Unlike in my former CT-NY-PA triangle, summer here really does seem to start on…well, the official first day of summer. There have been signs, certainly: stretches of almost-great weather, the little cards indicating that our tomatoes are coming from ever-closer farms, clouds of Jolie’s hair everywhere….
Everywhere.
Anyway, I’m used to a particular sort of summer: meltingly hot days, relief-less, fire-escape nights, and the occasional thunderstorm that’s as likely to boil off the sidewalk as to actually cool things down. We had all of those, in fact, during these past two weeks, which we spent in very enjoyable fashion in the U.S. It was wonderfully nostalgic for me, and less so for Nick, who eventually insisted that we switch rooms to one with air conditioning.
It’s less dramatic here, in years when it happens at all (it really does feel like I hadn’t seen actual summer since Belize), but we came back to a country off to an excellent start. We landed early on Tuesday, which made me right on time for the morning market. And what a difference two weeks make! There were mountains of stone fruits, four kinds of cherries in baskets deep as your elbow, live snails wobbling and lobsters waving their claws on ice, and Breton raspberries that glowed like Christmas lights.
Today I brought home about four pounds of tomatoes, each one a little lead weight on its stem, and turned the problem over to Nick: I think there’s a gazpacho in the works. (Yay! Raw garlic is a random hot-weather craving.) Personally, I’m busy with the skin that hasn’t seen for so long (really: I’ve been looking through old pictures and I look borderline ill). I take a notebook to my café and try to finish my Perrier before it’s tepid, switching chairs to catch the rays evenly like the lizard I am. There’s a strategic timetable of moisturizer and sunscreen to coordinate with my anti-inflammatory cream, which is already three times a day or else I can’t run the dogs. And if this keeps up, I might have to buy little sun hats for them, because they are not made for the heat.
“What did you do to them?” Nick asked, prodding the beagle dubiously with his toe. She didn’t budge from her flat sprawl on the floor. The same thing as always, really, but even in the relatively cool morning, when we go, they drag and sulk and are just as happy to go home and stay there. Which works out well: Nick and I’ve got World Cup games to watch, and a nice selection of ex-pat bars to watch them in. Doesn’t that work out nicely for everyone?
You know, except for those poor soccer players, down where it’s in the forties and fifties. I plan to spend the next two months (can I get two, France? I’ll bite my tongue for the other ten, I swear) pretending to forget how that even feels.