I don’t know if it’s a latitude thing or if the Pilgrims were just lazy procrastinators, but the harvest season is upon us here in Paris. I’ve spent the last few weeks buying heirloom tomato varieties like a kid in a candy store–to the point that I haven’t even bothered to stop in a candy store in ages. It’s not even tempting, because the squash is so freaking good (you make it into a soup, see…). And everything is local: potatoes, beans, apples, berries, grapes…everything. Which is a little ominous, because it strongly suggests that pretty much nothing will be in fairly short order. So I’ve been spoiling myself while I can: meals around here lately are giant mountains of produce with a little meat on the side.
And…Juliette keeps getting bigger and bigger, and is six months old today. Which I really, really don’t want to think about, because that’s a scary age for us these days. But she’s oh-so-close to housebroken (every time that I say she is housebroken she goes on a streak of proving me thoroughly, thoroughly wrong), and comes when we call, and can stay in her crate for almost five hours now during the day with no problems, and is generally turning out to be just about the sweetest little thing you can imagine. Even if she does spend half her waking time stealing our underwear and rooting through the trash.
And my bridesmaid dress fits perfectly and was, for the record, all done last Tuesday. So no one needs to worry, ’cause I know how you are.
And I’ve given the gardienne extremely specific instructions about watering our orchid, because the thing is an absolute miracle of a plant. We’ll be gone just a bit longer than I’m comfortable leaving it, and I’m not taking any chances–including (was she kidding?) moving it to her house for the duration. The thing hasn’t been moved more than three inches at a time since the tiny little shoots started poking out of the dry, cut ends, but now it has freaking buds–and some brand new shoots coming up from the soil. Coincidence? Maybe, but either way, no one is touching that plant without strict guidelines.
And when we come back, it really will be fall. The Parisian women will all be wearing black and dark gray again (they wear white and light gray in the summer), and the markets will be sad affairs: potatoes, onions, and dried out carrots. Everything else will have been shipped from Africa and South America, and it’ll look like it, too. Too sad to even think about, really, so I won’t: I’m going to go eat some figs and contemplate my orchid.