Frog Legs for Breakfast

by Chantal Sicile-Kira

It wasn't until I moved to France years later that I realized, my parents weren't weird, they were just French. Obviously, I knew they were French as they raised us as French as they could in America. I just hadn't realized that all those times my parents reacted differently than my friends' parents, it was because of their French mentality and emotional response, which was quite different.

However, this is not to say that my parents were typical French people. To begin with in the '50's, people didn't just leave France to go live in a foreign country (as mine did) when you could stay in France, virtually be guaranteed the same job for life, early retirement, lots of vacation and sick time as well as medical coverage.

Yes, French people do eat frog legs. But not for breakfast, and not cooked over an open campfire. And they don't usually go frogging at night on a river to catch them; they order them in restaurants.

My father was a project manager for a construction firm in New York. Eventually he was assigned to oversee the construction of a power plant in Louisville, Kentucky. For the first few years he commuted back and forth from Staten Island to Kentucky. During the summer, my parents would pack us all up and take us camping for two months in the Louisville area so that we could be together.

The word 'camping' conjures up different images for different people depending on their past experiences with that activity while growing up. Camping for my husband Daniel - whose mother was a Puerto Rican from Manhattan and his father is a Romanian from Detroit- has a different connotation then for me.

My parents were French Alpinists. This meant they would take a knapsack, some ropes, good shoes, a tiny tent and go climb up mountains and find a spot to spend the night. While living in Paris, they would spend weekends scaling the big rocks in Fontainebleau. And this was way before the Sierra club and marketing made rock climbing a popular sport. For my dad, who was an all-or-nothing type of guy, camping was strictly all about nature and battling the elements.

Daniel, who was born in Manhattan, raised first in 'the projects' on Staten Island and then in a house across the street from the world's largest remaining open landfill, has a different vision in mind when he hears the word 'camping.' Camping in his family meant taking the station wagon to a rest stop near a national park, pitching a tent for Daniel and his father, while his mom and sister slept in the station wagon with screens on the open windows, never far from flushing toilets and running water, and a Greek diner.

Camping in my family meant spending two months with six kids in a cow field 15 miles from any other sign of human life, where the only toilet was a one-hole wooden outhouse and running water meant the stream below, with just a campfire for a kitchen and tents to call home.

The place we camped in was an open field bordered on 3 sides by woods, the fourth side by a steep incline to a small river flowing below. In the woods there was a barely visible dirt lane that lead eventually to a country road. The field we camped in was used most of the time as cow pasture, evidenced by the cow patties that were left behind.

In the middle of the field there was a one room wooden shack where we would all take cover during torrential and scary lightening and thunderstorms, when the field would be reduced to mud. The shack was where we kept our supplies, and where the roaming rural roman catholic priest would come and celebrate mass for us on Sundays. My parents slept in the shack while the six of us slept in tiny handmade two-man tents that my parents had sewn together 15 years earlier for their trek in the Alps.

The worst part about camping for me was sleeping in that little pup tent. These tents were very low to the ground and so the tent ceiling at its highest point was only 12 inches away from your face if you were lying on your back. Now, I absolutely hated spiders, had a phobia about them. Unfortunately, every morning when we woke up, the inside surface of each tent would be full of anywhere between 10 to 25 Daddy Long Legged spiders. These spiders look like one giant eye in the middle with 8 skinny, long legs coming out of that eye. So here was my dilemma every morning upon waking up: Should I stay face-down as I crawled out backwards from the tent so I couldn't see the spiders but imagined them to be climbing down the sides of the tent and over my back? Or should I roll over and shuffle out with my eyes open so I could keep my eye on the spiders, terrorized that at any moment one or more of them would jump on me.

To be continued…