Savoring Provence's life in the slow lane

In the French region of Provence, you can keep busy by doing so little – and enjoying it so much.

By Jerry Lanson

from the April 13, 2007 edition

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There is nowhere else in the world where you can keep busy doing so little and enjoying it so much. One day you'll understand.

– Uncle Harry's advice to Max in Peter Mayle's 'A Good Year.'

In the 15 years since his best‑selling book "A Year in Provence" made this region a tourism magnet, author Peter Mayle often has been pilloried by the French: Mayle casts Provence as a trifle, it's been said, buoyant but lacking in depth. His characters are exaggerated. He first profited from the region, and then left it behind when crowds of tourists converged on the places he'd helped make famous.

But in truth the characters of Provence are exaggerated, often making their own statement, consciously and with humor. Life here is buoyant and lived dehors, on country walks and in outdoor city squares. And if Mayle stole some of Provence's privacy, he clearly boosted the tourist trade in return.

As with Uncle Harry's advice, delivered to a young Max years before he inherits the somewhat faded Provençal estate of his long-forgotten relative, Mayle's characterizations of this region often strike me as uncannily on the mark.

Nearly 10 weeks into our stay here, my wife, Kathy, and I are living life in the slow lane, trying to measure each day by what we perceive rather than what we produce. In its way, that poses the most insurmountable challenge. For, as the humorist Art Buchwald wrote in his final column, published a few days after his death, "What's it all about, Alfie?"

For now, I'll settle for three loads of wash, drying in the breeze on a sunlit patio, hung to the unrelenting serenade of songbirds in the soft light of a spring morning, with the fragrant smell of laurels for which our lane, Chemin du Vallon des Lauriers – street of the little valley of laurels – was named. (Time: about 90 minutes to hang, three days to dry.)

I'll settle for throwing open and latching the shutters each morning as the sky takes color, dodging the bees that seek amour on our screenless sills (10 minutes).

I'll settle for our daily walk to town, past the old women wheeling carts for shopping, past the teens playing cards on the sidewalk of l'école Paul Cézanne during a break, or the middle schoolers, jostling and giggling a few blocks farther on (45 minutes).

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