In France, we call them  Les gens du voyage. It's the politically correct term for all itinerant people. But among themselves they are known as the Tsiganes or Manouches. You may know them by other names. The Romani. The gypsies.
They arrived in Angers a week ago.
When I first saw the horde of white RV's which had descended upon the rugby field turning it, in one night, from a peaceful oasis of green to a clamouring trailor park, I was at a loss. Was it a festival? An unauthorized family reunion? "No," my French friend assured me. "It's les gens du voyage (the travelling folk). I think you in English call them gypsies."
I was consumed by curiosity. Nay, even that is an understatement. I was frantic, squirming, on fire with curiosity. I craned my neck about in passable imitation of a giraffe every time I could think of an excuse to stroll by the encampment. I watched the children frisking about at the edge of the field, their dark eyes flashing, the long black hair of the girls swinging in braids or flowing loose, the women gliding through the caravan with their brightly colored head scarves, the men in grimy t-shirts, their teeth gleaming white from brown, stubbly faces, boys standing around a tent, challenging and magnetic in sleek dark leather jackets.
I wanted to know more.
At night, I lay awake imagining pretexts for beginning conversations in my broken French, the questions, the hundreds of questions, which I would ask. The answers which I might or might not be able to understand.
But no such pretext arose. So I bombarded my French friend with questions instead, though he had no way of knowing the answers.

How many are there?
Where do they come from?
Where are they going?
How do they earn money?
What do they eat?
Where do the live in winter?
How are the children schooled?
Are the caravans made up of family groups? How big are most caravans? Do they intermarry with Tsiganes from other caravans? Do they ever marry outsiders and bring them into the people?
Do they always make the same circuit? Do the same groups come through the same cities every year?
Do they like this life? Are they happy? Do they ever settle down, and could they, if they wanted?

One afternoon, from my open window, I heard music coming from the encampment. A guitarist, and singing- sometimes a man and sometimes a woman. The voices were rich and beautiful, the melodies alternately haunting and lively. My curiosity was at boiling point, unbearable. With half an hour before I had to meet a friend, I threw on my coat, grabbed my keys, and marched off towards the gypsy camp.
I didn't know what to expect. I had vague visions of dancing, fortune telling, and colorfully garbed women, drawn from various literary and film stereotypes of the Romani people.
That is not what I found.
At the center of the encampment rose a large, blue striped tent. A few men of boys loitered at its open door, the collars of their jackets pulled up against the misting rain. And now that I could hear clearly the words of the song they were singing, I realized that it was a hymn. The colorful tent was the home of services held by Light and Life, a French gypsy ministry and the gypsy church which traveled with the caravan.
My friend and I attended two of their evening services, and for days, all afternoon, music and speeches were carried from the field to my window, a lively background to everyday life.

As the gypsies began to leave, and green spaces opened up once more in what had formerly been our rugby field, I was haunted by an unformed sadness and regret. They carried their whole world with them to Angers, and remained carefully detached from us- civil, but serenely indifferent to cultivating long term connections. What good is it to begin a life anywhere, when you belong both everywhere and nowhere? They planted no flowers, built no houses, introduced themselves to no neighbors. One day, inexplicably, a few chairs, a table, some laundry on the line, and some chattering children and their puppy would be whisked back into one of the trailers, and it would vanish around a bend of the street, leaving only a muddy rectangle and trampled grass in it's wake. Often a new trailer, new children, and dogs, and laundry would appear to take it's place. They were among us, but not of us- they left Angers the way the wind leaves branches as it passes through. The way ocean currents leave coral on their way to the deeper waters. The way international students return home at the end of a semester.

I was grieved, because watching les Gens du Voyage- the travelling people- I realized that I was one of them.  As spring gives way to summer here in France, my heart aches with an appalling ache. The springtime, the wonder of May and April belonged to me, enchanted me, beguiled me. The summer, I have no part in. June first will find me in Missouri once more.. And I want to see Missouri, want to be with family and friends again, to conduct life in a familiar language on familiar terms. But I don't want to leave Angers. The inexorable necessity of leaving Angers, and all I love in Angers, is (forgive the cliche, friends) breaking my heart.

When I think of France during the coming years, what will I remember? Green fields and little villages seen from the train. A sunset watched joyously from a bluff above the lake. A heron picking his solitary way along the edge of the water at twilight. Roses, roses, everywhere a wealth of roses pouring over walls and fences in the May sunshine. Wisteria dripping from every arbor. Warm light on worn plastered walls, the sun slanting along narrow cobbled streets and alleys. Pain au chocolat with friends in the afternoon. The wonder of two hands meeting and clinging together in unreserved understanding- a caress within a caress. The glorious, unapologetic greasiness of kebab and chips. The moonlit silence of the city at night as we walked home, or the riotous clamor and fairy tale lighting of the city center each evening. The blue, blue waters of la Maine flanked by banks of richest green, or at dusk, a magical mirror of reflections when the rainbow bridge is illuminated. Little dogs mincing obediently after their owners in every street, seen in smug repose at every corner cafe.
The rich inflections of the French language murmuring all around us- at the supermarket, in the classroom, in the bus.
My photos, my short, clumsy sentences, all the words in every language I study are inadequate to tell you this story, the story of this semester in all of its light and color and fragrance, in all of its sound and sensation, in its loneliness and camaraderie, its music and its silence.
The world doesn't give us the freedom to stay where we wish to stay, or go where we wish to go. To occupy two spaces at once is only another of the impossible dreams which men have dreamed since man's beginning. I know there's no profit in dreaming so foolishly thus, but my head is lost in it, fogged with it anyway. Angers is a garden with high walls too steep for climbing, and reality exists outside of these walls, is only heard in a muted clamour of traffic which finds its way in to linger bleakly among the lushness of the flower beds.
Like the gypsies, I came to Angers only to leave it. My caravan moves out toward the open road in less than three days. Yet unlike the gypsies I am bound here by cords which frighten me with their intensity. The French historically failed in their grapples with the Anglais, and in all their imperial ambitions, but in a dazzling blitzkrieg campaign, France has conquered me. I return to the Land of the Free in a shackled, colonial condition, utterly bouleversed by la douceur angevin. But when will I see again the blue slate roofs of Anjou, hear again the strident  French sirens, breathe in once more the heady fragrance of their honeysuckle and roses? Gypsy-like, I can only tell you, 'Je ne sais pas'.