Katya Varlamova was born in St. Petersburg about forty years ago. Now a mother, she lives in a remote hamlet in the Aude valley. She tells us about her singular journey which led her from the old Leningrad to New York then to Paris and finally to this small hilltop village in the Aude…
Katya’s father seems to be the stereotypical portrait of the romantic Russian aristocrat: he has the carefree and desperate Slavic charm, woven with contrasts and eccentricities, with a hypertrophied and melancholy heart. His mother, on the other hand, represents the wise and courageous Russian peasant harshness traumatized by the Soviet years and bitterly nostalgic for past greatness. Katya inherits from them, the desire to wander, simple tenacity and a bright smile. The young woman leaves Russia as a student to learn English in New York where she will finally stay for more than ten years.
In addition to a training in “Humanities”, she took business courses there and it was finally in this field that she ventured: here she was an expert in finance, “business manager” of several large American companies. But then a terrible road accident radically changes his trajectory and it is the plants that will save his life, restoring his bruised body. So, to the surprise of everyone, her clients and her teammates and at the risk of losing her precious green card, a vital professional passport in the USA, she left everything. She leaves for the spectacular mountains of the White Cordillera of the Peruvian Andes and decides to start learning naturopathy. She then embarked on years of study in herbal medicine in the United States, South America and Europe, then in the cultivation of medicinal plants and became interested in transforming them to make remedies. She then created her business in New York where this natural medicine is much more recognized than in France and gradually became a distinguished speaker.
But the adventure doesn’t stop there: Katya meets Eric in New York. He is a fashion photographer in Paris. Their life together, constrained by professional paths separated by the Atlantic Ocean and six thousand kilometers, seems compromised. However, neither sees the impossibility and during a vacation spent with friends in Rennes-les-Bains, the decision is necessary. The couple set sail for France: Katya left New York, where she maintained her activity partly at a distance; Éric abandons Parisian fashion and life, which had already been tiring him for a few years… Since then, the family has grown with Demyan, their son, and has put down his suitcases facing the mountains, in an almost abandoned village in the Upper Valley of the Aud.
Katya’s nomadic life is undoubtedly behind her and she likes to quote Anaïs Nin to express what today, in love with the Aude land and mother, she feels: “The day has come when the risk of getting stuck in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.“.
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