Missing Home

My nephew cuts the baguette, my father-in-law pours the wine, and the mourning doves coo in the background. It’s a lovely evening except for one thing. It smells as if the milk has gone bad, very, very bad, curdled, rotten, cultivating-webs-of-noxious-mold bad. It wasn’t from the milk, though. It’s the smell coming from the cheese platter being passed around the table at my French in-laws and it makes me want to cry.

This summer, I planned on roasting marshmallows with my mom while watching my kids catapult themselves around a bouncy castle at one of my home town’s numerous summer celebrations.

Instead, I am sequestered across the ocean where meals last for hours and the dairy is mostly unpasteurized.

My summer plans were to return to my northern Minnesotan roots. I wanted to look through old photo albums and hike across the bluffs overlooking lake Superior with my brother and sister-in-law. We would eat supper around the fire pit, each one of us balancing a paper plate on our lap. We would laugh, slap mosquitoes, and be a family.

Instead, I make faux pauxs, like putting the Camembert cheese in the fridge.  Everyone knows that moldy cheese tastes better at room temperature, mon dieu!

I’ve been living in Europe for over a decade now. The long-stemmed carrots sticking out of my bicycle basket every time I go to the market prove that I’m very European now. I am pretty comfortable where I have been living in Germany for the past nine years. Yet every time we go to my husband’s native France, there are so many things I just don’t understand. In my world, cheese is stored in the fridge. My family would agree. If only, I could be with them right now.

COVID has put a huge damper on trans-Atlantic air travel. A trip back home this summer was just not a good idea. We decided to spend three weeks in France with my husband’s family. In the mist of a global pandemic, this is not a crisis. I’m lucky to be able to see family again period, but I miss my home and my family. And I don’t know when it will be safe to travel to Minnesota again.

For years, my American and French families were kept separate. My Minnesota family never stepped foot in Europe and my French family only came over once to Minnesota for our wedding. French cheese remained on one side of the Atlantic, s’mores on the other.

It didn’t help that my family’s connection to France started and ended with our last name. My grandfather was of French Canadian origin. It was unknown when his ancestors came to Minnesota. My grandfather apparently could still speak a little French, merci, çava, little things like that. But the fact that he was a ragging drunk erased any positive association with the language in our house.

Despite this, I started learning French at age 13. It lead me to become a French teacher who met a French man at a French conversation group at a Minnesota coffee shop. I never imagined that the funky white and blue cheeses from my first French textbooks would end up staring me back in the face 27 years later. Yet here I am about to cry over Camembert an ocean away from Minnesota.

For the first time, just seven months ago, my entire family came to France for the holidays. The land of little sidewalks, wine at lunch, and stinky cheese was made real. They sat, like I am now, at a long table, tempting their fate with each piece of moldy cheese they dared to try.  

It is perhaps the champagne, the pâté, the wine, or the fresh baguette, or something else entirely that makes moldy French cheese taste magical at the end of a meal. I know what that something else is: it’s the company; it’s the family surrounding you.

I would never have to explain the magic of French cheese to my family. They experienced it. I may be homesick, but I’m not alone here. My entire family is gathered in my heart, for they know what I know, they’ve seen what I’ve seen.

And tomorrow, I’m making my French family tacos for dinner. The only cheese available is a stinky Emmental, but it will have to do.