My husband and I live in Collioure, a small village in the South of France. The Mediterranean is a block from our house. From our backyard, we have a view of the foothills of the Pyrenees, terraced vineyards and a trio of ancient forts.
We moved here in May , and, a year later, in the middle of the pandemic, bought a little house on Rue du Soleil. The phrase means love at first sight. It happens a lot in Collioure. So close to Spain you can go there for lunch. We returned the next spring and rented a house by ourselves, and then did the same every spring thereafter.
Every year we arrived a bit earlier, stayed a bit longer, and felt less inclined to leave. The next year, the house we rented had Wi-Fi. The year after that, the Wi-Fi was faster. We started to bring work. If my husband and I had been massage therapists or marriage counselors, we could not have entertained a move from Portland to a postcard village in the deep south of France. Those are sit-on-your-ass-in-front-of-a-screen jobs, and we could do them from anywhere.
We could do them from Collioure. We could move to Collioure. We returned to Portland, talked about the idea, but did nothing. Then, in June of , my daughter got married. She was twenty-seven, and was already filing her own taxes and getting her teeth cleaned on the regular.
She was an adult. But getting married made her seem even more adult-ish. It underscored the reality that I was no longer needed in quite the same way. We joked that if we were ever going to move to Collioure, we needed to do it before grandchildren arrived to throw a lasso around our hearts, as they surely would.
