"Over the remainder of that first fall in Autignac, I came to feel that there was almost nowhere I would rather be, nowhere I had ever been that was so perfectly tuned to play the music of daily life at just exactly my tempo and pitch. Days portioned themselves into a morning's work, a lingering lunch, an afternoon's work, and an aperitif—perhaps a sip of Jean-Luc's homemade vin d'orange beside a plate of oysters, or a sweating bottle of rosé with Lucques olives from a tree within sight. Then dinner, which could be a daube of beef or lamb, a steaming heap of yawning black mussels, or simply fish fresh from the Mediterranean. Maybe an entire mackerel, stuffed with lemon slices and fennel stalks, grilled over vine cuttings and basted with a rosemary branch dipped in a gritty slurry of olive oil, garlic, and sea salt that would run into the slits cut into the fish's side. The oil would hiss and flare as it dripped onto the knotty elbows of vine embers. I felt an urgency to belong—an inexplicable sense of homecoming—here, where no ancestor of mine had ever lived." - Steve Hoffman
