...banalities torments of school (with Sister Veronica calling me "a pest" for being away for three months when I should have had my nose in my hated maths books).

In our beautiful, haunted old house in the village of Empeaux, thirty-five kilometres from Toulouse, we raced from red room to blue room to brown room, joyously taking in all the sights, the sounds, and especially the smells that we hadn't experienced for two years: smells, for instance, of the Indonesian teak furniture that crowded the rooms, and of the fragrant country ham, the jambon de Bayonne, hanging up in its shroud-like pillowcase from the hook in the kitchen. We didn't think about how it was that the house always looked so good, the furniture was dusted, and the jambon was always hanging up ready for us; things just happened, in this fairytale holiday place.

But everything changed for me fifteen years ago, when that holidaying child became the prodigal daughter returning to the home of her ancestors, fleeing to it in search of peace and refuge--and a permanent home.

That year, 1990, was to be the year of revolution in the USSR. I was twenty-nine, unhappily married with two young children, painting whenever I could, and so geographically-challenged that I had no precise idea of where Tbilisi, Georgia, could be. I had to find out quickly--for that September, my Australian ex-husband, a sculptor, and I had...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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