Anthrow Circus

My Normandy Summer: A WWII Diary, 80 Years Later

STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAMI RICE

It had rained all morning. Poured. Despite this, I arrived to a large crowd at the Mémorial de Montormel just as the first plane, trailing black smoke, puttered dramatically overhead. The clouds were low, but the airshow went on. Five post-war planes took turns swooping and banking in the open air, sometimes in formation, sometimes alone, sometimes teasing us into thinking the show was over before reappearing to make another pass in front of hundreds of upturned faces.

Standing in that umbrellaed crowd on the bluff above the pastoral Dives Valley, with the D-Day Ladies playing swing tunes on a stage behind us and cows dotting the fields below us, I felt transported. Located around 35 miles inland from the historic Normandy beaches breached by the Allies on June 6, 1944, this rural farmland around Mont-Ormel was the final pocket of the Normandy region to be liberated from the Germans in late August 1944. The music and planes, the reenactors and exhibits were assembled to commemorate the last violent gasps of WWII in this part of France.

Teurgoule: Rice Pudding the Norman Way

A VIDEO REPORT BY BILL DIEM

This happens when I have been alone too long—the words start to leak out of everything and they will not stop. I cannot look around, I cannot take a single step, without it becoming prose, and it is not welcome. It thrusts me into a place where language imposes this acute separation between me and everything else—leaks its ink out of the bark, the pavement, the sky, flowing directly from itself to me in the form of a stream of words, and it will not let me rest.