August 14th 2024
Dear All,
I’m writing from sunny Dorset, where early this morning I was the only person on a wide empty beach at low tide. My family and friends’ departures the other day felt like a tide going out, a low moment, and this is the way of things: togetherness and then aloneness and then togetherness again, time after time. Tides go in and out; life goes in and out, we fill and empty, empty and fill. We accumulate, and then we let go.
Recently, after a family discussion, my brothers and I decided that sadly, it was time to let go of our shared apartment in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, and sell. After seventeen years of meeting there, being alone there, sharing and enjoying, it’s time. I’ve worked on three novels there, soaking up the ambiance of a city I have loved since I went there first at 18. I’ve spent time with Parisian friends, with my husband, with my daughter and son, with each of my brothers. It’s been a delight, and has changed our lives. But now, we know it’s time to let it go – and so I’m writing about it here in case anyone reading is interested in a pied a terre or even a permanent home in a lovely part of Paris, midway between the Jardin de Plantes and the Jardins du Luxembourg, near the rue Mouffetard and two markets, between the metro stations of Gobelins and Censier-Daubenton…. If so, get in touch with me before it officially goes on the market this autumn.
Letting go feels hard – letting go of people, beloved places, houses, even possessions. But there is a time for it, and I know from experience that once you let go, something else comes into your life. It’s the endless process of living, one time, one place leading into another. I’ve said goodbye to so many friends lately, and yet they return in my dreams to tell me that this not the end.
I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s famous villanelle: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master…” But I think it’s hard. I’m a Taurean, I don’t much like change. At the end of the poem, she tells herself, “Write it – as disaster.” The last loss in her poem is that of a beloved person, and this is the hardest of all; and yet we have to do it, over and over, during our lifetimes, and go on.
So – on a lighter note – Paris is still there, and I will certainly go back there, if not as a co-owner, as a visitor with a lighter step, not having to deal with the EDF or the phone company, not going up to Place d’Italie to buy a new fridge or washing machine, not attending endless meetings of the Syndic., not fixing things when they wear out and generally doing the maintenance that ownership involves. I’ve enjoyed learning how to do all of the above, and next I’m going to enjoy renting or staying in a hotel, looking out of a window that is not mine, and who knows, even writing something new about Paris, about changing times.
Affectionately, Ros
