Mondays are for dreaming: Mont Saint-Michel

As summer winds down and I get the children ready to return to school, I often feel nostalgic for my own school days. Today I’m thinking of the fall 19 years ago, which I spent in Paris. It was my junior year of college and I was ostensibly there to study French and political science. But really I was there to fall in love. With the woman at my corner bakery who unfailingly wore pearls with her apron. With Rodin’s statue of Balzac on the Boulevard Raspail. With the children sailing boats in the Jardin de Luxembourg. And of course with the Eiffel Tower, because anyone who says they don’t love the Eiffel Tower is lying and that is all.

I was fortunate enough also that October to go on a trip to Normandy with my academic program. We visited Bayeux to see the tapestry there that commemorates the Norman Conquest. We had an incomprehensible (at least to my ears, which had not yet fully adapted to hearing only French) tour of the D-day Museum at Arromanche, which made sense completely and viscerally as soon as we visited the American Cemetery nearby.

We spent the night at a small hotel where we were served huge platters of seafood, some of it still fully tentacled and possibly moving, along with copious amounts of wine. Our trip ended in the lovely seaside town of Saint-Malo where we strolled along the waterfront. But before we went there, we visited Mont Saint-Michel on an absolutely perfect fall morning.

And it is that improbable mound rising out of the sea that remains most strongly in my memory. I loved that at one time the only bridge to the island would be covered at high tide, leaving anyone who had traveled across it trapped, like something from an Agatha Christie novel. I loved that Saint Aubert, who founded the first monastery in the 8^th century, got a poke in the skull from the archangel Michael after he had been visited numerous times and refused to start building per instructions. I even loved climbing all of the stairs to the top of the abbey church (I’ve since learned that in so doing I went up 900 steps) and surveying the shimmering gray sand that surrounded the island at low tide. It was such a glorious improbably spot – both spiritual and fantastical.

And I loved how quickly the tide came in, rendering it once again an island, at least mostly. The tides there are known for being capricious and could catch anyone who chose to cross the sand unaware.

When we were there, the tide did in fact leave only a causeway to the island open. I think that now this only happens a few times a month, if at all, because of onshore development that has closed the distance from shore to shore and also increased the amount of silt in the bay. Tour buses park on those gleaming sands. But happily, a large public works project is underway that will restore Mont Saint-Michel to island status. By the time Tommy is the age I was when I went there, he will have to cross a bridge rather than a causeway to visit – and he will have the option to do so on foot without having to walk through a parking lot. Like the medieval pilgrims did.

I’m not sure why I look so expectant in this picture. Perhaps I knew that I would one day have two gorgeous boys would love a run over those cobblestones? I would certainly take them there in the fall, when the tourists no longer jam its streets and when the light is as pure and golden as the afternoon I visited. My dream today looks both backward and forward. I dream of myself and my boys at 20 exploring new worlds and falling in love.

What is your Monday dream? Please feel free to share a link below. Questions? See About Monday Dreaming.