Seasons in the Southwest: Early Summer
When the scent of star jasmine takes over and the guinguettes come back to life
Sitting in our dining room with the balcony door open to the early summer air, I can see straight across the river to La Plage. The old cowbell clangs. Another dish is up. Our local guinguette — one of the festive riverside restaurants that appear along the Dordogne each summer like a seasonal promise — is just coming back to life. The plane trees have fully leafed out now, thick and generous, and whatever wisps of buildings you could see have disappeared behind them.
I have a personal goal of trying three new guinguettes each summer, but I always return to La Plage out of sheer convenience. These festive outdoor restaurants pop up all along the riverside, serving simple food — burgers, confit de canard, the occasional fish. Carafes of cheap wine claim more than their fair share of victims. Some nights there is live music. Is it karaoke or a professional singer? I can’t always tell.
La Plage has emerged from February’s flooding looking spiffed up — new gravel, a new fence. The menu hasn’t changed, but it never needed to. It’s the view that really brings people in. Some regulars plant themselves at the bar, drink in hand, cigarette going, catching up with no apparent intention of sitting down to a meal. On certain Monday nights, there is a cochon feast — a pig day of sorts, which I imagine is something like that scene from Mark Greenside’s I’ll Never Be French (No Matter What I Do), where a bus full of French seniors arrive, and they proceed to eat, drink, and dance until there is nothing left to do but go home. I tell myself that this year, we will check it out.
The markets fill up again as the weather warms, and right now they belong to the strawberry. They’re everywhere — in tarts, in bowls with a little cream, and in one of my favorite drinks: Lillet — blanc, rosé, or rouge, I love them all. It has been made in Podensac, a small village just south of Bordeaux, since 1872. For a while, it had fallen somewhat out of favor. In fact, a French friend told me he associates it with his grandmother’s generation. I served it to him anyway. One sip and he was, to his own surprise, fully converted. Perhaps it’s not just a clever rebrand that’s thrusting it back into the limelight. It deserves to be there, if you ask me.
Fancy one for yourself? You can enjoy it on the rocks, mix with soda water, or do what I do: add a splash of tonic and garnish with whatever you have on hand. Right now, that means a gariguette strawberry — a variety with a distinctive long shape and a berry sweetness that we can’t get enough of.
The thing to know about early summer — and some may call this late spring, but let’s not argue — is that the month of May in France is practically designed for people who enjoy living life to the fullest. There are four public holidays packed into a single month. Taken together, they function less like individual holidays and more like a collective warm-up — France stretching its arms, loosening its shoulders, getting ready for summer.
May 1st — La Fête du Travail (Labor Day), the one day the French government legally mandates everyone to stop working. No exceptions.
May 8th — La Victoire 1945 (Victory in Europe Day), honoring the end of World War II.
Mid-May — L’Ascension (Ascension Day), a Catholic holiday marking the ascent of Christ into heaven, always falls on a Thursday — which is extremely convenient.
Late May — Le Lundi de Pentecôte (Whit Monday), the day after Pentecost Sunday.
It seems you can’t discuss holidays in France without someone bringing up the term faire le pont — making the bridge. When a holiday falls on a Thursday, you take the Friday off. Tuesday? Take the Monday. Suddenly, a single holiday has stretched itself into a four-day weekend. This, I understand. We did the same thing to make the most of our leave when I served in the Air Force. What was a little more surprising is when I found the Bordeaux préfecture completely closed last Friday. I couldn’t even be upset. My paperwork can wait. C’est la vie.
You can gauge the seriousness of each holiday by whether your grocery store is open. My Intermarché posts signs with a kind of escalating gravity: Fermé toute la journée le 1er mai. Closed all day May 1st. No exceptions, no apologies. May 8th: open until 12:30. The hierarchy is clear.
And on May 1st, something else happens that I find genuinely charming: small booths appear on street corners selling muguet — lily of the valley — tied in little bundles. It’s tradition to offer them as gifts for good luck. I saw them that day while driving through Bordeaux with visitors on the way to Cap Ferret, the stems peeking up from green paper cones, sellers of all ages stationed at intersections like the best kind of pop-up you’ve never seen advertised.
Back home, other things are popping up. The star jasmine is in full bloom. So is the honeysuckle, and the climbing roses — or what’s left of them. Our garden this year is, to put it charitably, a construction zone. We are currently in the midst of a façade overhaul, an attempt to fix the eroding limestone. The scaffolding went up sometime in March, and with each blow of the hammer, bits of stone and sand rain down. I feel naive having planted a whole flat of perennials and a bag of summer bulbs along the perimeter, which I had lovingly tended in the weeks before. I’ve almost made peace with it. Almost.
There is a particular lesson this season seems intent on teaching me, and it has nothing to do with flowers. The masonry work was due to be completed by May 4th. I’ve since adjusted my ambitions: I’m now desperately hoping the scaffolding comes down by July 14th, when we’re planning to have people over for La Fête Nationale. The maçon is so skilled and such a genuinely kind man that the schedule slippage is surprisingly easy to absorb. Have we finally learned to go with the flow? This revelation represents either personal growth or the slow French-ification of our expectations. Possibly both.
Maybe the garden, like us, just needs a reset. A little lavender where the dust has settled. Something in place of the dying palm. It will be better than before, I keep telling myself. I’m starting to believe it.
Early summer in southwest France smells like jasmine and patience. Both take longer than you expect. Both are worth it.
À la prochain,
Valérie
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This made me feel like heading to a guinguette and ordering a white Lillet! I doubt it's served in the guinguettes here, although you can buy it in shops.
Gorgeous roses! :)