The author of an article I had saved about a nonprofit that helps kids through giving them opportunities to write their stories had this advice: “Go out and talk to someone you don’t know. Someone you think about in a certain way, but don’t really know. See what happens when you really talk to them and hear their story”

I took his advice, and the result is the following piece of writing. I didn’t know what to call it, so I called it a “petite histoire” or little story. It’s a longer piece than I normally share but I hope you still enjoy it. . . I have Melina’s full permission to share her story.

Une petite histoire.


“There’s nothing like growing up on a farm. Nothing. Especially if you have two brothers and a sister to share it with.”

So says my French friend, Melina, who did just that, in the southwest of France in a little village called Tourliac.

Bumping along on the back of a small tractor she and her brothers would jump off to collect all the stones out of the fields and pile them into the attached cart, always arriving home in time to set the dinner table by 19:30.

Even though she often grumbled about the work, Melina loved helping her dad. “He was always good to me,” she said. And being with her brothers always made it fun, no matter how hard they worked.

They had learned how to have fun together from a young age, going out into the fading light of day on “espionage missions,” hiding among the trees near the barn where the cows were milked, putting on their “commando-clothes” and creeping into the farmyard. Once there they would secretly follow their dad as he made his way to the barn for the evening milking.

Watching from behind the trees they would see him return to the old stone house where they lived. The house he and their mother had renovated many years before, when their only child was Melina’s much older sister. If he saw them, they would freeze and pretend to be part of a tree.

“He knew we were there, of course,” she told me, “but he usually let us think we had managed to fool him. It was only when it was late, and we had to get back to do our chores, that he would shout at us to ‘get moving!’”

The espionage games often morphed into wilder games, “parcour” among the rafters in the barn, with a cement floor below. They would swing from ropes and leap from haylofts, occasionally crashing into beams that got in their way.

Childhood was wild, and rural, and unpredictable. And chores mattered.

All four children were expected to help their parents in what Melina calls, “the hardest job she knows.” Especially when the farm, like most independent French farms, consisted of a large vegetable garden, dairy cows, chickens, pigs, beef cattle (blonde Aquitane), a plum orchard, and a few fields of wheat or corn.

There was always work to do, -- not what a child wants to hear.

If the request came from Melina’s mother it was usually met with an argument, but if it came from her dad, it was easier for her to agree.

And then came the teenage years.

The occasional rebellions over milking cows or gathering plums off the ground turned more serious. Sneaking off to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol became common place. Things that were strictly forbidden for the children in her home.

Much like the earlier espionage games, her dad seemed largely unaware of her whereabouts, but one time she got careless. Riding her bike away from their house he saw her and followed a little later in his camionette, or farm truck. He found her at a neighbor’s house where she now regularly smoked and drank up in a tree with her friend from school. When she saw him drive in the farmyard, she jumped on her bike and rode home as fast as possible. When her dad arrived back home a few minutes later, he simply smelled her clothes and frowned.

But she knew he knew and was disappointed in her. Which just made things worse.

From that point on it was a war of attrition.

Melina would do what she wanted, experimenting with the forbidden fruit, as many young people do, while her parents stood by watching and waiting, hoping she would make it through unscathed.

Until, having exhausted their patience after being sent home from a nearby “lycee,” or boarding school, she headed out on her own.

Like many before her, she went to the big city. And, like many before her, she spent her savings at an astonishingly fast rate. For a girl of eighteen, there weren’t many viable choices. She called her older sister who had always been there for her in the past.   This time her sister didn’t know how to help and called their parents saying, “Melina is in trouble. She needs some help.”  

The next day, after a phone call from her parents encouraging her to come home, she had packed her car and was driving back to the farm she loved. The farm she had always loved.

But the lessons were still being learned.

After another dispute and an  ultimatum from her parents that landed her at a friend’s house to live, she finally took stock. The “experiments” weren't working out too well. And, worst of all, she knew she was hurting her parents. The worry and fear she saw in their faces made that all too clear.

She knew that, as she pushed against the strict rules she had been raised under, she was also pushing them to do things that hurt them deeply. All that came to an end when she decided to take charge and study something she found interesting. She also found she was very good at it: Real Estate sales.

The energy, intelligence, and creativity she had used to defy her parents suddenly turned into a way to make a good living, and to help people. Something she discovered she wanted to do. Had always wanted to do.

Her grandmother who had secretly given Melina money whenever she could while she was out of favor, exclaimed at how well she was doing.  

Her dad looked in astonishment at the checks she was getting. Checks with figures in the thousands if it was a big sale. More money than he had ever received in a single check for his exhausting, unremitting work on the farm.

The tenacity she had used as a young girl picking up plums for hours or planting potatoes one after the other was paying off. Even the lessons her mother had taught her about how to eat politely during dinner; keep your hands on the table, don’t use bad words, always say please, and thank you, were useful. Clients liked realtors who had good manners and could navigate different cultures and situations.

And Melina could. Picking up English she made herself invaluable to her clients and boss. But, as she became more and more successful, her dad became more and more concerned about who would take over the family farm.

As a young girl, Melina had proudly announced that she would take on the work when she was older. She had long since given up on that idea. And now her older brother, who had gotten his degree in agriculture and farming, had turned away from the farming life preferring, instead, to join the army. Her other siblings weren't interested either.

Who would want to work 51 weeks a year, seven days a week for 900 Euros a month and heavy debt payments? To be loaded down with forms and regulations that seemed to multiply year after year? To continue the grueling physical labor that was the lot of every farmer, even those who could afford help, until they simply had to stop.

“It is a passion. A passion my dad has but we don’t,” explained Melina. “To love the country, the animals, the smell of hay and dirt and cows, but it cannot be sustained these days. The farmers who receive 30 centimes for a liter of milk. Milk that sells for 1 euro 50 in the store. It is too hard.”

“What will happen” I ask, “if all the small farms fail?”

“They will all become industrial farms. Big farms that are owned by just a few people. Farming as France has always known it will die,” she says.

“The farm of my grandmother and great grandparents as far back as we can remember will be combined with a big farm,” she continues. “A farm that can sustain the losses and carry the debt.”

A farm where no grandmothers are living in the little house by the old stone house. Where no children are dressing up as commandos to follow their father to the barn. Where no farm wives are planting vegetable gardens every year to feed their families.

A way of life is disappearing before the eyes of a nation.
A nation whose agriculture has defined it for generations and given it a coveted place in the world’s economy.

“Sometimes I miss the farm,” says Melina. “The animals, the sky when you are out in the field, even the work. It made me stronger, confident I learned that I could work hard if I had to.”

But it’s not just love of the farm and its animals that keeps Melina in the Dordogne, in this bucolic region of France. It’s family.

“My family means everything to me,” she says.  “My brothers and sister have promised we will always be together. Always stay as close as we were as children, and we have. I can’t imagine it being any other way.”

She asks me what my family is like in the United States.

I pause and consider, then explain that when you grow up in the States you are expected to leave your family. To move away. To be independent and start your own nuclear family or make your own friends who become your family.

You may see your old family a few times a year, or you may not. And that’s considered normal, even a show of how busy and successful you are. Synonymous terms for most Americans.

I look up from across the table where we are talking and see that she is shocked, looking at me as if I am telling her some horrible thing. I laugh and say, “It’s ok. Chuck (my husband) is my family now. I’m very happy about that, even though at times I miss our kids. The closeness we had when they were growing up.”

And your other family? Your real family?” she asks. I look back down and say, “They are more my family in a memory. How I grew up. Not part of my day-to-day life.”

“How awful,” she says, unable to hide her pity.  I smile and say, “I guess that’s a difference across our cultures. I don’t know which is better. I just know it is.”

And as I say it, I feel myself choke up. I look away and wonder what we have lost by our national obsession with independence, the need to build lives and loves that are utterly separate from our lineage, our siblings, our parents, our roots. It gives us tremendous freedom, true, but at what cost?

And so, our talk over coffee comes to an end. She gives me a hug and kisses both my cheeks and we walk to her car. “A bientot” we say to each other.  See you soon. And I remember the way the French say they miss you, “Tu me manques,” which translates into, “You are missing from me.”

As I walk home, I think about my family, what Melina would call my real family: Brothers, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and I wonder what is missing from me.

The family we have, not by choice, but by birth.

The family we grow up living among, getting to know, relying on, and, ultimately, growing away from. The family that knew us when, and knows us still.

Like Melina’s family, who have loved her through her rebellious phase and love her still. And whose love she can count on and look back at down the centuries.

Whose stories she has grown up absorbing into the very marrow of her bones. The one about when her grandmother was a young girl during the German occupation of WWII and had to live in the forest for weeks, hiding from the Germans who had arrived and were looking for resistance fighters.

“Were your family part of the resistance?” I ask, fascinated. She smiles a little and says, “No, but everyone helped the resistance fighters and the Germans wanted information about where they were and who they were. That’s why they had to hide.”

“Did they escape. The resistance fighters?” I ask.

“Oh, no,” she says. “They were all found even though no one gave them up and shot. My grandmother still talks about the sound of the bullets as they were fired. They had brought them all to a small house in the village and lined them up and shot them. We still have a commemoration every July 14th at the house where they were killed. To honor them and to remember.”

It is not surprising she would remember this story of her grandmother’s so clearly. She lives 10 yards from the house Melina grew up in. In fact, the whole farm was hers until it passed to her daughter, a daughter she has feuded with for years, staying out of each other's way on the family farm. A farm that connects  them through the same bonds of blood and history, sorrow and joy, children and grandchildren.

She tells me about how her grandmother is very closed-minded, has never travelled or seen the broader world. She doesn’t like talking to her since she is now so negative and speaks only of dying and what she dislikes about her life. Melina’s zest for life is in complete opposition.

So, I ask her, “Do you love your grandmother?”

She replies, “But yes, of course, I love her. She is my grandmother. “

She says this with a little frown on her face and I realize she is wondering why I would even ask this thing because, for her, it is not really a question.

It’s another way we are different, Americans and the French. Not all, perhaps, but many.

An article entitled “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” by writer David Brooks explores this topic. To paraphrase, he makes the case that Americans have come to value individual freedom and the small, nuclear family over the messy, inconvenient, powerful, extended family. That includes grandparents.

If a relationship is not directly fostering and supporting our personal agenda, our self-centered wants and needs, Brooks posits, we label it destructive or negative and simply walk away. We are not encouraged to think about how the grandfather might feel who has been told he has old-fashioned, hateful ideas and that the grandchild really can’t visit with him anymore. It’s not good for him/her to be around that kind of negativity. Or, their life coach or therapist, guru or psychiatrist has encouraged them to leave those old relationships behind assuring them they aren’t healthy.

But is it always just about us?

Of course, there are people we should not be with, and there are always people we would rather be with. People who think exactly as we do and confirm how wonderful we both are for believing what we both believe. Who simply "get us" and can finish our sentences, instead of the older people in our life who don’t and can’t. Who, in fact, have the audacity to suggest we might not always be on the right path.

The ultimate sin of the aged.

In Melina’s family her grandmother lives in a little house to the side of the big house. She has lived there as long as Melina can remember. When her mother and grandmother were not speaking to each other (which went on for years) the grandmother would come over to the big house as soon as the mom (her daughter) would leave to go into town. She would bring candy and play games and ask what they were watching on their big, old TV and then sit down and watch with them.

“We would play our espionage game with her when she would come over, hiding upstairs. But she would always find us,” says Melina.

Her grandmother is 89 years old and she and her mom are getting along better now that it is only the three of them on the farm. When Melina visits to get fresh eggs and milk she helps with any chores that need doing.

“Do you see your grandmother when you go over?” I ask.

“No, not always,” she says.  “She only talks about death now and it's depressing. I tell her not to, but she still does. She’s very stubborn,”

“Maybe that’s why she’s still alive,” I say.

“Yes,” agrees Melina,” maybe.”

And ,suddenly, this woman I will never meet is part of my life. A stubborn French farm wife/mother/grandmother with strong opinions who has survived the war, the Germans, outlived her husband and an estrangement from her daughter and is now looking at death and wondering, “Will it be today or tomorrow?”

I like to think she can walk out to her farmyard and look at the animals and, like her granddaughter, admire the chickens and talk to the cows and smell the smells that tell her she is where she belongs.

With her family, on her farm, -- in France.


Note: Melina still lives in this region of France, in the Dordogne Valley, minutes from her parents and grandmother. She is a successful realtor.

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