I am in France now with my eight-year-old grand-daughter Oona, visiting her Grandmother in the little town of Aoust Sur-Cie. I am staying at an inn in the nearby village of Saillans. This is mountainous country that rises a few miles to the east to the Alps. On the long trip from Seattle to Paris, I read to Oona from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s By the Shores of Silver Lake – a good American tale to carry with us to France.
In the book we encountered the first cup in my tale. Laura, her sisters, and her mother are on a train travelling west to join her father. Everything about the trip is new and exciting, not the least the experience of travelling at the extraordinary speed of twenty miles-per-hour. A man walks past Laura to the end of the car. Because her sister Mary is blind, Laura describes for her what happens next:
“He’s turning a handle on the wall at the end of the car, and water’s coming out! The water’s pouring right into a tin cup. Now he’s drinking it. His Adam’s apple bobs. He’s filling he cup again. He just turns the handle, and the water comes right out…. He’s set the cup on a little shelf. Now he’s coming back.”
Fascinated, Laura asks her mother if she can get herself a drink of water. She takes the “bright tin cup,” holds it under the faucet, and turns the handle. Water comes out. She turns the handle back, and the water stops. “She had never seen anything so fascinating. It was all so neat and so marvelous that she wanted to fill the cup again and again.”
After reading this passage to Oona, I explained that our modern ideas of sanitation have developed to the point that we no longer share cups in public places. We don’t want to spread out germs.
(Come to think of it, “drinking fountains” are likely a product of these sensibilities. Of course, we waste huge amounts of water by delivering it in a jet instead of into a cup since much of the water flows out the drain rather than down our throats, but we eliminated a possible source of contagion.)
But a couple of days ago, I was proven wrong, and I’m still grinning at the lovely way that I learned that even in the twenty-first century good folk sometimes share tin cups.
On the recommendation of my inn keeper, Frédéric, I set out on a steep, twisty road into the mountains looking for good hiking and sight-seeing.
And was that road very twisty:
“He’s turning a handle on the wall at the end of the car, and water’s coming out! The water’s pouring right into a tin cup. Now he’s drinking it. His Adam’s apple bobs. He’s filling he cup again. He just turns the handle, and the water comes right out…. He’s set the cup on a little shelf. Now he’s coming back.”
Fascinated, Laura asks her mother if she can get herself a drink of water. She takes the “bright tin cup,” holds it under the faucet, and turns the handle. Water comes out. She turns the handle back, and the water stops. “She had never seen anything so fascinating. It was all so neat and so marvelous that she wanted to fill the cup again and again.”
After reading this passage to Oona, I explained that our modern ideas of sanitation have developed to the point that we no longer share cups in public places. We don’t want to spread out germs.
(Come to think of it, “drinking fountains” are likely a product of these sensibilities. Of course, we waste huge amounts of water by delivering it in a jet instead of into a cup since much of the water flows out the drain rather than down our throats, but we eliminated a possible source of contagion.)
But a couple of days ago, I was proven wrong, and I’m still grinning at the lovely way that I learned that even in the twenty-first century good folk sometimes share tin cups.
On the recommendation of my inn keeper, Frédéric, I set out on a steep, twisty road into the mountains looking for good hiking and sight-seeing.
And was that road very twisty:
Eventually the route took me high into the mountains to points like this where I could look far down to the valley below:
Coming around a turn in the road I entered the town of Rimon. In the picture below, that’s the Marie, or City Hall.
The town was one with the mountains, with buildings seemingly crafted by the same hand as the landscape itself.
On the outskirts of the village beside an open field I head the sound of running water and came upon this fountain.
It was called the “Fountaine Des Marrants,” and on the fountain beside the sign, what did I see?!
Coming closer I saw a bright tin cup, tied by a nylon line to the water spout.
I spent a few more minutes walking through the village, struck all the more by the beautiful ways that the hands of men and women had crafted the architecture and gardens of this place to be a part of nature.
Then I returned to the fountain and took another picture of the cup. I did not notice this until I began reviewing my pictures later: in the image above the cup was upside down, but in this picture it has been set down upright. Someone had taken a drink from the fountain.
….And so that is my tale of two bright tin cups, one described by Laura Ingalls Wilder on a train in the United States well over a century ago, the other tied by a nylon cord today to a fountain in Rimon, France. Could it be the very same cup?! That is of course unlikely, but the affinity of these objects – separated from each other in time and space, but so proximate in my encounters with them – fascinates me. And why is that? I cannot say for certain, but this thought comes to mind:
Those two cups suggest this broader observation: we are bound to the past and to each other by objects such as these, objects which evoke our kinship as fellow travellers moving through time.
Those two cups suggest this broader observation: we are bound to the past and to each other by objects such as these, objects which evoke our kinship as fellow travellers moving through time.
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