The sun rose at 8:30 this morning, and it’ll be gone again before 6. The original, more optimistic temperature forecast kept revising itself back down toward freezing as we headed toward noon. But the sun is out, and I mean it is out. There’s a violently blue sky with just a few wispy clouds, and it raises your pulse just to go out under it.
It’s the kind of day that pushes me toward stupid sartorial choices like dainty little flats instead of nice, warm boots, leaving my toes fully numb after an hour. It’s the kind of day where, when you open a window at 10am and are blasted with icy air, you put on a few more layers and go open more windows.
It’s also a holiday, of sorts.
I got about two-thirds of the way to the market before my Something French-meter went off. It’s normal enough to see people carrying flowers, but for the vast majority of flower-carriers to agree on a type is statistically unFrench. Therefore, when a fifth of the local population is carrying lovely, sunny, fuzzy-looking yellow mimosas, something is up.
I could see the source, of course; the cool florists (as opposed to the lame florist a few rows over) had packed their stall with sprawling bunches of the stuff:
But it didn’t stop there; they had also gone through first thing in the morning and stuck little bundles of mimosa everywhere:
Men, women, and children were carrying armloads, double armloads, tiny posies; half of the stalls had a spray of mimosas displayed somewhere among their wares. In other words: this wasn’t just “The mimosas look especially nice today, so they’re selling well.”
I pondered this as I bought enough fish for the next three days. There are people I could call and ask, but they don’t live in Saint Germain, so if this is a local thing I would miss my chance to find out what was going on. And while a few of the market vendors recognize me and chat with me by now, the whole place was packed, and I didn’t really feel like dealing with the type of scene that tends to come up when large numbers of my friendly new neighbors decide to help me to fit in better. It’s kind, but it’s exhausting.
So I bought cherry tomatoes, candied strawberries, and Pink Lady apples while I considered buying some sunny flowers, whether or not I really knew what was going on. And I was in the middle of a heated internal debate over how many split peas a person can really eat in a week when a pink-cheeked young woman with a basket of mimosas handed me a posy of my very own. I took them and thanked her, and waited a beat to hear that they cost a euro (which would have been fair) or two (which I still would have paid, because I suddenly wanted them more than anything). But she just wished me a good day and skipped off, and I tucked the stems into my purse and plucked up my courage.
“I’m not French,” I announced to the woman scooping my peas. “What’s with the mimosas?”
She called her father over to make sure she was right, but it could have been worse, scene-wise.
Apparently (and I’ll admit that I had guessed this much), today is the Mimosa Festival. It happens on “some Sunday” every year, although the date seems to be more about instinct and intuition than the kind of thing you mark on your calendar. “Is there anything else that it entails, other than…getting mimosas?”
After all, you don’t want to do these things halfway. There might be something I was supposed to do with them: give them away, or dispose of them in some special way. Or perhaps there was a particular meal one eats. Or maybe a Dance of the Mimosas; who even knows?
But no, the father assured me; this is “like with the Beaujolais nouveau.” Which is to say that you just get excited about the mimosas, get some mimosas, and then enjoy them.
And so I will.
