Home Sweet Home

Rue St. Dominique

Upon receiving our housing assignment at the beginning of the semester in Paris, my good friend and I were told by our director that we were "very lucky." Not sure how to take this, we anxiously awaited our first meeting that night with our landlord at our new apartment in the 7eme arrondisement. We arrived a few minutes late and out of breath after the 3 floor walk up but were greeted with a kind smile by a middle-aged blonde woman with red rimmed glasses. She invited us inside and we held our breath, ready to be disappointed, or at least underwhelmed. When we stepped inside, we realized that "very lucky" meant very very lucky. Before our eyes, the grand square living room stretched out and up, the ceilings lined in exposed hard wood beams, the opposite wall light with two great windows. Stretching around to the right was a study and a bedroom. Behind us was the bathroom (with a white tiled bathtub) and the second bedroom, bigger than my common room had been back in my New York dorm room. The kitchen shot off the living room and looked over the courtyard of our building. The front windows had a view of the Eiffel Tower on the left. And our landlord was nice, welcoming, and low-key about everything ("No need for a security deposit, I trust you!") We were really very lucky. We had a beautiful warm big place to live, a place that now, almost three months later, I feel comfortable calling my home.

It may not be my room at home in New England, my room that I love--a large maple wood-floored bedroom with pale yellow walls and a view of the ocean from my window--or my suite at Gramercy from last semester that I shared with my two best friends--floor to ceiling windows, new kitchen appliances, sparkling bathroom and open air, light, and warmth--but I have come to feel at home in this wonderful apartment. I love it, feel at home here, because I know it so well. The familiar creak of the stairs leading up to the door, the thick metal slab sound the key makes as it turns in the lock, the rush of heat as the door clicks shut behind me, the soft bend of the green leather couch below me as I sit, the humming of the cars driving by on the street below, the flashing of the rotating light atop the Eiffel Tower that beams through our windows well into the night... it's home now, home away from home. I know I will be sad when I leave it in May, and I know I will remember it forever in my life as one of the places I lived and loved and learned and made memories that will stay with me wherever I go.

Leaving the building, I turn down the street, left, towards the subway. The Eiffel Tower pokes out from the city skyline behind me, and the sidewalks bustle with families, children, people. The homeless man outside Fran Prix in his striped sweater and tight woolen hat that I have come to recognize, tips his head and says a soft mumbled bonjour. I smile back and drop a few coins in his cup. I will do this every so often as I pass him, like I know him, then continue on down the street. The city moves behind me and ahead of me as I round the corner out of sight from my apartment. And the homeless man, my neighbor, continues to smile.