springtime in Cambrai

When I left for Sweden, I stopped at Odéon on the 4 Metro Line for a lot of coffee. Paris in the early morning light was curled into itself like a snail shell found in a garden, each arrondissement pearly under the weak sun of the end of winter. Paris, city of love, city of lovers. I have not found love in Paris. For me, it is a city of bridges and of keys. I do find keys in Paris: a tiny anonymous key to one of ten thousand interchangeable locks on diaries with pasteboard covers. Someone's house key, which I left on the curb where I found it, though I took the small one. There are a million others just like it.

When I left for Sweden, Paris was shading towards spring and Stockholm was still locked into winter, snowy and slushy and chilly. Not as cold as Iowa, certainly. Stockholm lacked some of the bone-chilling cold of Iowa, certainly: it never really got below freezing. It was like home, really, about as cold as Arkansas, with considerably more snow. And it was pleasant. Fewer blond people than one would expect, but cobblestones and twisty streets like France. And to me, the Swedish subtitles looked a bit like German, at least enough that I could recognize some words. But it was a wintery place, and we ate wintery food, like the goat cheese with walnuts and honey and lingon jam that I had in the vegetarian restaurant, and the roasted veggies Angie made.

When we landed at Beauvais, outside of Paris, it was spring. The fields were greener under the brighter sun, and the sides of the road were touched with color: white from the snowdrops and the shrubs and trees like popcorn and the daisies buttoning down the grass, pink from some other sort of blossoming tree, and yellow from dandelions and daffodils and the forsythia. The light has gone from winter silver to spring white gold, and outside the maison blanche, there are violets. We've started taking long walks by the canal on the more and more frequent sunny days, just because we want to bask in the sunshine (and hey, Mom, I'm wearing my sunscreen that smells like India and everything). Cata has a photo of me standing under one of the trees that's just exploding into blossom, and none of us can stop smiling. Even though it's still a bit chilly, we have the windows open to let in the fresh air, and it's warm enough to go out without a coat.

There's an organic market today across town, but we're not going, because it sounds more fun to sit on the Grand Place and eat ice cream. If that isn't a spring and summer food, it's hard to say what is. We keep buying fruit for the house as well, a sure sign that winter's slipping away. I may make a fruit salad later: we've got a can of lychees and a can of mangos and a couple of yellow plums and nectarines that need using and I've got my trusty shaker full of ginger. Plus, I've started drinking coffee (with cardamom and cream, generally) instead of tea. Change of season.

Work starts again on Monday and I'll be glad enough to go back. I miss my students, and I like having a little more structure to my day than "Wake up, stumble downstairs, eat some yogurt, and argue peaceably about what we're going to do for the rest of the day, which ends up being sit around with our various computers". Although on Wednesday, we did go to Valenciennes to teach Cata how to bowl, and to play pool and air hockey and dance on the Dance Dance Revolution machine and wow some schoolchildren with our impressive skills. I've lost three fingernails this week: right thumb and ring finger to the bowling ball, and then right index at random. I also cut partway through my left index fingernail while I was slicing up (vicious! Lethal!) stale bread to make a vegetarian loaf. Been a bad week for my hands.

After this, only a few weeks of school left! Tragic. But for now I'll just try to enjoy the moment. Some of the old German assistants from a few years ago are visiting, and they've shown us some of their old favorite places around town, which are our new favorite places. So we're off to bask in the sunshine and chatter away in our patois, and it'll be lovely.