The French looked at me and at each other. Between the mosquito and the yellow-fly bites, they resembled plague victims. They hesitated only a second. “Of course not,” everyone said at once. “We’re just getting started! Lead on!” And without waiting for me to do so, Jean-Charles drove his paddle into the water and headed down an unexplored bend of this Georgia swamp. Bruno raced after him. We stayed out there for hours, as our flesh became a mottled mass of yellow-fly bites.

“That was wonderful!” Claudine said firmly when she at last got to climb out of her canoe. “What a great idea to show us that!”

“Fascinating,” everyone else agreed.

And it was with the greatest possible delicacy that over the ensuing week my French in-laws redirected all my cultural offerings to Savannah, Charleston, beaches, and Super Wal-Mart.

But here’s the worrying thing: the whole trip, they didn’t kill each other. Four people per hotel room and per car, twelve people in all, traveling around in a foreign country with twenty-four/seven exposure to each other for two weeks—and at most they had a couple of spats. Once Pierrette cried a little at one of those spats, and they all then apologized to her and to me for it.

What that meant was, no matter how overextended I felt, with all these weddings and honeymoons and country-hopping, I had to keep things under control. If I lost it even once during the wedding preparations in France, they would never understand.

Thirty-two

We hit French ground running, adrenaline pumped, ready for one last mad bout of action. We ran all the way to the ancient stone farmhouse, where we arrived just in time for aperitifs.

The heart of Sébastien’s family awaited us in the garden around Titi and Bruno’s teak table, under the white parasol: Claudine, Jean-Charles, Justine, Titi, Bruno, Colette, and Pierrette, or Mamie as Sébastien and her other grandchildren called her. I, too, was calling Pierrette Mamie now. I wasn’t one to call my husband’s family by their relationships to him. I called Claudine “Claudine” and not “Maman.” But somehow I had started using “Mamie” after Pierrette leaked tears of stress that morning during the wild trip with eleven family members through America’s South. Okay, so she was forty years older than I, had never been out of her home country before, had lost her husband less than a year before, and was recovering from her own bout with cancer; I could still cling to the knowledge that I wasn’t the only person overwhelmed.

“Great, you’re just in time for the council of war,” Jean-Charles said. “Who wants what to drink?”