last tango in paris

it was a beautiful day today, and the air smelled familiar. i just don't know what that familiar smell was of. but i remember it from this time every year. it goes with the blinding sun and the sudden whim of a breeze.

everyone gets back to school this week. everyone, except me.

my summer job ends this week. the new one has already started, slowly.

oh holy moses, i'm an adult now. i mean, no vestiges of kid are left. i'm responsible whether i'm responsible or not.

it's funny to have been here four years and never yet identified that smell. it must be like a kind of burn-off smell, because it lasts until you have to start wearing a jacket even at midday, which happens toward the end of october. the trees have been baking in the sun and now they are just cindering &mdash maybe that's what it is?

when i was at the end of my summer in france, two years ago, i almost didn't spend the last ten days in paris. i was exhausted from working hard and speaking french and living in strangers' houses, and i thought about just coming home. but i stayed. those last ten days defined my trip for me. when i think of my summer in france i think not of the three weeks in nice or the four weeks in correze or the week outside le mans, but instead of the last ten days in cold, rainy paris in the end of july. walking for miles, looking like a hobo with my straggly hair and clothes, circling back to the louvre every four hours or so to use the one free bathroom in the entire city. oh, i love it there and i can wait as long as i need to in order to get back and stay for another three months. or six or eight or twelve or twenty!

i've got a similar feeling now to what i remember of those days in paris &mdash not the rapture part, but the settled certainty that the exhaustion is coming to an end. i don't know what's ahead...i didn't after leaving paris, either, except junior year of school. but at least i'd be speaking english and not working with or around manure.

sometimes all we need for an uplift of mood is the knowledge that whatever trial we're moving into, at least it's not the one we've grown accustomed to.

(first published 8.18.07, 6.37pm)