River île

We call our evening walk “River île.” The river is the Seine; the île is the île de la Cité, where Paris was born.

River île takes us down the stone stairs at Pont Marie to the broad walkway along the Seine where a jazz saxophonist plays pied piper. We stop and listen for a while and watch the people on the party boat and at the riverside tables, couples like us strolling hand in hand among the bicycles and scooters slipping around them. 

We wander along the river to Pont Neuf, the bridge of masks, and up another stone stairway and across the bridge to the tip of île de la Cité where a courtyard park of cafes and restaurants is tucked in so discretely that in our early visits we often stumbled upon it afresh, as if a new discovery. We watch the bocci ball players, who are charmingly competitive and slightly tipsy, and then walk back along the other side of the river to Notre Dame. 

Viewing the grand old lady now means peering through construction barriers to follow the progress of her restoration after the fire that almost brought her down. France will bind her wounds, we know that, and viewing that patient and deliberate work is a different kind of pleasure than listening to Gregorian chants in her cathedral, but one no less moving in its own way. 

Our last stop is Pont île St. Louis, where buskers play among an eddy in the flow of lovers and children lapping against the low curbs and clinging to the railings of the bridge and to each other, listening to the music and watching the sun set orange and gold over Hôtel de Ville.

We have other walks with names: Louvre, Luxembourg Gardens, Place de Vogue. Pont Des Arts is still our favorite romantic retreat on a sultry Paris night, where we snuggle together and watch the people and the sparkling lights of the Eiffel Tower while the glittering water courses beneath us like the hot blood pumping though our hearts.

Ah, Paris. Where we go for love. Where we go to forget, to clean the slate, to start over. 

To get out of a rut, some might say, and it is that, but it is also more. Something more like rebirth. For those months in Paris, we are new. Not merely renewed as some form of our old selves, scraped of accumulated barnacles, but transformed into something else. The world looks different, both closer and more fragrant and more distant and beautiful, a crowd in the Tuileries, blue marble earth.

In Paris, we are just us. There are no others. We write and walk and eat and touch and stay up late like misbehaving children to slip out after dark into the reflection of the lights on the river. We are never alone, but there is only us.

It’s a mystery to me why we can sustain that way of being for months at a time in Paris and not for more than a few days at home in California. The natural beauty is here. The climate is mild. The sea is nearby. But it’s not the same. I don’t know why.

The reason certainly has more to do with us, or me, perhaps, than with geography. It’s more than wanderlust. I don’t get restless to be somewhere else when I’m in Paris. I work, but I don’t feel driven, or judged. The work is the thing, not the evaluation of it. Like a fresh baguette, it is something to be enjoyed daily, for it will be hard and stale the next day, when more words will be written and more bread bought at the end of the day of writing and carried home, partially consumed along the way, warm and fragrantly irresistible.

It is as simple as biology, and as complex as bread and wine and writing and love. Perhaps I am a lost wine grape of France, one that only flourishes in that terroir with the patient and loving tending of the winemaker of my life.