Three and a half months ago, Joan and I landed in France with two dogs, two carts full of suitcases, and a dream of what the next chapter would look like.
That sentence feels strange to write. Three months fly by in the blink of an eye. Yet it also feels so long ago. When I try to picture our life in Bend just before we left — the townhome, the familiar drive to the trailhead, the routines we didn’t even notice we had — it feels much more distant than the pages of our wall calendar have measured.
It’s not about time. It’s about how much has had to change for Dijon to start feeling like our life instead of an extended vacation.
The Part Nobody Warns You About
Here’s the honest truth: it hasn’t all been easy. The hardest thing for me has been the phone. Not French bureaucracy in the abstract — I expected that — but the specific, small-scale stress of a French number I don’t recognize lighting up my screen, and having maybe three seconds to decide whether I can handle whatever is about to be said to me faster than I can think in a second language. Emails I can slow down, translate, and reread. A phone call doesn’t wait for me. It’s a strange kind of stress — not dramatic, just persistent — and it’s become one of our clearest goals here: get better at French, not someday, but soon, specifically so those calls stop feeling like a small emergency every time.
That’s the part of “moving abroad” that doesn’t photograph well. Nobody posts a story about standing in their apartment staring at a ringing phone. But it’s real, and it’s probably the truest measure of how far we still have to go.
At the Same Time — It Has All Worked Out
Here’s the other half of it, and it’s the half I keep coming back to: so far, every single hard thing has resolved. Not always quickly, and not always the way we expected, but it has worked out. #Whatifitallworksout isn’t a slogan I’m using loosely — it’s become something closer to a working hypothesis that keeps getting confirmed one day at a time.
Petit à petit (little by little)
Early on, we found a genuinely great apartment, and (thankfully) it has air conditioning, which summer felt less like a luxury and more like a small miracle of foresight. We’ve had five canicules (heat domes) this summer and I want to be precise about that, because it’s not just us being dramatic newcomers: this July was, nationally, the hottest July France has recorded since records began, edging out the previous records set in 2003 and 2006. A “normal” French summer sees maybe one heatwave, occasionally two. We’ve had five. We’re grateful, almost daily, for an apartment with air conditioning.
The apartment itself has finally come together. The furniture is arranged, the artwork is hung, and the list of what’s left is down to bits and bobs rather than big decisions. Walking into a home that actually looks and feels finished, after months of boxes and temporary arrangements, has done more for our sense of being settled here than almost anything else.
What’s Actually Making This Feel Like Home
It’s not any single thing — it’s the accumulation. It’s the food, which has been extraordinary in a way that still catches me off guard on an ordinary Tuesday. It’s centre-ville: the architecture, the impossibly old streets, the sheer pleasure of being able to walk to nearly everything we need. Bend was walkable in its own way, but this is a different kind of walkable — layered with centuries instead of decades.
It’s also the people. We’ve been lucky to build real friendships with other English-speaking expats here — Rhonda, Doug, Amy, Rebecca, Heather, Christine, and others — and there’s a particular relief in having people nearby who understand exactly what this transition is like, because they’re living it too, or already have.
We haven’t traveled much yet, if I’m honest — mostly a day trip to Arbois for some hiking in the Jura Mountains, which was a beautiful reminder of why we wanted a life with more of this in it. But that’s beginning to change. Last week I completed an eight-day trek on the Tour du Mont Blanc, and we’ve already got more travel lined up for September, October, and November. Three months of settling in is about to give way to three months of actually using what we settled into.
If You’re Waiting for a Sign
If there’s a version of this post that’s for someone besides us — for whoever’s reading this while quietly turning over their own scary idea — it’s this: the phone calls don’t stop being hard because you waited until you felt ready. They get less hard because you did the thing, and then you kept going, one imperfect step after another.
Un pas après l’autre (one step after another)
We didn’t have this figured out three months and two days ago. We still don’t have all of it figured out now. But it has worked out, again and again, in the specific unglamorous way that only becomes clear in hindsight — a signed lease, a working AC unit, hung artwork, new friends, and small victories in expanding my French language skills. If you’re waiting for the moment it stops feeling uncertain before you start, I don’t think that moment arrives on any schedule. You start, and work it out along the way.
Onward — to the next three months!
