Brittany was the first place I've spent more than four continual months in ten years. We went because my girlfriend was pregnant and so we wanted a quiet place, with a nice coast and a market where we could surf and walk and work. We didn't want heat and we didn't want traffic. My girlfriend makes jewelry and I take pictures and scribble in notebooks. She is French and I have Celtic roots so we thought the place would be a good compromise for our child.
We drove from Paris in an old Mercedes bought off my Scottish aunt. Passing into Brittany the road shrunk in width, and the landscape became hilly, with fields and patches of forest hidden behind dense verges. It was lush and pitch dark green. We drove into the late evening sun, through quiet towns. The storefronts were empty, and covered with old posters. Near Audierne the landscape opened up. We drove through stonewalled fields bordered with poppies. At dusk, we passed the heavily lichened church in Esquibien, went down a little hill carefully so as not to scrape our rear-view mirrors on the walls holding back the pulse of roses and hydrangeas and found the cottage. It looked a bit bleak with only one small window looking out onto the road, but behind the wall there was a rose-filled garden with a glass door and windows looking out onto it.
There were no shops in Esquibien, but we were less than a kilometer from Audierne. When I had the discipline, I took the bike in the morning to the Ti Forn Boulangerie. I'd buy enough for two days (eating the day old toasted croissants with butter, almond butter and fresh raspberries) and bike back up the hill usually by 10:45am and make hot chocolate and hopefully finish breakfast before the afternoon. Brittany is not an early rising place, being at the far western end of its time zone.
Often, I bought a few gray sole from the Audierne maree, a lovely clean place with white tiles. It overlooked the harbor. The family who ran it always wore Breton stripes. In the evenings at the height of summer, lines formed outside. Inside, writhing pink piles of langoustine were shoveled into clear plastic bags. An easy meal, one just dumped them in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes, opened a jar or mayonnaise, and cut a lemon. We ate a fair amount out on the lawn in the sun. We never saw a cloud in June. July was poor, and cold, and August felt like fall had come, but then September was like June and so was October.
We ate out rarely. But when we did we took very delicate and crisp crepes at the creperie Le Raz de Sein, near Pointe du Raz. The lady there is very brown but with very blond hair. She has wonderfully toned calves and usually wears small pumps and several layers of make-up. She was one of the very few who predicted, correctly that we were having a girl. It was often closed when you most wanted a crepe, between 2-6 pm, because she was down on the beach sunning herself.
The hospital was in Quimper, so often we'd need to find a meal there. We always looked forward to it and only went to one place, Le Cosy. It’s on a corner with a few outdoor tables pushed close to its walls. It is an old building with cracks in the stone walls, and in the cracks are piles of coins left by patrons for their return visits.
We bought only organic food and so immediately devoted ourselves to a small corner of the market. The vendors were mostly young with dirt on their hands. When we had our child we brought her around and it was nice to think that the majority of what composed her, they had brought out of the dirt with their hands.
The wild strawberries stood out, and the small tomatoes and the physalis. We kept them on our kitchen counter and picked the boxes clean throughout the day. We bought a brush because the carrots and parsnips and potatoes all had to be scrubbed clean of dirt. There was good fennel, and aubergine. The early season garlic didn't even need to be husked, with skin was as soft as the bulb. We bought chicken, and guinea fowl, and duck, and haricots verts from a man in a trailer.
I always felt a deep desire to stay longer at the market and have an espresso at one of the tabacs along the port where fisherman bathed in clouds of tobacco smoke, and their beers shone like bits of gold. But the bags would be bursting, raspberries upturning, lettuce getting crushed and wilting, and we'd have to climb the cobblestone road to the church parking directly.
Throughout the whole summer I don't remember it raining once on market day. For any other needs, we went to La Saffron Organic market on a broad shady square in Pont Croix. They had good cheese, and sausages and butter and cream. From there we discovered the town Pont Croix, on a day with the very lightest trace of rain. The kind that settles in your eyelashes. Across from the church, in which a quartet practiced, we passed a potter, firing his work. On one side of the town the land falls away and small lanes follow it. The doorways are very low, and flowers peek over walled gardens.
There is a beach at Gwendrez that was kind of connected to the beaches of Plouhinec. There was baie des trespasses at Pointe du Raz that was good for surfing. There is a surf school there with a shed full of wetsuits and longboards. Kids are dropped off there in the summer, and skateboard up and down the hill to Plogoff. There are the town beaches of St Yvette lined with creperies and ice cream parlors. There are no buildings or large roads nearby. Just a little farmland and cattle that sometimes you can smell from the water, and a few small villages marked by steeples. The water at all these beaches, unless kelp has been dredged up by a big swell, is perfectly crystal clear.
Between all these beaches is a series of footpaths that trace scraggly lines along cliffs that rise to Pointe du Raz. At no point does a coastal footpath detour around private property. The entire coast from what I could see is open. There was a great sense of freedom in that.
In August there is a season of town fetes. Outdoor seating, bands, dances, barbecues, bagpipes... and it rained. Yet it affected nothing. Families came in rain gear, sat at the benches, and ate and drank and danced.
We often had guests, and otherwise we kept ourselves to ourselves and we were left completely alone. The farmers who we bought from were always generous, and welcoming and never seemed too curious, until the very end when we had to go and I had better French. The last day at the market, I was introduced to everyone and answered lots of questions and felt I had a good amount of friends and was sad to leave. Maybe in June we will go back to Audierne where we may take a place for a year, and have a workshop and studio, and see what the winter is like.
