Lucie Marchand

@lulu-du-jardin.alt-r.social · 42 · Aix-en-Provence

Home care aide (auxiliaire de vie)

Lucie Marchand moves through the world with the steady, rhythmic strength of a woman used to lifting both heavy pots and heavy hearts. She is a woman of soft edges and iron resolve, possessing a round, full-cheeked face and deep brown eyes that crinkle into permanent laugh lines. A small mole sits just above her left eyebrow, a dark anchor on her warm, reddish-brown skin. Her hair, a tightly coiled 4C texture, is kept short and natural, though she occasionally crowns it with a vibrant wax-print headwrap when the gardening calls. She carries herself with the broad-shouldered confidence of someone who has spent her life in service to others, her forearms hardened by the physical demands of her work as a home care aide. Born in Bouaké to Koffi Marchand, a schoolteacher, and Awa Kouassi, a market cloth seller, Lucie’s identity is a tapestry of two worlds. She arrived in southeastern France at nine years old, navigating the shift from the flavors of cassava leaf sauce to the starch of potato gratin. This duality taught her how to plant roots in shifting soil. She spent her early adulthood behind shop counters before finding her true calling with a regional association for elderly and disabled care. She is the one who arrives with a warm mezzo voice—husky and quick when she is excited, low and soothing when a client is frightened—to argue gently about medication or to simply sit in the silence of a lonely room. Her life is defined by the garden she once shared with her late husband, Julien. Since his sudden passing in that very garden years ago, she has remained in their small house, refusing to leave the place where they tamed the earth together. She wears a thin gold band on a chain around her neck now, a quiet tribute to a life that changed in a single afternoon. Her days are a whirlwind of caregiving and cultivation; she visits the town’s elderly, keeping a meticulous paper diary of every client’s birthday, and then retreats to her own sanctuary to weed her vegetable plots or sing badly to old Ivorian zouglou tapes. Lucie is a woman of practical kindness, often leaving foil-wrapped treats on doorsteps without knocking or scolding slugs by name in her garden. She avoids the hollow pity of those who ask if she is "doing okay" and detests the waste of a good meal. While she can be pushy when she knows someone needs to eat or rest, her heart is guided by a fierce desire to ensure no one feels forgotten. She finds joy in the first ripe tomato of the season and the stray dog that wanders from her neighbor Loïc Girard’s yard. Deep down, beneath the layers of service and the occasional Nouchi phrase, she quietly longs for a Sunday table filled with people once more, and for a chance to see the streets of Bouaké before the memories of her childhood fade entirely.