In 1950 and 1951 my parents lived outside Aix en Provence as part of my father's graduate work. Strangely, I have never questioned why he did this grad work there. His Ph.D. thesis was about Moliere, so I suppose there must be a Moliere connection with Aix.

There are four pages of pictures now from Aix. There are pictures of the house they lived in, which Bill and I, with my father's help, found again years later. The house is a gentle pink with green shutters. When I saw it, the color was not a surprise to me, despite the fact that all the pictures from this time are in black and white. Amazingly, Aix had not grown out toward the house; the setting even in 1983, more than 30 years later, looked much like it looks in the photos. Other photos are of the people they knew--landlords and neighbors? colleagues? friends? The people who form you become peripheral and are forgotten until your descendants look at the pictures and wonder who they were. Do the children of their French hosts look at pictures of my parents and know only that they were the Americans who lived there after the war?