Entre Nous

“Were you about to take a nap? Or were you about to wake up?” The young architect, wary of my mother and welcomed by my father, poked his face through the soft, green grapevines, as if traversing a gentle spring. I was lying in a hammock that my father had tied up under the shade of a broad-leafed grapevine, tossing and turning as I tried to fall asleep. “If you leave, I will sleep. If you stay by my side, I will wake up.” The stranger’s face appeared and disappeared a couple of times through the sunlit, azure leaves, before he finally smiled brightly down at me. “A good answer.” A secret and intimate story of a spring day, unfolding in a beautiful, small town in southern France, within...