Marchand de Couleurs

“Seventeen below zero outside, on the thermometer”. Said my husband when I got up this morning at 6:40.

A few minutes earlier as I was laying in bed, deep under the covers, I had sensed  it was going to be a frigid day because my nose felt cold.

There is a sharp draft from our bedroom window that blows right over my pillow. I love feeling its whiff of fresh clean air greeting me every morning as I take my first deep breath, awakening slowly. It invariably invites me to get up.

Except today.

It was much too cold.

So I had no choice but to resort rapidly to some kind of Plan B before this affirmation could become a lame excuse for going back to sleep.

I decided to concentrate and focus on thoughts of a hot shower and a steaming cup of tea, while at the same time calculate how quickly I could find my sweater and slippers.

It worked.

I managed to totter to the window led by the curiosity to see outside, as if the view could confirm how cold it really was, and here is what I saw:

A most inviting and beautiful winter morning greeting!

Then I remembered that my daughter was twenty years old today.

The winds have brought an autumn chill in the air tonight. The smells of wet decaying leaves and fermenting apples are slowly taking over the scents of dry grass and the sweet heady whiffs of a late blooming rose. Frogs and crickets have paused in their songs.

Summer 2012 is over. Some day, not now, I will write about it.

So tonight and with all of you my readers who are going through the rush of back to school, back to work, back home or back from a time of slow, stretched and balmy days, a time of soft early dawn light and golden lazy evenings, a season when our lives can seem just a few paces slower, I want to share this one perfect moment of quiet I had, back in August, on a very early morning by the Adriatic Sea:

I was in San Francisco for the first time earlier this month. What a beautiful city! And a feast for my eyes.

Indeed what affected me visually the most were the unlikely angles, the slanted perspectives and other optical illusions those fantastical and ubiquitous hills gave me via my iphone camera.

 from Alta Plaza Park, Pacific Heights.

Pacific Avenue, view from our hotel room.

And into the twilight…

In pairing food and life stories, there is one particular dish that consistently stands out throughout all my “adult life,” or more specifically, my last 30 years.

When I first arrived in New York City, coming from France some three decades ago, I had never heard of Matzo Ball Soup.

My only exposure to Jewish food had been at Jo Goldenberg’s restaurant in the Marais in Paris (it closed in early-2000 after serving Ashkenazi fare for nearly 50 years). A colorful joint catering mostly to Gentiles who wanted  a taste of the “real thing,” “authentic” and so inevitably touristy and featuring dishes that many local Jews thought were a far cry version of the simple delights and daily offerings of a Jewish family kitchen.

So the first time Matzo Ball Soup appeared in my life was upon my first meal with a new friend I had met two weeks before (and who eventually became my husband), at Fine and Schapiro, an Upper West Side neighborhood deli, and accompanied by his three brothers and one cousin (the poor guy! I realized since that he would have much preffered to ditch them that day…).

Little did I know the significance of the moment when I first got a whiff of the steaming, home-evoquing, mouth watering concoction.

The Soup, indeed significant in cementing our relationship, and Peter (who became my boyfriend), both jumped in my esteem the day Peter brought me a bowl of the hot and fragrant, Cure-All-Blues-And-Ailments Jewish Penicillin and set me up comfortably in his own bed less than an hour after I had two wisdom teeth extracted.

Multiple times followed when a flu, a rainy day, or simply the urge for warm comfort demanded a prompt serving of The Soup.

I’ll just name a few, some momentous and some less so: Coming home from the hospital 48 hours after the arrival of each of our four children; during a couple of  New York City’s paralyzing historic blizzards and hurricanes; and at the end of  many of the long hauls back from Europe and being greeted by an empty fridge.

But don’t get me wrong, The Soup has also been part of larger festive occasions: At Peter’s grandmother’s Passover Seders, surrounded by her large family, when we were still living in New York, and later, in our own efforts to follow the tradition, at our Seders at home in our predominantly Gentile New England State.

So in some ways it is, and I believe always will be, the cement and symbol for the bonds that Peter and I, our children, their school and college friends, and our  handful of close non-Jewish friends who have shared The Seder with us over the years, very much treasure and intend to nourish for life … with a bowl of the “Liquid Gold.”

I made a batch this past weekend and finished this plate right after I took the picture*.

*I would not dare give you my own recipe knowing that it will pale in comparison with the many delicious and “genuine” versions one can find online and which are almost as numerous as the different spellings of the word “Matzo.”

Earlier this month I went to Paris for a week, staying at my childhood and best friend Véronique’s apartment in the up and coming ultra cool 9th arrondissement, just a few minutes south of Montmartre and its old neighborhoods.

I know. How lucky!

Well, believe it or not, I look forward to these trips overseas the same way a Once-In-a-Lifetime visitor does, bursting with excitement and anticipation even though I used to live there.

When I am in Paris, I walk for hours, day and night, with or without a friend, revisiting neighborhoods where I used to live and discovering with curiosity how they have evolved and changed. I take it all in, look at everything, try, taste, listen to  as much as I can.

I walk into courtyards, ateliers, old apartment buildings, churches and anything that has an open door. I talk to people on the street, at the markets, in shops, galleries and cafes.

This is something I have always done ever since I was about 18 years old, out of school and living in Paris. It feels completely natural to me, I have never felt lost, unsafe or out of place, even in the various ethnic neighborhoods of the city.

Increasingly during my last few visits, I noticed that my attitude, my questions and my demeanor provoked a reaction I had never experienced before , and I should say to my dismay, it  suddenly dawned on me that I had turned into a “foreigner”. Man! Was I mortified!

My expressions where dated, my innate knowledge of how things worked and people interacted had been frozen at a time long gone, some 30 years ago and as a result I was OUT.

Little everyday things… For example, buying metro tickets did not invlove a teller anymore, I had to read the instructions on the darn machine! Or, when in a grocery store, I would spend hours studying the “new products”.

Even the language subtleties had evolved and escaped me. (What Is Verlan???)  It was as if I had stepped out of a time travel machine into a future version of my old city.

Of course, I was the only one noticing this… Until my friends started to tease me about my syntax and intonations. Oh My Shame!

Now I would argue that technically, my French is correct. But, as any Parisian would point out, it IS slightly off and dated. In other words, I can’t pass as a native speaker anymore…

I confess I am rather piqued by this.

Speaking with an affectation or pretending to be a local… Please! I can’t stand those people.

“Well, face it!” I told myself. ” You can’t fix it. So accept that you are an outsider and fine! Be ready to discover, learn, observe  and listen.”

And this feels just right! Now I am truly a wide eyed out-of-towner and enjoying it! (Okay, as long as I am not  too often confronted or reminded of it…I have my pride still)

In the next few posts, I plan to report on my last month’s trip and where my absolutely, genuinely and perfectly up-to-the latest Parisian Girl and Best Friend Véronique took to me to discover.

It has been so warm outside that I had to fish out my shorts and summer skirts from the storage bins in my barn. I normally do this after Mother’s Day when I finally pack away the winter boots, parkas and mittens.

So warm that I have been drying my bed sheets outside in the sun. So warm that yesterday I played catch just before sunset on wet and muddy grounds with my son. So warm that I have been driving with all the windows down and have been tempted to set up the deck furniture to eat outside.

But wait, I normally do this when it’s close to summer! Something doesn’t feel right.

Yes something doesn’t feel right when all this is happening and there are no colors in the landscape.

The trees are still bare, shrubs look burned, no tender greens there, no dafodills, forsythias, blue jays or cardinals yet and the grass is like straw.

It has been so warm that I wish for true signs of spring now.

And colors…

I found this at DesignSquish a blog that I look at frequently and love.

I drooled over these in Paris recently…

And I knew when I took this picture of the field behind our house last May, that it would remind me of spring one day…

MESSAGE TO MY PEOPLE

I saw this little figurine waving at me in an empty storefront window in Paris earlier this month..

I have been back for a week already but have had no time yet to sort out my pictures and stories from that trip. So this is just a preview and I hope a teaser too.

More on my trip to Paris soon