The italian coffeepot on the stove, tall and sharp-edged and masculine, burbling deep bubbles beside the simmering whine of the teapot.
Today's tea of the morning is Tuocha with Ginseng and tangerines.
His knees are in my back, my arms already sore from awkward laptop positions.
(I have a handful of particularly blistering syllables for qwerty keyboards. We've all heard this gripe before. One day I will be truly multinational and the language of preference will cease to be an issue.)
New Year's celebrations were that warm sort of spectacular, curled up by a fire in a cabin just far enough from Paris for he brush to be frosted white and for the trees to be less sparse wih every hurtling train-sped kilometer (zone 7).
Midnight saw the interruption for a fiften-minute konga-line of a billion-course dinner carefully put together by friends, for friends, in an atmosphere where every laugh and chortle was a step tighter in the circle.
One day I will understand the thing Parisians have about Oysters and the Christmas season, aside from the fact that they travel best at this time of year.
One day I will understand why it seems that every dazzling smile that pierces this fashionable gloom hails from Bretagne, and why behind each smile is a deep melodic voice that knows all my favourite songs and isn't afraid to lead a tableful of parisians in rousing renditions of Pelot D'Hennebont between the cheese platter and the yule log desserts.
In the morning, there were five geese raising a rucus like I haven't heard since I was five years old and running from them on our farm in Poland.
This time, George and Patrice and Fred (a.k.a Konga) and Jean ran from them with me.
The looming stone of the fireplace is still warming that lonely spot behind my forebrain.
Yesterday's too-many-hours of terror that something went wrong at the airport, nearly shook the cinders away.
But then the flights were straightened out, the bevvy of blonde Lufthansa ladies sweet as anything, and then his freshly shaved head was interrupting the uncomfortable stare of the man at the bar and the familiar perfectness of his shoulders were around me, underneath my chin, pressed so tightly there and yet not tightly enough, as though tightly enough were the most impossible of theoretical precepts...
Hours later, sweat-soaked in a bed not accustomed to two, the closeness was just right.