Long, long days in Paris

Although it was after 10 at night the red colour of the tiled Paris roof top across from my friend’s apartment was still visible in the late spring evening light. We’re in pajamas watching a DVD but the mood is so different from the December night when on another visit we drew the curtains from the spitting snow cocooning ourselves inside albeit it with a another DVD.

We are coming up to the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Long days create extra energy, night seems never to come and the desire to sleep disappears with the dark.
Dawn is for going to the beach long before the swarms of children with pails and their carping mothers appear.

I will head to Argelès tomorrow, to be there for the arrival of the Danes, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Dutch and the French from the North, people I greet each summer. We spend the long nights going to street dances, outdoor concerts or sometimes just bringing our chairs onto the narrow street to talk, perhaps with champagne, perhaps with wine, olives from local trees, some black, some green, some stuffed with anchovies pulled from the sea and sold in the next village from anchovy outlets. Others will have the nut still inside. And there may be saucisson cut in red little circles. And if we don’t nibble too much there will be decisions on which outdoor café to eat or to retreat to our own places.

For 400 years Catalan women have been sitting in the same spots it as part of their daily lives, snapping beans as they gossip and watching their children and grandchildren play up and down the street. For them it is not an escape from winter lives someplace else. Still the sitting, the talking nourishes our spirits for when we are back in our respective countries and once again facing the cold short days.

We will once again have a bonfire as the flame is brought down from the top of Canigou, the highest mountain in the area, for the fête de St. Jean celebrating the solstice. There will be music and dancing until the drums arrive and the men with fireworks shooting from their backs as they dance frantically to the beat of the drums around the dying bonfire.

The weather has been strange this year. When I left Geneva in April I was searching for my lightest clothes, but when I came back in May I reached for sweaters and woolly socks.

Today it is raining, scuttling my plans to wander an area of Paris I had missed but spied from a cab on my last trip to this flat. Instead I will treat myself to lunch at one of the neighbourhood restaurants and buy the makings of chicken soup to feed my ill hostess who stumbled off to work this morning despite it all.

There is an Arab fruit and vegetable hall with bins of bunches of fresh parsley, carrots, onions, eggplants and the apricots each prettier than the next, full of juice. The last of the cherries have been brought up from the south. Yesterday I began to establish a relationship by using the few words of Arabic I know. It worked with the internet café owner whom I cultivated on other visits and now we chat each time I time I come in. Even in a city in Paris it is possible to create a small village feeling. At the green grocer my Mahaba brought a smile that was not given to the three women in front of me even though I explained I really only know a few words of politeness.

When I serve the soup to my hostess, she will tell me I shouldn’t have and we will put on another DVD as in the window behind the TV set the sun lingers late into the evening as we eat.