"Feels like 44,” the radio announced as I drove into a parking garage in Aix-en-Provence recently. That’s 111° Fahrenheit. 

On the pavement outside the garage, a woman of about 50 sat crumpled against a wall. Her black garments looked hot. “My husband is dead,” her little cardboard sign said. I dropped a Euro in her paper cup. If this were a novel, I’d imagine she’d wind up being one of those grey-haired ladies in black who sat on doorsteps at dusk.

"Respectable people,” wrote the novelist Emile Zola, a native son of Aix. “What bastards!”

At lunch in a restaurant gilded like a church, I sat near a lady who wore a lace shawl. Her back was straight as a poker and never touched her chair. Here was a daughter of privilege, my novel would say, a properly equipped middle-class woman whose life was set.

Maybe she thought I was a retired priest, possibly disgraced. 

But later that afternoon as I strolled down the Cours Mirabeau, one of the most beautiful streets in France, I saw the woman in black, not crumpled against a wall but seated in a cafe, shaded by plane trees, sipping a lemonade. She smiled.

It sure felt like 44°.

“Pretty as a new-laid egg”

Mrs. Ladu, my fifth-grade teacher, was a fierce guardian of the English language. A single “ain’t” evoked her wrath. Since then I’ve tried to keep the faith.

But at lunch in the mountains of East Tennessee recently, the cook came over to ask, “Was you-uns up at church?”

She had me right there.

We were eating grilled cheese sandwiches in a general store where you could buy crankcase oil, ham biscuits, and rat poison at the same place that sold shotgun shells and smelled of old wood.

“I ain’t done nothing,” a man at another table said.

Folklorist Vance Randolph believed the people in the Appalachian Mountains inherited a superior English: “They know that it’s more expressive to say, ‘I ain’t said nothin’ than to say, flabbily and ineffectually, 'I haven’t said anything.' "

Likewise, a mountain cabin built of logs and smelling of hickory smoke can be far more eloquent than a flabby McMansion.

This cabin, with its unpainted boards and crooked corners, might look strange to a flat-lander. But to the family who lived there, “It was pretty as a new-laid egg.”

Even Mrs. Ladu would like that.

A redbud beside a pawn shop

A friend had come back from a road trip:
“Stupid churches and sixty feet tall billboards advertising everything from root canals to divorce.” He said, “When everything is the same what's the point of going anywhere?”

He could have been describing US 64, which goes east-west across North Carolina where once brick textile mills worked three shifts. Now the mills are dark, but the lights are on at the Quik-Lube, Mcdonald’s, and Dollar General.

Just as vigorous as the sprouting fast food joints is another thing common to North Carolina: redbud trees. The redbud’s pink blush appears in eastern North Carolina in March and follows springtime across the state until May. Its seeds have wings, perfect for being drafted along US 64 behind eighteen-wheelers. It roots almost anywhere.

On a recent spring morning, I noticed a redbud blooming beside the Silver Dollar Gun and Pawn on US 64 near Asheboro, its roots growing in a cracked parking lot. It reminded me of my friend’s lament and what Leonard Cohen sang:

There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
That’s how the light gets in