When our plane lands today in Boston, I will set foot on American soil for the first time in 30 months. After two and a half years in France, I am moving back to my hometown of Norwich.

When I arrived in the small Burgundy village of Saint-Prix-les-Arnay 931 days ago, my wife and I, together with our two small boys, ages 3 and 9 months, did not know a soul in Burgundy. But we were optimistic and ready for some adventure.

During our stay, our French, decent when we arrived, improved dramatically. There was a sense of exhilaration when I dropped local slang and expressions into my daily conversations with French people. It felt respectful of them, of their culture and language, and it showed that I was paying attention to their way of life. Watching my own personality develop and mature as my vocabulary broadened was deeply rewarding, a chance to be two different people in the same skin. While I will never speak like a native Frenchman, it was — and is — thrilling to think and dream in French and compare it with how I think and dream in English. And, when our boys, now 5½ and 3, watch French cartoons on the weekend, it is hard not to feel pride when they speak to each other in grammatically correct, accent-less French. They arrived without a word, and leave correcting my pronunciation in their second tongue.

But language was not the most important part of our episode in France.

Naturally — this is France, remember — we discovered and experimented with food and wine from the region. We enjoy eating snails, poached eggs in red wine sauce, parsley-ham terrine, and stewed wild boar. The smelly cheeses from the area are delicious to eat and fun to say out loud: Epoisses, Brillat-Savarin, Soumaintrain, delice de Pommard. I am a proud member of the Snail Brotherhood and the Brotherhood of Chicken in a Pot, two clubs that unite passionate gastronomes from Burgundy and beyond. My wife won two cooking contests during our stay. I can debate locals about which bakery in town produces the best baguette. It took time to figure out, but we now know how to serve a proper Sunday lunch: aperitif, appetizer, main course, cheese, dessert, coffee, digestifs, the lot accompanied by a specific wine for each course. It should last at least five hours.

Although this education was critical to our enjoyment, food and drink will not be what I think of first when I reflect on my time in the French countryside.

Before arriving, I imagined how to best fit into local life. Here again, France did not disappoint. Slowly, patiently, and firmly, she showed me the importance of saying bonjour when entering and au revoir upon exiting a store, a restaurant or the post office. French women educated me about les bises, the little kisses on each cheek given in greeting. It is a tradition I will especially miss, a harmless, flirtatious intimacy carried out dozens of times over the course of my normal day. With time, I internalized the bizarre French driving rule of “priority on the right,” which mandates that you slam on your brakes and yield to cars merging from your right at a crossroads with neither a stop sign nor a traffic light, even when you are on the main road. Both my wife and I came to realize that a non from a French person really means “we can probably do that, but you’ll have to ask at least one more time.” I probably know more back roads and shortcuts in rural Burgundy than I do in my native Upper Valley. We both use the informal tu with the mayor of our village, and call him by his first name.

Yet, despite the excitement I feel every time I sense myself “going local,” these skills will not be what flash in my mind when I think about our life abroad.

In the end, France’s greatest gift to me and my family came from the most obvious place: the people. Rural Burgundy is populated by men and women whose kindness, generosity, humor, friendship and love flow in abundant streams just below a surface that distrusts those who do not have roots 500 years deep in the region. It took time to get below that crust, but once we did, just being human was the only currency we needed to be happy and accepted.

I will think about Maurice, whose contagious joie de vivre filled our plates, wine glasses and hearts. I will remember a nuclear scientist’s palpable joy when he took me to gather snails that we later cooked and ate together. I will worry about a woman whom I once hugged and cried with in a crowded church just inches from her son’s casket. I will be thankful for the entrepreneur who rescued this American family during two of our lowest moments, first by letting us stay in his country home for six weeks rent-free when we had a housing hiccup and then, after my car burned, by loaning us a free vehicle for six months.

And I will remember each of the 60 people who came to our house for a farewell lunch on Father’s Day. During my brief speech to thank them all, I simply said, “If you had told me two and a half years ago that we would be here today, surrounded by genuine friends, I would not have believed you.” Of course, I cried. Many guests, male and female, confided later that they were thankful that their sunglasses had hid their own tears.

Each of our guests had given us indelible proof of friendship. The bureaucrat who lubricated the French system to help us with paperwork. The winemakers who invited us to harvest with them and taste their wines in the intimacy of their homes. The couple and their two children who folded us into their lives, making us feel more like family than foreigners. The man who volunteered his time and expertise to put the drive belt back on my lawn tractor. His wife who put me in touch with the local newspaper, where I became the local correspondent for a brief spell. The doctor who made a house call on a Sunday during our first tumultuous weeks in Burgundy to help one of our boys get over conjunctivitis. A gentleman who guided us on beautiful walking trails in the area. And the family who offered up space in their attic for some of our things, saying they would keep them there as long as we wanted . . . provided, bien sur, that we made good on our promise to move back to the area someday.

I will miss those people. But now it is time for a new chapter and I am excited to rediscover so many things that make America unique: Vanity plates! Ice cubes! Phish! Dan and Whit’s! And, most importantly, the hundreds of people in this community and beyond who, over the past 41 years, have helped me become a man who can move to a little village in rural Burgundy, France, and end up feeling like it, too, is home.

Mark Lilienthal, as of today, lives in Norwich. He can be reached at mlilient@gmail.com.