I know my way around France, speak the language, and have friends from the year my husband and I lived in the country.
Yet each time those glass tubes drop me at DeGaulle Airport’s door, I find myself switching not only languages, but personalities as well. My American persona just won’t do.
Winter in New England used to drive me indoors every year. I would shrink from the cold, huddling under layers of wool, dashing from heated house to heated car to heated workplace, dreading the daily weather forecast. Winter seemed to chill my soul. Finally, I got fed up.
My husband lays shirt, shorts and boots on the sandstone. Pink and nude as the rock around us, he strides toward the water that blocks our way up this narrow canyon in southern Utah.
“Watch the sky,” says the man in the battered jeep, chin jerking skyward. “That canyon’s no place to be in a rain.” He switches into 4-wheel drive and guns his jeep along the sand-and-slickrock track toward the nearest paved road 10 miles away.
