Over the course of the semester, we've been doing all sorts of writing in my Creative Writing class. Recently, we've been working hardest on a long midterm essay, but now and then we just do simpler free-writing exercises. I will post the most polished version of my midterm essay when I receive my second draft back from my professor, but in the meantime, here is a short piece I wrote up when my professor basically said to us, "It's spring! Things are changing in Aix! What's different? You have half an hour. Use all five senses! Write! Go!"
Spring change—what changes are there? Finally, there are blossoms. I missed the bud phase, somehow. It seemed like everything was dry and dead, still, but on my walk home, and even in Lacoste, there are pink and white flowers in trees. There are bees; I hear them humming past my ears. Their sound is like that constant cymbals hum in some jazz music—it gets in your ears and fills them, almost annoying, in the background of whatever else may be going on. The melody is carried by the birds. The first bird I heard was an owl, a darker, rounder sound, but now the high-pitched, sharper, lightness is there, too. I see a black-and-white bird flit across the driveway every time I leave Josy’s apartment. I’ve never been able to distinguish individual markings on a moving bird before, but this one’s white wingtips contrast with both his black and the intense blue of the sky. To finish the music metaphor: the dogs bark to provide some bass. They were there before, but an empty echo of a bark on stone is not the same.
What else is new? There’s suddenly so much sugar and sweetness! Yesterday was free cone day at the Ben & Jerry’s on the Cours Mirabeau, and I got a bowl of cookie dough! At home, Josy has revealed her sweet tooth. She’s been holding it in all winter, apparently, but when the Easter season hit, and all that chocolate appeared, the cupboards started overflowing cookies and candy in the kitchen. My mom sent me chocolate, too, and I gave some chocolate-covered sponge candy to Josy, because I haven’t seen it here. She thought she knew what it was when I described it, but when she bit into it with a crunch, she exclaimed about its surprising caramel taste. Now we talk chocolate every meal! She brought home little glass jars of chocolate- and butterscotch-flavored mousse and watched me eat them. She’s promised to bring more, and ice cream, and sorbet, and who knows what else. I didn’t ask for it, but I can’t help smiling and laughing when she offers it so excitedly. She has a toothache now, though, and probably a cavity. She’s all sweetness. I’m just dying for some salty popcorn!
But the scents outside are sweeter, too. Greener, mostly—it’s those flowers making their presence known to another of our senses, I imagine. It makes a lot of students sneeze, which provokes the equally sweet sentiment, “A tes souhaites! A tes amours!” I catch whiffs of people’s colognes and perfumes on the street. Does scent not permeate well through colder air? Is it like a vacuum, the way sound doesn’t permeate through space? Or are they wearing scents where they weren’t before?
Colors are starting to come out. In winter, it was all black and gray and brown, boots and leggings, maybe red. But I’ve seen coral pants in the cathedral square, and glimpses of green and light blue. A young man in blond dreadlocks and a weathered guitar supported against his green-clad chest strums and sings with his back against the clock tower; I am reminded of a minstrel. I saw a girl in light blue, feathered wings the other afternoon! Walking on the Cours with a group of friends. At the ballroom soirée on Saturday night, the theme was plein de couleurs, and I have never before seen French people so vibrant! Kind of random and eclectic, too. The lady in short jean shorts, with maroon tights, and a sparkly purple tank top, bopping to the jive and to French ‘80s songs that were throwbacks to her but new to me. Red and yellow kimonos and African robes—what would my ballroom professor at Penn State say if she saw those billowing across the ballroom in the Viennese Waltz? It’s splendid. (At the buffet was a chocolate fountain, meringue stars, and crème puffs filled with ice cream!) At the beginning of the night, my partners were somber and nervous, but by the end, they smiled when I smiled. Elizabeth and I got a photo with our friend Samuel—and all these colorful strangers jumped in on top of us—hugging and jumping and laughing! Quelle surprise!