Did That Just Happen?

Feeling rather emotional, I wrote the following on the back of my printed flight confirmation as my flight left Paris:

Whenever I leave a place, I wish for rain so I won't be sentimental for what I've left behind.  So I wanted it to rain on my last day in Paris.  Instead, it was refreshingly balmy, and Samantha and I wore sweatshirts to the airport.  We parked and stood behind the car together in silence, nervously shifting our feet, each of us lacking the heavy words to say goodbye.

She hugged me - which was extremely un-French - then quickly hugged me again before we both turned away and hurried in our opposite directions, afraid of making a scene.

I sulked through checkin, security, and passport control, then sulked through a few shops to keep my mind distracted.  A cashier told me that I was beautiful and I blushed and remembered that compliments like these don't come easily in America.

On the shuttle bus to the plane I heard a Frenchman say "Pittsburgh"; with his strong accent he reminded me of Alban, and the way he would grin after saying the name of our new home.

As the plane ascended, the cloudless sky and the pilot conspired to give me one last glance of the past four years.  First the Eiffel Tower, standing proudly on the banks of the Seine.  Then La Defense, from which I could orient my view to identify the neighborhood of our first apartment in Levallois.

We banked and followed the Seine, winding through the suburbs to meet the Oise River in Conflans, close to our second apartment.

Then the urban sprawl of Cergy, and soon I was gazing over the calm winter green and brown tones of the French countryside which so often reminded me of Impressionist paintings on my drive to work.  I imagined the rows of cyprus trees lining the road, the bright yellow fields of rape seed in the spring, the cherry trees the gypsies raid in the summer, the smell of the boulangerie in the last village before Meru, the horses I looked for every morning at the cottage with the pink roses.

It occurred to me that all of these things are a part of me now, but I am no longer a part of them.  My colleagues won't have to struggle to speak English anymore.  Samantha, Pierre, Alban, Hector, Francois, Luc, they'll all wake up tomorrow and carry on with their lives.  Within a few weeks I'll be little more than a distant memory, and their minds will turn away from sentiment and onto ski holidays and summers to plan.

It will be longer, but someday I'll look back to them and this place and ask myself if it wasn't all a dream.   Maybe not a dream, but a parallel universe, one that is so easy to forget when I am immersed in America and American culture.

The last four years....Did that just happen?


Things I Left With

Pot of Lauduree honey (present for Terry)
Salt and Pepper grinders from Peugeot (colors inspired from lunch restaurant with Francois)
Peugeot 206 keychain (the French car I always wanted but never had)
Musee de Nacre bracelet from my bosses
The last ten episodes of Lost (files from Pierre)
OSS 117 DVD - extremely politically incorrect and hilarious French comedy...with subtitles
Two tins of Frisk mints (our favorites)
Qu'est on Mange? - a fat old French cookbook from Luc's mom
Can of pureed chestnuts - also from Luc's mom, in order to make the chocolate cake recipe she gave me