Each day the dawn chorus rings out more richly.  This morning the towhee has arrived: "Drink your tea!"

I spent a weekend camping with the boy scouts -- and came down with a malicious head cold.

April's blackflies gave the forest a relentless flicker and my head was over-stuffed with an intrusive pulsing.  For reading, I'd brought Kosinski's Being There, a satire that plays on the charisma of Chauncy Gardiner as an archetypal wise fool.  Sexless, without ambition or self-regard, Gardiner perplexes and seduces the strivers in the story.  All in all, a strange book to read amid the clangor and striving and violence of camp with four men and 17 adolescent boys.  I envied the calm, cool, dewy emptiness of the fool's mind.

We hiked five miles in sudden mid-80's heat, which I guess kept the mucus from settling too much in one place.  Leafless trees gave only pale striation of shade and the boys were quickly out of water.  The Scoutmaster lets them make their mistakes and learn from them, but we helped them plot a shorter route back to camp.

The scouts cooked their dinner with a clamorous mix of hilarity, recrimination and greasefire.  I slouched off to sit on a rock and watch a pair of chickadees homesteading in a stump.  The bird would enter the old woodpecker cavity, vanish for a moment, then flit out to a nearby hemlock.  If you looked close you could see it drop a fleck of sawdust from its beak before it flicked back into the hole.

Philip and Jacob were over in the afternoon.  The four boys played in the backyard -- killing each other again and again.  They called it man-hunt; when I was a kid in our neighborhood we called it army; my father and grandfather probably called it cowboys and indians or cops and robbers.  The rules always are simple -- when someone is in sight and a person makes the right call -- some version of bang you're dead! -- another person has to fall to the ground (with greater or lesser degrees of theatricality) and count down the required amount.  Then they revive and it begins again.

But the simplicity of this play can't obscure the real game, which is of politics and power.  The nuances of rule and rule-break are negotiated at every turn and every boy (do girls even play this?) -- every boy tries out their strategies and tactics, from violence to argument to cajolery to tears and the threat to quit the game.

Everything important that I know about power and its limits, I first learned at play with other boys and girls.

The warm-blooded skunk cabbage is the first to shrug off the winter leaves.

Vernal pools are alive with arthropods.  The midges, with their innocent, feathery antennae, swarm from the earth at my every step.

A mourning cloak emerges faded from hibernation and basks on a sunny rock.

I startle a pair of blue jays from an apple thicket and they fly off -- oddly silent.  

Do jays fall mute at nesting time?

The hawks are not quiet -- a red-tailed screams at me in annoyance and rides the wind away to the south.

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With Nico the chessmen escape their rigid hierarchies and make unfamiliar moves.

Today they rode the carpet sea on a ship: and a silk scarf sail billowed from their flashlight mast.

His abuela said she didn't want to see pictures of long-haired Porter, but here they are . . .

I heard the discordant call of a phoebe in the yard today.  If the flycatchers have arrived can spring be far off?

I'm bothered by things that I can't comprehend as a whole -- at least after I've tried and failed to grasp them. 

It's like that with electricity and electrical devices for me. I just don't understand how electricity works.  There seem to be too many properties at work or something.

I just take their word for it that it's best to connect the ridged wires to the silver screw and the smooth wires to the brass screws -- but I don't like it.

The house graveyard of dysfunctional lamps was growing, and so I had to take up my wire strippers and needle-nose pliers and start swapping parts around to get a few going again.  And when I plugged it all in nothing caught fire, though I couldn't tell you why not.

Down to Pennsylvania to pick up the boys from Mom and Dad.  We all gathered at Cathie and Eric's in Kutztown.  Got to bounce little Birgit on my knee and hear a little about the boys' adventures.  Still a bit disoriented by jet lag, but it was nice to stroll along their muddy little creek with its wary mallards and streaking chubs.

I had known only the literary or cinematic Paris -- 

the Paris of

Alexandre Dumas,

Anaïs Nin, 

François Truffaut . . . 

It was a pleasure to assemble in my

 mind a personal geography of road and river and monument.  

A geography to resonate the next time I enter a story set in Paris.

Monica and I have been pining for travel in general and Europe in particular.  Over 3 years have passed since we left Ireland, and time and money never seem to show up hand in hand.  

Although there were other things we might have done (without 15 teenagers in tow) we thoroughly enjoyed our trip over to France (and for Monica, to England as well, of course).

Our days in St. Avertin, Tours and the surrounding Touraine were wonderful.  The heart of the trip was the stay in St. Avertin with the host families.  Last fall twenty-some students from College Jules Romains traveled to Pine Point on an exchange.   It was a great success.

And that success was rewarded by a huge welcome for the Pine Point students as they were taken in by the local families.

The Zenonis, Marc, Natalie, Antoine and Charlotte were marvelous -- down to earth, cosmopolitan, with a warm and easy hospitality.  We should know better than to strike up friendships with people who live 3,500 miles distant, but we couldn't help it.  With luck we'll convince them to put Rhode Island on their itinerary.

(I've sometimes

 wondered about that sudden friendship that happens -- especially in travels.  Just people that you meet -- you may not know the details of their lives -- but you know them -- perhaps because you sense a shared understanding of the heart of things.)

Travels with the Pine Point students

On our last sunny day in Paris we took the train to Versailles to walk the rooms of the great palace -- and afterwards a stroll past the Petit Palace to the Champs-Elysees. Three groups with different shopping styles headed up along the avenue toward the Arc de Triomphe. We reconvened back in the Latin Quarter for a final dinner.

The Eiffel Tower, Catacombs and the Louvre

Arrival in Paris

Last Day in Tours

In Amboise, we visited Clos Luce, the residence where Leonardo da Vinci passed his last three years.  The house and gardens there were filled with his inventions and reproductions of some of his great art.  From there we walked to the town's great castle, Chateau d'Amboise for a tour of the grounds and battlements.

The students spent the morning at the College Jules Romains de Saint Avertin with their friends -- visiting classes, watching a very impressive dress rehearsal and having lunch in the cafeteria. But afterwards, they left them to their studies and we made our way into the city of Tours for a guided walk of the historic downtown.

We spent the morning walking in the local forest with Marc and Natalie, our host parents, while their children Antoine and Charlotte slept in.  In the afternoon, we reconnected with the students at Rochecorbon for a boat trip upon the Loire.  Elaborate houses and wine cellars (and even a silk factory) have been burrowed into the soft tufa limestone that make up the cliffs south of the river.