Last September I traveled to Paris. It was everything one hopes & dreams a “I went to Paris”sentence will entail: delicious food at Parisian cafes, world class art galleries, museums, cobble street roads with bakeries, patisseries & charcuteries, afternoons watching the world go by sipping a cappucinno and this: this little sailboat cart in front of the Jardin de Luxembourg. A cart of vintage sail boats for rent, 2 euro for an hour, wind-powered and pushed off the dock (pond) by sticks, really, a beat-up antique stick! (I’m sure there is a frenchy word for sailboat stick but I don’t know it) As simple as this little event was, it was the single most memorable & sweetest memory of my trip.
I pushed that little boat out onto the water, watched it zip past the other sailboats, narrowly miss the fountain, listened to French children laugh & yell & run to the other side to push off & there was me. A 40-something woman watching the sails in her boat, looking over my shoulder at the Palace, the expansive green lawns with matching sap green chairs, the Parisians reading, writing, sleeping, taking the world in, in this magnificent outdoor living room they share with their neighbours. This was one of those moments you know is “the moment”. It’s that good & perfect & you take it all in one frame at a time.
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
― Henry David Thoreau
Paris Sailboat Cart, 16×20″, acrylic. xoxo
