Sud de France 1.2 Leaving on a Jet Plane.

Our bags are packed we’re ready to go. Our house is just about completely empty and in 24 hours we are in the air to France. We’ve been saying goodbye to friends and family and it is all pretty bittersweet.

Closing one door and opening another is what some people say but life isn’t about doors. It is about knowing you have a time limited ticket. You use it or lose it.

People say that we are brave to live out our dream, our adventure. But I look at it as trading one normality for another. Within a few weeks the South of France will be as normal and ordinary as Seattle is to us now.

France is a first world nation, fully electrified, fully modern and with the world’s best health care system. We will be fifteen minutes from the Med and a five minute walk to the boulangerie and the supermarket. We are not going to the Amazon River basin or to an island off the coast of Fiji.

All the adventure talk is embarrassing.

And despite any thoughts of having a lot of quiet time we are already cranking up our lives. Thursday we land in France and we already a social life happening. On the 4^th October as a favor to our landlord, we are meeting an American couple and escorting them to their rental. On the 10^th I’m shooting a video for the “One Day on Earth’ project about the big antiques fair in Pezenas. Having just given away, sold or shipped over thirty years of furniture I wanted to make a video about how memory adheres to objects. Then on the 15^th we have the opening of a friend’s photo show.

The big adventure will be getting new cell phones or as the French call them “mobiles” and in a month a car and in four months a house.

I don’t know what to expect as a writer/photographer. Okay, I am a certified by the French state to work as an “Artiste.” But who knows where that will lead?

Perhaps there is a part of this journey that might be called a dream. All my life I’ve been a worker. My photography was commercial work that was made to sell or was paid for. While I had my personal images I never thought of myself as an artist. On good days I was a photojournalist, on bad days I was just a mess.

Freelancing means you are always unemployed until the phone rings or the email arrives. I’ve done it for thirty-five years and have survived the ups and downs, now comes a big change.

Now I’m working through the Internet, inventing jobs, making movies. And maybe even getting that novel finished. That’s the exciting part. 

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer