The France story / August 1998–January 1999
The exchange ended early. The education kept going.
At fifteen, Clayton went to France through AFS. First came Nîmes: a Roman city, a new language, school strikes, and afternoons of wandering and reading. Then came L’Itaca near Nyer, an unconventional household in the Pyrenees, where freedom could feel a great deal like being very far from home.
Granny’s letters and packages crossed the Atlantic. Friends helped make the unfamiliar feel ordinary. A mountain outing in Kenzo dress shoes offered a practical lesson in the limits of personal style. And when Clayton’s family arrived after Christmas, Texas brought its own ideas about how a boy ought to be living.
The story draws on the developing memoir France, 1998, contemporary correspondence, scrapbook entries, and Clayton’s later recollections. Its heart is the distance between the adventure he imagined, the experience he had, and what he understands about it now.