There is a moment I can point to, exact and unmistakable, when the woman I am now began to take shape. It was 2011, a three week trip through France and Italy with my girlfriend at the time, and I did not know it yet, but I was walking into the beginning of a complete unravelling and remaking of myself.
The chaos started before we had even left the airport. I had gotten rather merry on the flight over, so my girlfriend took the wheel once we landed at Charles de Gaulle, and somewhere in the maze of French roundabouts she got stuck circling the same loop again and again. I could not help myself. Every pass I leaned over and said, in my best Chevy Chase, “look kids, there’s Big Ben,” the way he did in European Vacation when he could not find his way off that roundabout to save his life. She was not amused. She told me to shut up, several times, and eventually we broke free and pointed the car toward a small village I had seen once on a travel show, a place called Rocamadour.
Rocamadour turned out to be one of those places that seems to defy the ground it sits on, medieval chapels and churches built directly into a cliff face above the Alzou river, the whole village stacked up the rock like it grew there rather than being built. At the heart of it sits a chapel holding a small wooden Black Madonna, carved from walnut and darkened by centuries of candle smoke, venerated for close to a thousand years by pilgrims, kings, and queens who came seeking healing and protection. Legend has it a sword called Durandal is lodged in the rock above the chapel, said to belong to the medieval hero Roland, and the whole place has that quality of somewhere both ancient and quietly waiting.
My girlfriend, exhausted from the flight and the driving, put in her earplugs, pulled on her eye mask, and was asleep well before nine. I was wide awake. We were staying in a beautiful old building with an enamel clawfoot bath, and I climbed up onto the windowsill and sat there looking out at a sky I had never seen before in my life. Growing up under the Southern Cross, I had no reference point for the constellations above me that night, an entirely unfamiliar sky, and whether it was the clarity of the night or simply the surrounds, it felt like there were more stars than I had ever known existed. Below the window I could hear the river moving through the valley, and somewhere down in the village the monks from the abbey began their evening chant, the Gregorian tones drifting up through the stone streets and settling over everything. It was spine tingling, genuinely, and sitting there in that unfamiliar dark I knew with total certainty that I was exactly where I was meant to be. This was not a holiday. Something in my bones told me this trip was going to change things, and it did. Somewhere along that journey I met someone who introduced me to Isagenix, and that chance meeting sent me down a completely different path with my health, one I am still
walking today.
France kept unfolding from there, generous and unhurried. We stopped at one of those extraordinary French petrol stations that are really full supermarkets in disguise, and loaded up on salami, cheese, fresh fruit, a beer each, then found a picnic spot by a jetty along a quiet river. Families cycled past on the bike track behind us, it being the height of the European summer, and across the water sat a sunflower field so vivid it looked staged, one of the most striking backdrops I had seen in my life and my real welcome to France. The food throughout the trip was on another level entirely, gastronomy in the truest sense, an adventure in itself, and we gave two nights to Avignon simply because we could not bring ourselves to leave sooner. We drove through the Mont Blanc tunnel into Italy, passed through a town called Beaurepaire that was, rather hilariously, absolutely overrun with giant roosters, a strange and funny detour given my own surname. Somewhere in Italy I ticked off a bucket list moment I had been carrying since childhood, sitting with a glass of red wine in an olive grove, the Tuscan landscape spread out in front of me exactly as I had always imagined it.
Tuscany itself broke something open in me. We rounded a corner and I asked to stop the car, got out, and stood there while tears ran down my face, because I had finally arrived at the one place on the planet I had loved from a distance since I was a child, and it had not disappointed me in the slightest. Rolling hillsides, roads lined with poplars, an old manor house sitting quietly in the background with rolled hay bales scattered through the fields, it was the most beautiful thing I had seen in my life, more moving even than I had expected, and I had expected a great deal.
That trip landed at a time when I was not happy in my marriage, when we were struggling badly with money and with each other, and somewhere between the lavender fields and the sunflowers, the carvings on Notre Dame, the cobblestones and pot plants hanging from Italian balconies, I remembered that there was a whole world out there still worth reaching for. France and Italy gave me everything I had imagined and then some, and from that year onward I began, quietly and then with increasing intention, building a life I could actually feel joy in. That is the trip that started it all, and it is one of the reasons this website exists, because the woman writing this to you now was shaped, in no small part, by a roundabout in Paris, a chant in the dark, and a field of sunflowers I never planned to fall in love with.
