Coming Home to the Center of the Village
I have a cane now, and a garden that is far too big for one woman with a cane, and I have never once regretted moving here–coming home to the center of the village.
There is a moment every American who relocates to rural France eventually has, and nobody warns you about it ahead of time. It is not the paperwork moment, though there is plenty of that. It is not even the language moment, though that comes too, slowly, in fits. It is the moment someone in the village says your name back to you without you having said it first. The boulanger. The woman at the market who sells you your eggs. A neighbor who has simply noticed you exist, and decided that matters.
I did not expect that to be the thing that undid me. I expected the stone house, the light, the food, the history under my feet. I did not expect to be known.
A Diplomat Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
A few weeks ago, French Connections HCB posted an interview with Adrien Frier, the Consul General of France in Los Angeles — the man who represents the French government across the entire American Southwest. He sat down with relocation consultant Richard Hammond on Bastille Day and talked, plainly, about why his government wants more Americans to move to France. Somewhere in that conversation, without any prompting from Richard, he said something that stopped me.
“The British people are wanting a bigger house, move to the sunshine… But I think the American people that I see move are wanting to be in the center of smaller villages, part of a community. I hear this all the time. It’s their biggest drive.”
— Adrien Frier, Consul General of France, Los Angeles¹
He was not being sentimental. He was describing a pattern from his own casework, the thing he hears over and over from the Americans coming through his consulate–coming home to the center of the village. And it is exactly right. It is exactly what happened to me.
Not Escaping. Arriving. Coming Home to the Center of the Village
I think we tell this story wrong, most of the time. We frame American relocation to France as an escape — from the cost of living, from the noise, from whatever exhaustion a person is carrying when they finally book the flight. And escape is real, I won’t pretend it isn’t part of it. But escape is not the same thing as arrival, and I did not come to Clugnat to get away from something. I came, without fully knowing it at the time, looking for a village small enough to actually belong to.
Six hundred and fifty-three people live in Clugnat. I know a good number of them by name now. Quirijn and Kerry and Maureen and Des live near me and have become the kind of neighbors you stop thinking of as neighbors and start thinking of as simply people who are there. The garden is 632 square meters of a 170-year-old stone house’s worth of land, and I will be slowly turning it into a food forest, a Carolingian medicinal garden, something rooted in centuries that were already old before my family ever crossed an ocean the first time.
That is not retirement. That is not a nicer version of the life I already had. It is a different shape of life altogether, built around proximity to real people instead of proximity to convenience–coming home to the center of the village.
What He Heard, What I Lived
Frier’s observation matters because he is not selling anything when he says it — he is a career diplomat, twenty years in the foreign service, describing what he actually hears from Americans coming through his door. And what he hears is not “I want a deal” or “I want sunshine.” What he hears is community. What he hears is center–coming home to the center of the village.
If you are watching this and thinking about the move yourself, I would say only this: pay attention to what you are actually looking for before you go. A bigger house in a warmer place is one kind of move. Wanting to be known by your baker is an entirely different one — and it is the one that, in my experience, actually holds up after the boxes are unpacked and the excitement wears off and you are just a person living your life in a small stone village in the middle of France.
I did not move to France. I came home to a place I had never been.
Want to join me in France? Use my affiliate link with French Connections HCB for help in your relocation–from real estate and rentals, visas and insurance–tell them I sent you♥
¹ Adrien Frier, interview by Richard Hammond, “The #1 Reason France Wants MORE Americans to Move There,” French Connections HCB, YouTube, August 2026.
