So I was up in the cherry tree on a Saturday morning, blissfully filling sacks and sacks with beautiful cerises, when Jean-Charles stopped below me. He wore a paint-splotched T-shirt and baggy shorts, his gray hair flying every which way around his head. A professional restorer and remodeler of houses, he was a stocky man with hidden strength in arms that easily moved things serious weight lifters couldn’t handle. Baggy, paint-splotched clothes were his favorite attire. “I don’t hear you whistling,” he called up. “You know, in France, cherry pickers are supposed to whistle to prove they’re not eating all the cherries.”

I coughed a cherry pit out of my mouth discreetly and tossed it into the bushes behind my back. Of course, as my white shirt had been indelibly stained in various places with cherry juice, this wasn’t very convincing. “Maybe you should whistle when you walk by, too,” I counterattacked. He had already culled a half dozen of the darkest cherries automatically and was popping them into his mouth as we spoke. So when he exclaimed, “Oh, there’s a nice one!” I naturally assumed he was talking about a piece of fruit. I turned, hoping I could grab it first.

A big fat brown snail was oozing its way up the Burlat cherry trunk. Jean-Charles dumped cherry pits out of his palm hastily and snatched it. “One for my collection.” He grinned and disappeared into the back of the garden.

I didn’t follow him because I didn’t trust Jean-Charles. He kept telling me things about his culture that turned out to be true. It was unsettling.

Take snails, for example. Everyone knows the French eat snails. I tried one in French Polynesia and decided that eating snails was similar to putting gold leaf on perfectly good chocolate. Neither tastes good, both have a lousy texture, and both are clearly priced for showing off rather than for their culinary value. But Jean-Charles never ate anything just to show off, so either he was playing with my mind about French-snail stereotypes and was going to put on a beret next, or . . . he genuinely collected snails?

I chose not to have my leg pulled and went back to picking cherries. I would find it more reassuring to take the French culture on as an in-law if, even once, Jean-Charles turned out to be actually pulling my leg.

The next morning I was sunning myself on a bench he had made, contemplating attacking the cherry tree again, when he passed en route from the tool shed to his remodeling project in the kitchen. He stopped, grinning at me as if I were his sister and he had a big bug in his hand. “So, do you want to see my snail farm?”

Well, actually, I did. Maybe I hadn’t yet fully grasped what getting married to a Frenchman would mean and still hoped seeing a snail farm would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.