Part Three: The Years of Making Do
I will not pretend the early years were not hard. They were hard in the way that things are hard when you are sixty and have been planning for a certain shape of life — a quieter shape, a shape with grandchildren who visited and went home — and the shape has been replaced overnight with something entirely different and entirely non-negotiable.
I had my pension, which was modest. I had the house, which was paid for. I had the savings that Michel and I had put aside over thirty years of careful living, which were enough for emergencies and not enough for two children from infancy to adulthood. I had Marguerite, who came twice a week and who never once suggested that I should have done anything differently, which was the most important thing she could have given me.
I had the tea.
I had been blending tea for twenty years — not commercially, not seriously, but as the kind of hobby that develops when you are someone who pays close attention to flavors and who finds the process of combining things into something new satisfying in a quiet, private way. I had notebooks full of blends, labeled in my handwriting with dates and notes and small assessments. This one needs more lavender. This one is better in winter. This one Hugo likes.
That last one surprised me when I wrote it. Hugo was three and a half. He had tried a small sip of the chamomile blend I was testing one afternoon and had looked at it with the expression he brought to things he was evaluating — that serious, concentrated regard — and had asked for more. I had noted it in the notebook with the date and his name, and then I had sat for a moment and thought about what it meant that I was already noting his preferences.
It meant he was mine to raise. Not temporarily — there had never, after that afternoon with the bag on the doorstep, been a call from Claire asking about them, no letter, no indication that temporary was part of her understanding of the arrangement. It meant I had better do it well.
The market stall came out of necessity and became something else. I started selling the blends at the Saturday market in the town center — a small setup, a card table, labeled jars, a sign I had Luc help me paint when he was four and that had his handprints on the border, which I kept until it fell apart from weather and then had it laminated and put on the wall in the shop instead. The response was better than I expected. I understood, after several months of Saturdays, that what I was making was actually good — that the twenty years of notebooks and adjustments and attention had produced something with a quality that the market customers recognized and came back for.
By the time the boys were six, I had a small wholesale arrangement with two restaurants. By the time they were nine, I had a proper shop on the rue du Commerce. By the time they were ten, the shop employed three people and the online sales had made the wholesale arrangements look modest.
I had not set out to build a business. I had set out to pay for school uniforms and dental appointments and the summer camp that Luc decided was the thing he wanted most in the world when he was eight, and that Hugo went to because he went where Luc went in those years, before they had fully differentiated into the distinct people they were becoming.
The business grew because I paid attention to it and because I was not afraid of the work and because the product was good. The same reasons anything grows.
The boys grew because I paid attention to them and because I was not afraid of the work and because they were, both of them, extraordinary in the specific way that all children are extraordinary when someone is paying attention.
