I’ve been reading this amazing book, A Writer’s Paris: a guided journey for the creative soul. It suggests taking a trip to Paris, and spending a month or three or six just writing. Actually, it says, you should write in three different sessions each day and spend the rest of the time exploring the literary culture and history of the city.

I am, of course, fantasizing, nay, pre-planning, a trip to Paris next May. Why May? Why not. I like Spring weather, I guess. I’ve gone so far as to browse vacation home rental sites on the ‘net, something I’ve done before.

In 2002, my parents, Fuzzy, and I rented The Tall House – a vacation home in St. Thibery, France (near Bezier) – and spent Christmas there. In the morning we strolled to the outdoor market and bought chestnut pastries, and in the evening we would brew tea and carry it up the steep steps to the second-floor lounge (the house was very tall, but only two rooms wide) and eat pastries while we watched the lights in the sleepy village click on and off, or read aloud to each other, or watched video tapes of Brit-coms.

We all had the flu, we broke the funky thread-spool toilet-flushing mechanism, and it was raining a lot.

And I’d never felt more like I belonged somewhere in my entire life.