Notre Dame de la Garde is the centerpiece of Marseille, the veritable cake topper of the city. Mary towers above the city, holding her infant son, gleaming in the sunlight, drawing eyes for miles around. Dutifully, we set out to make our pilgrimage. “Let’s walk, it’s only two and a half kilometers,” I glibly suggested as we set out under clear blue skies painted with wisps of white on a gentle breeze. The perfect day for walking.

Marseille is a city best explored on foot. To drive would be maddening, to cycle would be exhausting. To walk is to keep tolerably warm in the face of the mistral and to be gently caressed by a myriad of scents drifting from the open doors of irresistable little boulangeries filled with baguettes, heavy, dark, seeded, langurous breads, and piles of tiny petit fours. Not the little iced cakes that we North Americans mistake for petit fours, but the real deal, two inch morsels of delight in every flavor, from anise, to chocolate chip, to fenetres framboises… my personal favorite, little shortbread cookies with raspberry filling peeking out of the cut out windows. There are other scents as well, less seductive, this is France, after all, the country lacking laws regarding pet waste. The boys have devised an amusing game centered on avoiding the various mine-fields littering the side walks. Les petits canards happily paddled in our wake, oohing and ahhing over the pastries in store fronts, shining golden cherubs frolicking in the reflecting pool in front of the Palais de Justice and begging intermittently for another petit four from the warm brown paper sack.

It is a bigger hill than it looks, the hill beneath the bascilica of Notre Dame de la Garde. Always looking close, yet remaining maddeningly far off. We stopped more than once to let Ez rest his tired legs and to savor the view. The children, who’ve pedaled their share of miles this year commented repeatedly at how pleased they were NOT to be pushing their fully loaded bikes up this particular hill. Gabe declared it a “real mountain” and proceeded to pontificate about the benefits of mountain air on the lungs and how when HE grows up HE will live in the mountains because of the healthful properties of the air. If the wind had been lax in blowing our hair as we climbed and climbed, it more than made up for its error at the top. Colder and more ferocious wind in the absence of a driving snow storm, I have never experienced. More than one hat was blown off of a head and chased around the ramparts by a shrieking child. More than once I thought we’d lose Elisha right over the edge and down the long cliff to the soccer pitch below.

The basilica itself is worth the arduous climb. It was very different than most we’ve been in. True, it was filled with the requisite relics and jaw droppingly intricate mosaics, but it had the added oddity of strings of model ships hung from the ceiling at various intervals and the wall sconce lighting was in the form of the prows of small row boats, jutting out from the cold stone pillars. I suppose it is necessary to differentiate one’s church from the copious competition for Vatican dollars in one way or another. The origins of the basilica were proudly humble: “No miracles and no sightings of the blessed mother here, this church was built on the simple faith of simple people” read the rotating information screen in the cafeteria where we ate our lunch out of the wind.

Ezra had his own religious experience on the way down the mountain. He spontaneously developed stigmata on his hands and legs, you know, the miraculous bloody wounds that reflect the wounds Christ suffered on the cross. Well, it was either stigmata or the many pieces of shattered car window glass that he rolled head long into as he ran down the hill ahead of us, craning his neck back over his right shoulder to get a good look at the homeless guy in dreadlocks reclining on his roadside futon like an old Roman general. We are waiting to hear the final verdict on the photographs from the Pope. If it is not stigmata then perhaps we can sue (since it happened on church property) and fund another six months of cathedral visits.

I was given my first french rose at the basilica. A yellow one. It blew (along with the other eleven and the glass vase) out of the paper sack being carried by a priest to a shrine in a hotel somewhere in town. We rounded the corner just in time to see the wind whisk the contents of his bag up through the air and roll the whole mess across the concrete. The vase was quickly collected (miraculously unbroken) but the flowers had disappeared altogether. Tony finally found them, and carefully climbed down a minor cliff into a garden to collect them and return them to the old priest. I was rewarded for my husband’s efforts by receiving the one which had broken off of it’s stem. It sits now on my computer desk… next to the candle which Tony insists on lighting for me every time I sit down to help me be a “real writer” in France.

Ezra dripped blood the whole way home. No exaggeration. It dripped. He was manly in the best six year old way and didn’t complain too much. He even attempted to pose, gamely, with two fingers extended and the rest curled in saintly fashion for a photo of his stigmata (the one we sent to the Pope… who thankfully doesn’t know Ezra, as any hope of a miracle being declared would evaporate if he did.) There was a great deal of howling when the warm water of the bath began to return feeling to his numbed extremities and the gravity of his many puncture wounds became evident. After five minutes of the nerve grating noise I said to Tony, “I’ll bet you a chocolate bar I can make him stop in three seconds. Watch this.” Two and a half seconds later I returned, enshrined in silence. Tony was tempted to name me a minor saint for restoring the peace. “How’d you do it?” He asked. “I have my ways,” I winked. I finally caved and told him. It was my friend Jen’s trick: she keeps a bag of m&ms in the freezer as a litmus test as to whether a child needs a trip to the ER. If they can be quiet to get the m&m, their wounds are not life threatening. There’s one you can take to the bank… anywhere in the world.