Michigan in Paris

As I wash my face in the morning these days, my mind wanders back to a specific outdoor sink in Voditsa, Bulgaria. This sink in Voditsa serves as the bathroom sink, as it sits at the end of a line of four compost toilet stalls. The counter is a long L shape, made of forest green mosaic tiles. From what I can remember, it was hand done, like every other beautiful detail of this majestic homestead. There always seemed to be a number of scattered projects out on the counter, giving it the feel of a community ceramic studio sink. I guess I always thought of it like that, a ceramic studio sink.

The water was always ice cold. We spent time there into November, which meant wearing layers of pajamas and sleeping with one hot water bottle, shared between two travel buddies. We would alternate nights and then trade tips each morning. I would start hugging the heat source to my chest and then at some point once I was warm and half asleep, would push it down my sleeping bag to my feet for the night. Getting out of our sleeping bags in the morning was a feat in itself. Each morning at the sink, I would think, “I don’t want to,” and immediately splash the ice water onto my face three times, literally leaving me gasping. I remember my heart beat would get hard in my chest, like tightening the tension on a drum.

I think about water temperature more since then. I think about all the options and I turn the faucet on hot to start, in the middle range to wash my face, and cold for my teeth. I noticed the other day that I shifted somewhere along this decent into fall, to only using cold water.




Autumn makes fall for my husband all over again. It takes me by surprise every year. We met in late September and every year since, when the air cools for the first time, I find myself looking at him with googley eyes again. Like a light switch, I’m in the mood to go on spontaneous drives out of the city, just to drink coffee and talk. I want to take our dog for long walks at night with cups of bourbon, and to go walk on the beach, together but separate, completely aware of each other no matter our distance. I was secretly building a list of all the things I wanted to know about him our first walk like this. He was photographing me against the sun.




I remember working outside in Europe, watching my breath billow out of me in puffs so huge I wonder how I could possible be breathing this much. I remember picking little apples off the ground and saving them to eat. I remember yoga in the three walled barn before an early breakfast, and that early breakfast, always fresh from the oven, and wanting to stay at the table all day long. I remember gathering wood and stacking it next to the house for winter. I remember thinking of how someone would slowly be dismantling my stack, day by day hour by hour, through the fullness of winter, and that they would get the other half of this stacking meditation, and in that way we would always be connected.




I remember Eric rolling up in his beautiful and beat up Blazer with a thermos of coffee and two mugs for a Sunday drive. I remember thinking, ’Who the F is this man drinking out of a ceramic mug while driving?' and having the inkling that he might be right on my level. I remember walking with his dog, feeling really content that I was holding the leash. I remember watching Eric carefully choose and put on records for me. I remember him showing me how to make pour over coffee, and noticing that he must be distracted by me because he probably should have dumped out the pre-wet water at some point. I remember playing a guitar by the fire while Eric made us breakfast on our first camping trip. I remember thinking, 'If I can’t make it work with this guy, I’m not making it work with anyone.'




I think in some way these two spaces live in my heart as equals. I always thought, in the back of my mind, that when things fell apart with Eric, like every other relationship I had been in, I would stop treading the ‘Marriage and a Family Path’, once and for all, and go back to living somewhere with a cabin and a woodpile. And here I am, drenched in family life, still in Chicago, living in the opposite of a cabin with a woodpile, writing about this sink in Bulgaria.

I can’t help but notice that in the year that I was 'on the road', I mostly wrote about my past. I processed old relationships, wrote a mini-report on Lake Michigan when I came across a Lakes of the World book on a hostel bookshelf, and wrote about my family and friends in the middle of Chicago winter, from a beach in Kerala.

If I was living in the cabin with a woodpile, I would surely be writing and dreaming of family.

Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about 

Michigan. I did not know that it was too early for that becuase I did not know 

Paris well enough. But that was how it worked out eventually.

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast