#58: permission to reinvent yourself

staying with Kit & Peter in the South of France, recipes at the end!

May 27, 2024

Pierre Bonnard, *Dining Room on the Garden (Grande salle à manger sur le jardin),* 1934-5

1×

0:00

-10:19

Above is an audio recording of me reading this post for those who prefer listening. Thank you for being here! And thank you, Philipp Kaspar, for the intro music.

My aunt Kit’s cappuccinos are my definition of wealth. To sip her obsessively tested rich espresso crema and perfectly microfoamed whole milk is a luxury akin to Anthony Bourdain’s jarring description of eating the rare ortolan delicacy in his book Medium Raw, except without any of the gore, pain, and species endangerment that he describes.

“I bring my molars down and through my bird’s rib cage with a wet crunch and am rewarded with a scalding hot rush of burning fat and guts down my throat. Rarely have pain and delight combined so well. I’m giddily uncomfortable, breathing in short, controlled gasps as I continue slowly – ever so slowly – to chew. With every bite, as the thin bones and layers of fat, meat, skin, and organs compact in on themselves, there are sublime dribbles of varied and wondrous ancient flavors: figs, Armagnac, dark flesh slightly infused with the salty taste of my own blood as my mouth is pricked by the sharp bones. As I swallow, I draw in the head and beak, which, until now, have been hanging from my lips, and blithely crush the skull.”1

An insane quote, I know. But necessary in order to capture the intensity of experience in drinking Kit’s blissful cup of coffee.

I’ve been craving Kit’s cappuccino since my last visit to her and Peter’s beautiful home in the South of France in 2022 and to be back there again with John was beyond a treat.

Kit is my dad’s second eldest sister. After living in San Francisco for a large chunk of her adult life, Kit and my uncle Peter committed to making their dream of moving to a medieval village in the South of France called Saint Antonin Noble Val a reality. This dream was implanted in Kit in the 1960s when she read a Time magazine article about American girls becoming au pairs in Europe. She wrote to Time asking how to find an au pair gig and they directed her to an agency that would eventually place her with a family in France. She would go on to live with them in Paris for several years and has kept in close touch with them to this day. So close, in fact, that just days before John and my arrival, one of the sons of Kit’s au pair family had been staying with them in Saint Antonin. After her days as an au pair, Kit would eventually return to the US (with many adventure stories and stints abroad in between), but always dreamed of settling into a home in France in her later years. And so she did.

I’ve asked permission to share that Kit and Peter are astonishingly in their 80s, a fact that breaks my grip on reality while simultaneously making me so excited to get older. Shit, if life can be this good at 80, I don’t know what the hell I am worried about right now!!!! Kit and Peter moved to Saint Antonin in their 70s and started a new life here. They were so excited to share the good news that just a few weeks before our arrival, they’d finally been granted French citizenship, which is no small feat.

It’s rare these days to get to spend ample time with people of different generations and wow is it refreshing, reinvigorating, and dream-making to do so. My main takeaway from my visit here is how rich life can be as we get older if we trust that each chapter will leave its own footprint.

With that, today’s newsletter is an ode to Kit and Peter’s lifestyle and creativity. My words for 2024 are “astound me” and “what matters,” and I have been reacquainted with both in my few days of being here.

I am astounded by the amount of purpose, intention, and creativity these two bring into their lives. And I am reminded of what matters by being in such close proximity to two people who have chosen each decade of their lives so carefully.

Kit and Peter, it is an honor to know and love you.

“Why did you choose ‘La Chouette’ as the name for your Airbnb?,” asks John.

“It’s a double entendre,” Kit replies.

“La Chouette means owl but is also slang for cozy, intimate, warm.”

She bends down to jiggle her key into the faded green door and gently pushes it open into her mini cottage palace. I am not exaggerating when I say that there’s not a square inch of this home that Kit has not touched with her bare hands, from sanding floors to painting ceilings, to organizing book shelves, and hanging lightware. Each layer of detail in this home builds upon each other, creating an ineffable sense of tranquility that I have yet to experience elsewhere.

After settling into their main place here in Saint Antonin (and perfecting it over a period of 7 years), Kit and Peter explored further dreams of buying a small second home with a garden to convert into an Airbnb. And so they did.

It’s no wonder at all that they’ve never received less than a 5-star rating.

Each guest is treated with a surprise basket of fresh tomatoes, eggs, nuts, 2 croissants, and a bottle of wine. With the warmth of this welcome offering, guests proceed to open the refrigerator to find butter (the good Euro kind), 3 different types of jam, a punnet of fresh berries, and 2 pristine pink lady apples.

You can feel the fulfillment and purpose that Kit derives from maintaining the beauty of this place. It reminded us of the importance of having and following passions.

The spirit of artistry and entrepreneurship that Kit brings to her projects transforms what feels like work to others into a deep sense of joy for her.

She mops herself out of the home, closes the door, and is ready to greet her next guests. I wrote obsessively about the “lemonade stand feeling” that I craved at the beginning of writing this newsletter. To me, that means working hard on a project that gives you the daily gift of a reframe and a purpose. You start seeing the world through a renewed lens and have a new meaning through which you are able to find value in the simple things.

Just as interior design and culinary excellence do it for Kit, Peter finds equal joy in his research and volunteer work with elephant sanctuaries (both locally in France and in South Africa), and his devotion to civic duties in Saint Antonin, such as serving on boards for canal maintenance and breathing life back into their local cinema.

Someone once told me that a successful marriage is just a really long conversation. Peter and Kit have been out in the world, collecting their own stories each day through their different passions, and bringing back home conversational acorns to share with each other at meals and the small moments in between. Their 43 and counting years of marriage seem to be due, in large part, to their ability to stay sharp and interested by devoting themselves to topics and projects that make them feel alive.

My main takeaway from this visit with them was a deep sense of relief and patience.

It can be easy in your twenties, thirties, and probably forties, too, to feel so fixated on your current season that you forget how many more chapters there will be. Our culture belabors us with the idea that we need to know what we want to do in our teens so that we can go to school to master it in our early twenties and begin a linear career immediately following. This makes all of life feel like a pressure cooker in which missteps early on derail you from future rewards.

It’s just not true.

Life is so much longer and more organic than that.

We always have the ability to reinvent ourselves. At any age. And each chapter can be so different. To imagine leading a whole new life in a different country with new friends in my 70s and 80s really rightsized the importance and pressure of perfecting this chapter now.

It made me excited to get older. And I felt reassured in knowing that we are all always in a continual process of figuring it out.

Being in your twenties can come with a whole lot of comparison to others, as our paths meaningfully diverge for the first time. This can lead to feeling behind or questioning if you are on the right track.

You are.

If Kit and Peter can move to France in their 70s and have a whole new chapter, then there is no point in needing to have it all perfected and figured out right now. Yes. Sure. Their move required lots of planning and dreaming. They didn’t just wake up one day and decide to move to France. Rather, it was even better. They had the pleasure of dreaming about this whole experience for many years and then actually living it out.

Sometimes booking a trip and getting excited during the planning stages is nearly as good as the trip itself. You prolong the joy by getting to map it out. The same is true for all of life.

I left Kit and Peter’s wanting to start dreaming about not only my 30s, 40s, and 50s, but also my 70s and 80s and all of the moments in between. Life is short. But it’s also long. And it’s a whole lot more fun when you give yourself permission to be messy and enjoy your present season, all the while knowing that there will be so many more to come.

Sometimes it’s harder to know what you want in the near term than in the distant future. In dreaming about the future, though, you may just reverse engineer your way into clarifying what it is that you want right now.

What future dream could you begin planning today to immediately start experiencing its joy?

That’s all for this week!!

Thank you for getting

Caught Up in Char’s Web

with me.

Catch you here sometime soon!

-Charlotte

Xandra’s Curation Corner

Xandra Beverlin is an incredible art curator at Pace Gallery, co-founder of PULSE, and dear friend, who so generously pulls pieces for this newsletter each week. I text her a few short bullets about the main themes of Char’s Web and she replies with the most thoughtful articulations of the artists that come to mind. This is my favorite part of writing my newsletter. Do yourself the favor of reading her curator’s notes!

Pierre Bonnard, *The Dining Room in the Country,* 1913

I am going to serve up the duo of Pierre Bonnard - a true Post-Impressionist - and Alex Katz - a figurative New-Yorker favorite

Bonnard’s work is endlessly a synonym of these very photos you’re sending me - depicting this vibrant yet effortlessly colorful landscape of color, harmony, and tranquility. The coloring is delightfully complex in a way, you can really see it in the layering, and yet the subject matter so simple

Pure escapism

Works like the piece above really illustrate the hospitality that your aunt and uncle clearly tend towards: light seeping through the windows, a pot of coffee and fresh fruit always on the table, and time, the greatest luxury, winding away down the road - no real agenda or haste.

I have no doubt you’re familiar with his work but fun to put in parallel with the reality you’re experiencing :’)

I also love to bring in Katz if not just for the adoration of his wife, Ada - how she was endlessly a muse to him throughout his life, a characterization that I think brought them closer as a couple, while of course reinforcing and strengthening his practice. Many of these works of Ada are known as his most famous

-Xandra Beverlin, May 2024