Beans, Baguettes, & Boulogne

This Monday last—Alison’s big 25—some feasted and others (*egh-em*) binged upon fresh fruit sangria, organic blueberry tartlettes, baguette, and vegan garlic pâté. Bready morsels and pitter-patters of burgundy littered our sheet cum picnic blanket (and no shits were given) as oscillating chitchat lollopped in a semi-circle about me.

As wont to such a locale, the air grew leaden with the crispest of relaxations—like the tightest of strings gradually slackening—and so each surrendered in idiosyncratic form: Chelsey and Alison prattled buoyantly; Erin quasi-committed to some French novel; and I let the sangria and sunshine massage me into grated sleep.

The name of the specific park folds itself deep into memory, but what a deliciously torpid state, what a birthday, what a day!

Photo credit (bottom 2): Erin Griffin

The seasons of laziness are varied and mutable: for in winter one cozies under blankets consuming literature, but in summer one rests one’s eyes—never plunged fully in dream, but thinking free-form in branded consciousness—amidst a semi-deserted meadow of the Bois de Vincennes.

Reposed in my hollowed wake upon the tickling wildgrass, marveling the ethereal contrast of cinquefoil leaf against sky, I ruminate into the breeze: a newfound ecstasy, my allergies, meeting Chelsey in fifteen, ants roving, and then… a blankness of mind often so tragically unreachable. Such is summer: warm ease and mindlessness.

Although I may be abstemious to a fault in paying entrance fees, scrutinizing the façade, with its rigid turrets and sky-skimming diagonals, of the Chateau de Vincennes (a mere hour’s but-sit on the metro) suit me juuuuhs fine.

In witnessing an ash blond cherub—full of mettle, like a mouse defying the elephant of life—proffer scraps of baguette to an apprehensive swan, my t-shirt averring birds as “friend[s] not food” never seemed more applicable!

Water unites all in these captures—their effect comparable to knismesis—from a full day’s peregrination across the Bois du Boulogne.

Feet aching obscenities and water peeved with thirst, I was fairly lost at this, the hour of sunset in the Bois du Boulogne. The swaying threshes of the weeping willow seemed illogically comforting, akin to the comfort of gently caressing the hairs of a lover’s head with the most infinitesimal surface finger friction. At these romantic musings the bum came into vision; realizing the wood’s transformation into prostitution central was nigh, I gingerly tucked the moment away for a delicious winter daydream, and huffed away compass arrow determinedly pointed home.

An angularly arresting configuration of paddleboats awaits paying rowers at the Grand Lac of the Bois du Boulogne.