Somewhere that's green
La Saussaye, Normandie, France.
La Grange is a place of poetry; it says very little, but it listens with aged intelligence, it remembers all that makes joy, it extends its embrace to all who enter its doors. All its memories, it hides in the shadows of eaves and corners, in the joints of old wood, the chill of ceramic, the ashes abandoned by the heat of fire.
I had managed to finish Simone de Beauvoir's La Force de L'Age (in English, of course) just before leaving. In front of the fireplace, we discussed how today's feminists have relatively little interest in her work, and that certain women have rejected her because she chose not to have children.
The lack of interest is understandable - she belongs to a different time when the feminism battle was different. However, the rejection seems to me a little uncalled for, eventhough I can see the basis for it. Today's first-world woman has been given the choice of having a family, a career and a personal life. Perhaps it's due to the fact that these choices have not always been present and that our rights were hard-fought, that I think women today tend to feel we must have all three. The fact of the matter is, we don't. The idea behind choices is that we can choose, that we are no longer imprisoned behind society's demands. Just because we have these choices available to us does not mean we have to take everything that we can.