Gordes is a soul touchpoint says author Elizabeth Birkelund…

I wonder if Louis XI knew what he had gained in 1486 when Provence, a semi-independent state ruled by the Counts of Provence, was legally incorporated into France. He must have known that the Rhone River was a highway of commerce and communication, that the area bordered the Maritime Alps and included Mont Ventoux, the Giant of Provence, and that thanks to the Mediterranean climate, the area had the potential of producing the most fruit and vegetables in all of France. Perhaps he had already tasted Provence’s dessert grapes, figs, almonds, oranges and lemons.

If Louis XI didn’t appreciate the bounty and beauty of Provence, I sure do! I fell in love with France when I was 8 years old. But I fell head over heels in love with Provence only nine years ago, when I stayed with a friend in a house in the hilltop village of Gordes. That first morning, when I walked to the center of the village, heard the church bells chiming, saw people under umbrellas chatting over morning café, smelled baguettes baking from the nearby boulangerie, and took in the view of vineyards in the valley, something about this place connected with something deep inside me. It was a soul touchpoint.

Since 2015, I have visited many villages in Provence extensively, but I keep returning to the perched village of Gordes. My favorite spot in the village is the postage-stamp sized balcony of the café tabac, Le Cercle Republicain. Because we writers like to relive our lives through characters, that is the location where my character, Ilse Erlund in A Northern Light in Provence, a Greenlander, spent her first hours in Provence. When I’m in Gordes during the summer months (generally it’s best to avoid visiting at this time of year), I try to arrive before the rest of the world to sit in one of the eight tables overlooking the view, to take in the sky, the misty lavender/blue colored Luberon mountain range and the lime green vineyards below. In the late afternoon, there is no better way to say au-revoir to the day but to sit on the same balcony with an anise flavored Ricard in hand, and to gaze at the unfolding shifting orange rose colored kaleidoscope of color.

There, as Ilse Erlund does in my novel, I meet my friends to discuss the cares and delights of the day. And unlike fetching a morning coffee in NYC, where I will wait in line, offer a shortened version of my name (it’s faster), respond to texts while I wait, then about face to work, in the perched village of Gordes, there is no such thing as “to go” coffee (at least with the residents).  A “coffee to go” is the antithesis of the concept of Provence.

Provence tells you to stop, to smell the coffee (and the lavender), savor the croissant, touch the plump fig hanging from the fig tree, notice the colors in the light in the distant views. They say the unusual light is thanks to the strong wind, the mistral, that strips the dust from the atmosphere. No wonder Cezanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, and more drew inspiration from this setting.

After the adrenaline-rushed days in New York City, I feel the need (not that I can always satisfy it) for a yearly visit to Provence to remind me to touch, listen, smell, taste and see the world afresh —and to connect with the deeper part of me that that knows…. to quote from C.P. Cavafy, that “arriving there is what I’m destined for.”

Elizabeth Birkelund is the author of a Northern Light in Provence: (Ballantine hardcover, ISBN 9780593722213): A woman leaves her coastal Greenland village to translate the works of a renowned Provençal poet and finds her life irrevocably changed, in this tender and romantic novel set in a French village.

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