Perhaps it is good I'm walking across this country in the dark, rainy fall season and not in the springtime. Honestly, I think my heart would never bear to leave here if there was sunshine to go along with the incredibly gorgeous women and equally appealing landscape.

Strolling south from Cherbourg to Briquebec, St.-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Lessay, Countances, Gavray, and St. James to Fougeres has been like floating through a time warp. Sometimes, such as the night I passed the crumbling towers of an ancient Norman castle in St.-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, I swear I can almost hear the clanking of knights'armor and the hoofbeats of their battle-weary horses.

Here in the little gray-stoned villages of the countryside, far from the throbbings of Paris, life still clings tightly to the past. Most residents dwell in the same mortar-and-stone homes that their great-great-greatgrandparents were raised in. And their children are being baptized and married in churches that were blessed long before the United States was formed.

There is a calmness, a regularity to life here in Normandy and Brittany, that to this American is almost ethereal, almost naive.
Every farm has its small herd of black-spotted dairy cows, a small corn field, some cranky geese, a loud dog, many overabundant apple trees, and a cement-floored, shuttered farmhouse with an attached hay barn.

Each town--whether it be a one-cafe, four-house village or a large city like Fougeres--has a tall-steepled church in the center of town on the highest point of land. All the shops and homes are built around the church like some wide halo. Long before I reach a town in this predominately Catholic country I usually spy the church's steeple first. Always the steeple is visible from afar, whether the town was built in a valley (like Gavray) or on a tall hill (like St. James). At times I feel as if I'm merely traveling from church to church, like some wandering monk of the Medieval era.

Caught in the spell of this land of happy faces and sad love songs, I find it difficult to believe that almost 40 years ago there were tens of thousands of soldiers dying alongside these very roads I'm walking. Hardly an hour goes by that I do not pass yet another tall cement crucifix with the local casualties of World Wars I and II listed upon its base. And then there are the most somber of all reminders--the American war cemeteries.

As I stand among those crosses and Stars of David--always in graveyards of several acres covered with thousands upon thousands of identical white crosses, each bearing the name of a fellow American who landed on this chubby peninsula on D-Day but never made it back home--I am made to realize that I am inseparable from that violent period. Were it not for all of those men and women who came here to fight, to cry, and to die, I might not be able to enjoy this land today. I might never know what a beautiful place France is.

In the village of Gavray a couple days before, I had darted from a chilly rain into the town hall, to seek both some warmth and a signature in my log book. The graying secretary, upon learning I was an American, begged me in French to wait for her while she went away to get something for me. But before she fled the room in her high-heeled pomps, she excitedly led me by the hand to a wall of the office, where she directed my attention to the many framed black-and-white photographs arranged upon its white plaster. Then at once I was alone with the photos and the ticking round wall clock.

The photos were of a Gavray ruined by the second world war. From the amount of destruction in the photos, it was evident the village had been smack in the middle of the fighting between the Nazis and the Allies. Gavray had suffered horribly.

When the secretary returned some ten minutes later, she was now as drenched as I must have been earlier. Her heavy breathing told me she had rushed across the village to get whatever it was she had wanted to give to me. Then, as she hid her left hand behind her back and stuck out her chest, she energetically marched back and forth across the creaky floorboards in a loud pantomime of what I took to be the victorious Allied forces marching into a liberated Gavray. All the while she pretended to be waving a small flag of some kind in her right hand, even as she mimicked the sounds of a band playing an American military song.

The entire scene was surreal, and I imagined a mob forming outside the hall, wondering what sort of mayhem was unfolding inside. Her flashing me a V sign every few seconds and her shouting "HOORAY, YANKEES!!" each time she marched past my figure only made me all the more uncertain about her sanity. But then, like a little schoolgirl, she held up to me that mysterious object she had been hiding in her left hand behind her back. In the cradle of her palm was was a French chocolate candy bar.

Now I knew for certain she was re-enacting the time, so many years ago, that she had been freed by the Allied Forces. Not only was she showing her joy at the return of her freedom, but also she was returning that sweet favor shown to her as a little girl by some Allied soldier who had, like me, been weighted down by a heavy pack.

How incredible to think that that simple act of kindness shown to her by some soldier so long ago was still so fresh in her mind and heart. I might have cried, except that she beat me to it. For suddenly she buried her wrinkled face in my leather jacket and weeped. When she finally stood back and looked up with those soft, brown eyes so common in this part of the world, I had to turn and leave rather quickly, lest she see how watery my own eyes had become.

A mile or two out of the village, just when I thought I might be able to get over the strange feelings inside me, I found myself again being stopped in my tracks by a vistage of the past; to my right was a vast war cemetery that mesmerized me with its complete peacefulness and perfection. All too soon, it was evident this scared place was yet another final resting place for another legion of American soldiers.

Towards the back of the cemetery I came across a lone dark-haired man in a dark suit. He was standing silently beside a simple white cross. He greeted me in a low, thick accent that hinted of the U.S.A.'s Deep South. He told me he was there to pay his respects to a much older brother who had been killed in the Second World War. Also, he was there to silently tell that brother thast their mother still prayed daily for the time God would allow her to again see him.

Later, very shortly after I had left the cemetery, I unexpectedly started crying aloud. For the events and images of that magical morning had shown me what it truly meant to be an American. Like so many of my generation I took everything we had for granted. Never had I had to fight and sacrifice for my freedom. But those soldiers beneath those crosses and Stars of David had. And not so much for themselves but for others--others far away who they didn't even know. That, I realized both painfully and proudly, was the stuff of a truly noble nation.

Like it or not, all of us in the USA I had been born not to be simply an American, but also to be a hero. We were of a noble nation; we were all important; each of our lives had meaning; and consequently we should always act as such.

Steven