On The Way To The Fort

4 enfants +1 adult+1 baguette+du fromage+des pommes+ 1 treasure hunt= a great afternoon. (I was the adult by the way) Paul, Ludo , Yaëlle, Alec et myself toted our picnic up through a grape vineyard and onto a plateau overlooking Lessy. Immediately Paul and Ludo hunched over an old trenched road in search of treasures. Soon shouts of "regarde" were heard as one and than another found fragments of bombs dating from WWI and WWII. Another regarde, this time Alec as he uncovered the find of the day, an ancient fossil of a preserved snail. Ludo was quite imressed, "z best find of the day." I stopped searching, stood straight to see the red roof tops stacked like playing cards fanned out below in the village of Lessy. I looked down to my mud splattered probably-made-in- china-nikes to the earth beneath my feet. I stand upon metal shards of a violent past Shards, if gathered and glued would piece together a rusted, german grenade, a made-in-america bomb a metal patch-work quilt fragment by fragment that tells this story of little legs running through open fields tiny fingers picking and placing buttercups beneath chins and tucking daisies behind ears 7,8,9 year old friends and cousins huddled over these trenched roads searching for clues of a time when the sea ruled these hills searching until the bombs fell and fell and fell as in Gravelotte a village not far from here and now where the children looked up way up and saw not cats and dogs raining down but bombs And here I stand upon this French soil years later amidst unseen memorials of book satchels, paten leather mary janes, momma knit vests and tweed shorts and I hear "regarde."