Rose Windows

I wanted to write a blog about my trip to France, but I didn’t know what to call it until I read Ina Caro’s book Paris to the Past. It describes 25 day trips by train from Paris to historic sites. Caro writes about the rose windows in cathedrals, something I’d never really heard of or noticed before; even though I’ve been exposed to them many times and surely thought they were beautiful. I’d never really thought of them or really seen them before.

The way Caro described them captivated me. They sounded like eyes to the soul, like portals to the divine. I wanted to see them again and really look at them; read their stories.

I would casually mention rose windows to people to see what they knew. Almost everybody that I mentioned them to knew all about them and would start telling me about them. I felt as if I’d been kept in the dark somehow and was finally being pulled into the light.

The school at Sancerre looks like something out of Madeline. A stately old building with a clock on top. I found it on-line and registered. It would be there that I’d begin what I’d begun to think of as a pleasurable boot camp, a place to brush up on my French for two weeks before going to Paris.

Tom will meet me in Paris not reluctantly but with some trepidation. He’s not sure about the French and thinks France is too Western. He wants to go somewhere exotic like Burma or Iran.

But of course he will come; it’s Paris after all. We will meet there after my two weeks in Sancerre, and I love that – the idea of meeting in Paris.

I had a rose-colored view of Paris and still do, a perception that was almost crushed by actually living and going to school there when I was 22. I found Paris to be filled with the same problems of any large city. A French version of New York. It could run you down.

I always thought I would go back. I put off seeing and doing some things while there because I knew I’d be back. But I didn’t go back.

Until now. Almost thirty years later.