the tending and growing of lavender, French to be exact.
If you’ve grown Lavender, as many of us have, you know first-hand of the grief that sets in when the purple blooms quiet themselves in winter, even to seemingly or nearly dead. “Belief,” even in the ugly seasons, is best-testified by those who give their hands as a sacrifice to the soil.
Through it all and without fail, Bernadette’s belief is rooted in the inevitability of something beautiful not yet seen, resting and then working its way to the surface.
Every Saturday for 60 years, Bernadette has brought her handmade fresh lavender sachets to market at Le Grand Marché at Place des Precheur in the center of Aix en Provence. This gypsy life, of rising before sunlight, loading and setting up, is not only necessity but passion. Her people, like her, were raised in the market, weaned on fresh goat’s milk and peaches and conversations of life and love with intimate strangers.
The Saturday morning I meet Bernadette the Square is already overstuffed, hundreds of people so much taller than she milling about, and still I notice her. Prim French blue apron and brown hair with hints of grey tossed in a chignon, her impish smile like a magnet or a memory, so like my tiny Grandmère Blanche who sang Je te tiens, Tu me tiens over and again until my giggles wore out.
Bernadette and I are immediate. kindred. spirits. We are both old souls, her face lined with brush strokes of a hard life, tightly wrapped buds of memory as vivid and breathtaking as her French toile sachets.
I see the sadness behind her fading blue eyes. Bernadette has seen things. But the ashes are no match for the ember inside. She snatches the yellow toile sachet from the table and declares, “Celui-ci est pour toi. c'est qui tu es!” [This one is for you. That is who you are]. Today I am the color of sunshine and of hope. Bernadette has seen things. And still she prefers yellow.
Today, as I write, I am channeling Bernadette—her voice implores to imagine rows and rows of lavender laid out against a summer sky, to take heart in the long view.
