Homesick

It’s four o’clock in the morning, and I’ve slept two hours. I don’t have my contact lenses in, but I can’t be bothered to find any. Instead, I just pad down the stairs with the rest of them: the little Americans, the Country Boy, and I sit down in one of the giant, brown leather chairs that I’ve come to claim as my own.

We wait around in the kitchen as breakfast is eaten slowly–day-old-bread popped in the toaster with butter and jam. I stare at my toes and try to make out their forms in the shadows.

Eventually, we all clamber downstairs, one after the other. The bags were already piled into the car yesterday evening, so all there is to do is load the kids in with one last hug. They press their hands up against the windows and smile and wave: they may miss this place, but they’re not sad to go–they’re going home.

We have a tradition of chasing them down the hardtop road as they drive away, and so we do: bare-footed and blind, I follow the lights until they hit the turn at the end of the road, by the café, and then over the bridge–not because I see, but because I know–and they’re gone. It’s me and the Parisian’s sister, alone after another summer of full houses and banging doors and cake. Lots and lots of cake.

One of my new endeavors this year was to offer dessert every day. Dessert, as so many have come to know, with expanding jeans’ sizes and too much frosting, is one of my favorite things to make… odd, seeing as I don’t particularly care for sweet things. But that’s neither here nor there: for these kids, I will do anything, including making two cakes (because one is never enough, not for more than twenty people) nearly every night.

This cake is from back at the beginning of summer, when kids were still appearing well past their bedtime at the breakfast table, where I sat up nights to write. They came with tears and teddy bears, missing Mommy, missing home, missing their beds. It’s not a feeling I know well, but I don’t need to understand it to dry tears and offer a Carambar as a sweet treat til morning, when the days were so full that no one remembered to be homesick.

By the time they left, we could march into the vines at night to witness the sunset, picking grapes and blackberries from the bushes and eating them. By then, they might feel a pang when they thought about leaving… but it was nothing like the vacancy I knew I would feel once Paziols was, once again, just a memory and a handful of photos.

As we walk back into the house, picking our path carefully so as not to step on anything, I’m struck by an odd thought, one of those ones that passes through and leaves without fanfare, but then again, those are often the best ones. I wonder how it is that a place that I’ve barely lived in, just twenty-four weeks of my life, not even a full year, can feel so much like home that I fear homesickness will set in, not when I arrive, like with the kids, but when I leave?

Apricot Upside Down Cake

The cake portion of this dessert is made using the traditional French yogurt cake recipe, where the yogurt pot is used as a measuring device.

12 apricots
100 g. butter
200 g. sugar

1 125 g. pot of plain yogurt
2 pots flour
2 pots white sugar
1 pot vegetable oil
2 eggs
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Wash the apricots and halve them, removing and discarding the pits. Heat the butter and sugar in a pan until the sugar dissolves, then spread the mixture evenly over the bottom of the pan and add the apricot halves. Cook until caramelized, about 10-15 minutes.

Meanwhile, combine the cake ingredients in a bowl, stirring until just combined.

In a cake pan (or tart pan, if you don’t have a cake pan, like me), spread the apricot halves and the remaining liquid from the sugar/butter mixture evenly over the bottom surface. Pour the cake batter over the apricots. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the cake bounces back when touched or until a tester comes out clean with a few crumbs attached.

Invert the cake onto a platter and serve.