Auvers-sur-Oise

Paris had rained on me almost perpetually. I'm not entirely sure why I thought a small town an hour's train ride outside of Paris would be less rainy than the city itself, but I convinced myself of this and headed out to the countryside with neither rain jacket nor umbrella, having come without the former and having left the latter in Notre Dame on one of my many trips to the cathedral. Auvers-sur-Oise did not disappoint- from the second I stepped off the train to the moment I stepped back onto the platform to await my train back to Paris it never stopped raining, keeping a perpetual drizzle going even when the downpours let up.

True to my expectations of the community that had harbored Vincent Van Gogh in his last days, the train station at Auvers was full of paintings from local artists though empty of any kind of attendant or helpful employee. It was bright compared to the gloom outside but it didn't offer a map of any kind to help me navigate that gloom and so, though I was tempted to stay, I ventured out into the chilly rain of the day.

My main point in visiting Auvers was to see the church. It was made popular by Van Gogh's painting (which, if we're being honest, I saw for the first time in a Doctor Who episode in which Van Gogh painted a monster in the window of the church and the Doctor has to go save everybody, etc., and while that may have been my inital reasoning for wanting to go visit the little town, it wasn't the only one) but I hoped it would be interesting in its own right. Luckily for me there was a sign across the way from the train station that pointed to the church, which was helpfully at the end of Church Road, a road which was unhelpfully turned to a small river of mud.

The church at Auvers-sur-Oise is from the -wait for it- twelfth century. The sign on the inside for visitors who speak English proclaims it to be nothing but a chapel on a hill. It is a small church, but its location makes it visible all around the town. If I had looked, I would have been able to see it sitting on its hilltop from the train station. It's Gothic, from its rose window to its peaked arches to its minimal butresses, though it doesn't boast two high front towers. The bell tower is actually the high point of the little church and when Van Gogh painted it, he painted it from the back, showing the outside stone that guards the apse, the tower that holds the bells and the windows that color the apse and the chapel of the holy sacrament off to the side.

Inside, the church smelled familiar. It was deserted, such a wonderful and yet uncomfortable change from Notre Dame or any of the other churches I'd seen recently. I shuffled up and down the aisles having cleaned the mud off my shoes in a puddle by the stairs and having dried them as best I could on the mat by the door. I paused to appreciate the golden container for the consecrated host, a vessel hadn't until recently understood,

and then walked to the front of the church, sitting for the first time in a long time in the first pew in front of the altar. There was a handsewn altar cloth sitting on the plain table, its white and gold offset by the dirty green of the tired carpet that stretched from the back of the church to the chancel, splitting the rows of pews and chairs down the middle.

Looking down at the carpet and glancing over to the small puddle of water gathering by the organ from a leak in the roof, I realized that this small church in France smelled exactly the space we used for worship at the camp that I had worked at throughout high school. It was the not unpleasant smell of old wood and carpet in a place that saw rain too often indoors, a smell for once not overpowered by the devotional candles lit inside the church. Now suddenly this Gothic church of stone was linked to a wooden shelter designed as nothing more than a meeting room halfway around the world, built not so very long ago when compared to the centuries these stones had seen. Van Gogh had died and been buried for many years before the Shepherd's Shed at Camp Joy was even contemplated and yet I couldn't shake the image of the one and the other.

I sat in the church a long time, until a couple I had seen walking around the village made their way into the church. I slipped out and walked around the building, ducking under the shelter of trees to avoid the rain drops that a village boy happily ran through, jumping in puddles that I knew his mother would scold him for disturbing. Around the back of the church, past the green lawns and paths I saw a sign for the graves of Vincent and Theodore, his brother. I zipped up my jacket and tightened my scarf and started up the hill.

By the time I came to the end of the walled road that led up to the graveyard at Auvers, the rain had lightened to a drizzle small enough to be ignored and ignore it I did as I crested the hill. Before me was this wide open space of fields, the cemetary a blur in the rainy distance. The picture I took did no justice to the depth of the road leading into the shorn yellow fields and I am honestly at a lack of words for describing the place, as the French-field-in-the-rain section of my vocabularly is severely lacking. I could imagine sitting here with an easel, capturing this moment in paint if I knew how to paint. This is precisely the time that I would do it.

All around Auvers there are copies of Van Gogh's paintings set up like signs. There was one titled The Rain depicting a field I was standing near and I laughed at the unexpected moment of finding a painting that described my situation perfectly, walking through the rain that never bothered the cheerful flowers by the road.

I found the graveyard with little trouble and the graves of the Van Gogh brothers with even less. The day had turned into a day of thinking and remembering and I remembered the first time I had ever heard of Van Gogh- I had won a small picture in art class in elementary school by being able to identify Starry Night, though I didn't know the painter. The teacher handed over the prize and I remember one of my classmates complaining that it wasn't fair, that I didn't know the painter and how were they supposed to know anything about the names of pictures painted by dead men?

I love Starry Night and the Cafe and the pictures of Sunflowers and especially now the painting of the church at Auvers. Now, standing alone in the rain by the green covered sunflower spotted grave of the man who had brought such beauty into my life, I thought about the unfairness of the way he had suffered. I wished I had brought something to leave, flowers or a picture or something, anything other than sad true thoughts that flowed up from my heart to my mind and out my mouth, whispering lost in the quiet sound of the rain falling soft on the graves. Vincent Van Gogh's last words were The sadness will last forever. And here he lies in a city of the dead under a simple gravestone and I don't have the words to contradict him, nothing beyond the comfort that because of his work, there is a little more wonder in my life.

I walked in the fields some more, alone except for a small family that had pulled up to the graveyard and walked out to see one of the painting signs. The rain kept the rest of the world away from the small town, pleasant enough in sunlight, I suppose. I walked down to the train station, my heart getting lighter as I slipped down the hill past quaint little houses and parks, stopping by a used book store before heading over to the platform that would lead me back to Paris. After staring at page after page, cover after cover French books that I could not understand, I decided to pass the end of my time in Auvers lost in thought, glancing from the puddles on the platform to the church on the hill to the clearing skies until the tracks groaned under the weight of a train.