GOODBYE

Well guys, this is it.

After tonight I don't think I will be posting anymore. Unless I think of something crucial about this trip that you might like to know. But I'm trying to reach conclusions right now.

Here it is 12:39 am, my last night in Paris which actually means Pontault-Combault. Goodbye my Portuguese suburb. I'll miss your blaring rap and your pride of the motherland. Tomorrow morning I will leave you and the rest of France at 7:00. I will eat my peach yogurt in the car and I will drag my luggage through terminal 1 and I will fly away, and time will repeat itself.

Every time I leave somewhere I also see the final scenes of the other places I've left, and every time I say goodbye I cry again on the shoulders of friends I have left before.

Again and again.

I can't talk about leaving Paris without talking about leaving in general.

Transition is my catalyst for growth; it's the thing I dread and yet, oddly enough, depend upon for familiarity. I have wanted to belong somewhere and to the people there, and I have-- many times-- and I have lost them. The pattern fits me like a glove, but one that I never asked for. I used to resent that, but I think finally it has been a long time and it's my life and it's okay that way. It's a gift I didn't expect.

God allows everything in order that we can find him somehow. All things for the good of those who love him. And ultimate goodness is only in God. In all the transience of my life and all the people I have known, the isolation after leaving them and the apathy towards relationships after that, I have learned that God is still good.

I have learned that the only reason I hurt is because I'm losing love, it's because I need people and that is not a bad thing. God only wants us to love each other. It is how he loves us and how we love him also, and it is how we can see him even through this fractured world. There is beauty here in the way that we live. If we are willing.

I didn't have to come here for three months and then leave again. I have thought about that a lot this past week or so. I've thought that I could have avoided the whole thing for the sake of stability. But that's just me trying to lie to myself. The truth is, I have found stability here that affects all of my life. I have committed here even though I knew it was temporary, and it has been worth it, and this is the most relieving choice I've ever made in regard to transition. I've been working toward it for a while, I think.

Jesus once went through a lot of transition knowing full well that it wouldn't last and that everyone would fail him and that he would even have to die, and it was the greatest gesture of love possible. And I think the point in being a Christian is to follow his example as closely as possible, in order to know him as well as we can and to see him in everything.

How then, could these months not have been worth while? Who am I to hold back in the future?

So I'm sitting here on my bed, my last late night in the basement. There are a few bags sitting next to a scale on the floor. I have two unfinished goodbye cards on my desk. The walls are bare except for leftover glue-tack spots. This is such a familiar situation.

Tomorrow will be hard. I will cry probably, and I will watch Paris going by the windows and I will see a village, a road, a runway receding from view. Hug Katie and miss all the friends I've ever made. It will be an overload, but it will also be peaceful.

I never meant to get incredibly personal on this blog, but I think that to close with a good explanation of my time here it was necessary. And shoot-- I won't be blogging again. Goodbye readers.

Goodbye Paris. Thank you for everything.

LASTS

Maybe some of you remember Veronique from several posts ago. Well, this orange and black weave... it's hers.

(This is the class at Telegraphe, my last day ever).

And this is the class at Saint Denis, my last day ever. This is Mohomad.

CHERRIES AND OTHER THINGS

Outside our back office window next to the garage is a nice smallish cherry tree and it is full up with cherries. I pick them almost every day now and it is oh so nice. Especially since I have no other fruit just now.

This weekend there's a big meeting in our dining room/ living room for one of the OM branches. It has to do with teenagers or something and I plan on not being here, although it will end with a barbecue tonight and that is very temping to me. Free food in any form is tempting. Cherries; barbecues; the other day a pastor at one of the churches here offered us all these packs of ready-made fish soup and, yes, I did carry all of them home through the metro. I haven't tried them yet, though. They look a little suspicious. I could feel them sloshing around during the commute.

Today Sarah and I are going to the Centre Pompidou, which is a big contemporary art museum whose stairs are all on the outside of the building. I learned about it in my 9th grade French class with Madame Coffman the Wonder, and now I'm actually going. For some reason this is the most surprising thing to me yet.

We don't know how long it will take. Afterwards we are meeting Katie for coffee (she has no interest in Pompidou) and trying to stay out as much as possible. Meetings are a great repellant for us slackers in the basement.

Classes are coming along well. They are almost over for the semester, since most of the women taking them go back to their respective countries for the summer break. It's a transient time as far as teachers go-- one of the women who teaches has gone back America for a few months and her place is being filled by various other people on various days of the week. There are several very short term people staying in the house right now, and another group will arrive next week. It is only a matter of making room in the fridge and washing sheets more often, and watching Jane Austen with five to a couch.

WE TRAVEL NORTH

On Saturday we drove 10 hours. Katie, Sarah, me, and Katie's boyfriend Stephan. He drove, actually; the rest of us mostly slept.

It was a trip to Holland, north from Paris, through Belgium, and a lovely day. It's finally warm here. The countryside is covered in fields and clumps of forest and towns.
Have any of you seen Ever After? I assume you have. You should. We stopped in Ghent, as in the Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent, the wicked stepmother's hometown, and we wandered about looking at her old buildings covered in graffiti. What I have seen of Belgium looks more medieval than what I have seen of France, but also full of ugly industrial-looking apartment buildings.

Stephan was explaining to us in the car why French people always bash Belgians: They are in the European Union but have contributed nothing to the world except French fries. They speak Flemish. Their only famous landmark is the Pissing Statue (which unfortunately we didn't see).

The closer we drove to Amsterdam the more cars we saw loaded with people wearing orange. Friendly people, blowing horns out their windows and pumping their orange fists at us. The games are on, apparently, in Holland.

And Amsterdam is so beautiful:


The first thing I did when I woke up the next day was check if my school has an exchange program for Holland. They do. The houses are tall and skinny and surrounded by canals. The canals are overflowing with houseboats and smaller boats of happy weekenders getting sun and listening to music. I would not mind joining them someday. I could be a houseboater. What about the Mississippi?

Now, we did not count on staying in Amsterdam all afternoon, considering that it's rumored to be such a seedy city and has no major sights we had heard of. But it's actually quite nice. Sunny looking people on bicycles smoking free love.

Under the feet of a herd of tourists I found a map. I'm collecting trash here in Europe with some kind of art project in mind. It's a smelly endeavor, but probably worth it, especially nice when I find maps. On this particular one we found the ANNE FRANK HOUSE, which we didn't know was in Amsterdam but which gave us a decided purpose for the rest of the afternoon. I did a book report on Anne Frank when I was in seventh grade. (Who didn't, at some point, do a book report on her?) I remember trying very hard to make my poster look like a torn out and burned page of her diary, to make it seem authentic. Well the house was beyond authentic. They lived there. We in our very own living bodies crawled through the same space behind the bookshelf that they, the Franks, were taken through to Auschwitz. I saw her wall decorations. Then we drove all the long way home again across three countries and several decades to my own wall decorations. I have an explorer, a hot air balloon, my favorite people. She had the Dutch Royal family and girls holding puppies. She died in a concentration camp. And here I am. Who are we?

My only regrets about Holland are that 1) we didn't go to Corrie ten Boom's house, and 2) the tulips weren't blooming anymore. This only gives me reason to return.

COUNTDOWN

Well guys, it's down to two and a half weeks. Ever since there was one month left time has been going by fast.. I'm afraid I'll wake up tomorrow and have to pack up.

I count down for everything in life.
Days until the weekend: 0 (yay)
Months until school starts: 2 and 1/2
Years until school is over: 3, possibly 4
Hours until I have to wake up again: 9
Number of kiwis left in the cupboard: 5
Years until retirement: 47

But otherwise I have little use for numbers, and they are hostile toward me. Especially 9. I don't like 9 or 11 or 5, as they are all quite menacing.
And right now, this 2 and 1/2 weeks is slippery but neutral. I have never liked leaving, in fact, it fills me with loathing and sadness (and much gnashing of teeth). We could dwell on the effects of this for a while but I'll spare you.
My point is, tonight, that this time I'm eager to continue in life, however much I will miss Paris. I have given and taken as much as I am able, and soon it will be time to go, and that will be alright.

CURRY AGAIN

When I first got here I found a bag of chickpeas for relatively cheap, and thought I should buy them because my healthy mother uses them quite often. Since that purchase I've had a hard time remembering what exactly she cooks with chickpeas. I've experimented a few times. It hasn't been bad. About a month ago I cooked a pot of chickpeas and couldn't think of anything to use them on so I put them in the freezer and then moved them to the fridge this week, thinking some great idea would come to mind.

We like cheap food around here. My house mate, Katie, bought 25 kilos of potatoes off some farmer a few weeks ago for only 5 euros. Most of you reading this don't use kilos, so in case you have no conception of how much that is... over 50 pounds. She split them between herself and two other people and we STILL have a bucket of small potatoes in the cupboard which are determinedly putting out small creepy-looking fingers. My other housemate, Sarah, and I almost ate them for dinner last night, but decided they looked too much like fetuses. Disgusted, we ate toast.

Today, though, I was very bored about dinner time and struck upon a hopeful theory that anything can be curried. Anything. I had ultimate faith in this idea even though I've never tried to curry a single thing. Open Google. Curry recipe. Curry chickpeas. How convenient.
I made the sauce, opened my container of chickpeas, and was greeted by stench. OH NO. They were covered in small bubbles, pale and slimy. But, Oh well, I thought, We still have multitudes of potatoes.

I have to tell you though, now that the dishes are washed and I'm sitting here with a jar of Nutella, potatoes don't curry. Don't try it.

SOMETHING ABOUT PAINTS

Last week our field leader had this idea that I should illustrate the story at the end of the lesson by painting. Usually I have nothing to do with the story-telling; it has more to do with introducing new vocabulary and I tend to serve cookies as soon as it's over. But everyone who teaches classes agreed that they shouldn't waste the opportunity for the story to be painted-- I am leaving in a month, and then no one else will want to paint. It will be back to flannelgraphs for ever. All the flannelgraph backgrounds we use, incidentally, are the exact same ones I remember from Sunday school. Same movable pillars, same Sea of Galilee scene.
So last week I painted the story of the Miraculous Catch of Fish at one class location, and the Ascension of Jesus at another location, and in two weeks I'll do another one at the last location. Three paintings. I've never painted as a performance before so this is all quite new to me... should it be a literal illustration or just a nice painting of some people? Should I bow when it's over? I'm not sure that the ladies know what to think either, since mostly they just stare and then give me curious looks when I'm cleaning up; on the other hand, some of them just can't tell me enough how pretty the colors are.
The kids love it. It seems like they would like to paint also, and that makes me like the kids more. Even if we can't paint together.
I am enjoying the paints, too. I didn't bring any with me and hadn't meant to buy any while here. But when they were first dropped off at the house for me to test, I was almost in heaven to squeeze them out and spread them around a canvas. Colors! I forgot how much I love you. My soul is happy because of this.