Terrasse

Home (Paris) Again, Again

Just returned from two amazing weeks in North Carolina.  Already missing it.  While I didn’t grow up there, my sister and her fiance went to grad school at Duke, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time visiting and it feels comfortable enough that I even sort of think of it as a second home.  Durham specifically has all my key ingredients: good food, heat, informal, great music and art, small town vibe.  I like it.  I could wear a tube top and flip flops down to buy a popcicle.  Unlike this town where I live, where I need to be fully clothed and made up to purchase a Berthillon ice cream cone.  In short, a trip to the states did nothing to appease my chronic homesickness.

BUT, that’s besides the point as the purpose of my visit was the marriage of two incredible people: my sister and her mister.  And they put on quite an event.  For all the stress and anxiety they faced the final days before hand, the wedding sure paid off. AMAZING.  I cried until the dancing started.  Cried from joy and, of course, also loss - missing the mama something fierce.  Hard to believe how life keeps moving without the one who seemed to move it before.

After all the beautiful celebration (culminating in my husband, my sister, her husband and me drunkenly awaiting a cab at 3 am in downtown Durham - last ones standing) we all headed out to the outer banks for a week on the beach, where my sister and her mister procured us a HUGE beachside castle to share.  Though constant social interaction can wear me down (particularly when I’m feeling a tad emotional and having a mild mama freakout), the week was truly wonderful.  Favorite moments: swimming with sister+mister, my dad, my man, riding bikes with my 75-year-old dad and my own mister cooper, beautiful dinners on screened-in porch, quiet time with my sister all to myself.

Loving the beach and heat and tan skin and my people, it has been a rough 24-hour welcome back to Paris.  I am missing family fiercely, missing convenience and familiarity, missing the burritos.  And I’m coming back to a Paris where the small community I built up over the last year has entirely dissipated, everyone having returned to their own respective corners of the world.  So in some ways I feel again as if i were starting all over, though I now have regular activities to occupy me.  But, I continue to take on this project of trying to establish life here in Paris, determined as ever to embrace its alienation, its blessed anonymity, its quirks, charms, and luscious vices.

La Rentree approaches, and all the Parisians return from vacation.  And with them the art wakes up from its own month-long nap.