Houses I Don’t Live In Yet

Flowers in front of a Paris bodega, digital painting, iPad and Apple pencil, c. 2025

Dear Reader, this was written in February of 2021, and is part of a larger story that isn’t all told here. There are details that I left out the first time, which I’ve included now, but please remember when commenting that it was written almost five years ago. Thank you.

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They were giving away free roses at the supermarket, long-stemmed but natural, like garden roses, the flowers still pinched into buds. I took a white one, and once back home, I clipped the stem and set it in a water glass. A few hours later, the petals started to open.

It was February, and the sidewalks were icy and covered in grit. There was snow on the grass in the gardens, and snow turned to ice in the branches of the trees, and broken slabs of dirty gray ice littering the sidewalks.

One day, going out for bread in the frosted morning, I saw two men dressed in the bright green coveralls of Parisian city workers, with yellow high-visibility vests worn on top. They looked like something from a Bruegel painting, spreading fine gravel with shovels from a wheelbarrow, stooped to their task. They were doing this to prevent people like myself from slipping and falling on the icy pavement. They moved through the narrow backstreets and covered passages, paying special attention to the intersections, the crosswalks, and the little shaded corners, to keep us all safe during the cold.

At this time, I was pregnant, though still living in that terrible little studio in the half-abandoned 19th century building once known as the Hospital for Incurable Men.