A pug is sitting at my feet looking up at me with pitiful eyes, hoping for a crumb of my iced lemon pound cake. The coffee shop is painted a soft green. A long cushioned bench upholstered in floral fabric lines the wall. The front window is framed by cascades of lilac and jasmine. In the back of the café is a flower shop. Two women chat in French as they strip leaves from stems under a ceiling of skylights. A sign on the wall above them says La Fleuriste. The espresso machine whirs. A demitasse spoon tinks in an espresso cup. A florist pours water into a pail and I hear it trickle like a faucet.
-June 11, 2025, Paris
Romantic is a soft, gauzy feeling. It is a blush, a glow. The ruffle of a petal or a skirt. It is the fall of light. It is the rush of love, the hope to create beauty, the glimmering of an ideal. Romantic cherishes what could be and softly, gently, attempts to make it real. In the attempt, it succeeds, if only for a moment.
I am prone to romanticizing. In my younger years, this romanticism could be painful. I wanted romance to last, whether the romance was that fluttery feeling of first being in love or the glowy feeling the golden glimmer of evening light gave. In my adult years, the ephemerality is part of its allure. Romance is special when it shows up.
When I was younger, I also could not square that romance could live alongside truths with harsher colors and harder lines — if the hard realities existed, and romance faded, then my romantic notions must be false. Boy was that a depressing thought. Now I know that life is made of both romance and the not so romantic, and that the hard elements make the romantic — which is just as real — that much more sublime.
I savor the romantic when I’m lucky enough to experience it: the moment will likely be fleeting. Our days in France were full of romantic moments, including these on my final day alone in Paris, from the fall of light in St. Sulpice cathedral, to the soft floral shelter of Cordelia’s Coffee Flower Shop, to the bright blue door of the apartment where Hemingway wrote words that made me want to visit Paris, to the masterful impressions of mood and light in paintings at the Musée d’Orsay.
Light in St. SulpiceCordelia’s Coffee Flower ShopI love the wind and the light in these sketches of Woman with a Parasol by MonetAnna Boch, CuilletteDetail from Henri-Edmond Cross’s Flight of the NymphsSo sad. Doctor Paul Gachet by Vincent Van Gogh.Portrait of the Artist, Vincent Van GoghThe Siesta, Van Gogh74 Rue du Cardinal LimoineErnest and Hadley Hemingway lived on the 3rd floor above the blue door. Hemingway wrote about this apartment in A Moveable Feast, which introduced me to the romance of Paris, and he lived here when he started writing about the Lost Generation in The Sun Also Rises.
The streets were quiet when we arrived around 9 or 9:30, and we walked through a green city park with tall trees and butterfly beds at its entrances. The sky was gloomy and grey, but we brought our hats and umbrellas, so we were prepared. I carried my tote and didn’t bring my camera. I didn’t want to spend all my time photographing and I didn’t want to hurt my back carrying my camera and two lenses. I carried my notebook, Boox, hat, and umbrella instead. And I have no regrets. Not now anyway. I might when I look at my phone’s photos of the castle and wish they were higher quality.
-Saturday June 7, 2025
I do have regrets. Sort of. I wish my photos from Ghent were better. At the same time, I do remember how much I loved just being present in the moment while we were there, feeling the mist on my skin, gazing out over the ramparts, feeling the solidity of the castle stone, taking care in the slickness of the castle walkways, thinking about the puddles and the chill dampness of the castle’s interior, and how miserable it would be to live there, except for the glorious fireplace that was big enough for me to walk into. I wouldn’t mind scooting a chair next to a blazing fire in that with a book and a glass of port. Pulling out an iPhone to snap pictures requires less concentration than a real camera with settings and lenses and whatnot, so a phone makes it easier to be present (and is much lighter to carry), but the photos definitely are inferior, especially since I never remember to clean my lens. Oh well.
After our son left our Brussels Airbnb to go back home to the States, my husband and I took the train to Ghent. Several trains run the 30 minute route each day. When we disembarked at Ghent-Sint-Pieters, we went outside the station and gaped at a vast bicycle parking lot we’d seen from the train. Then we passed through the station to walk towards the historic part of town where the castle is, and we saw even more bicycles. The circular park outside the station was filled with bikes packed frame to frame to frame. The medians of the streets that ran out from the circle like spokes on a wheel were packed frame to frame with bicycles.
Bicycles in Ghent
Ghent’s outer portions, other than the medieval city center, look like any city, really. Roads, sidewalks, square-edged buildings not made from ancient stone. We noticed a big difference at street level, though, especially on the larger boulevards. In Ghent and various other places we visited, there is not only a cobbled sidewalk, but a side…bike? as well. A bike lane, I guess we’d call it in the US, except these were part of the raised sidewalk rather than on the street itself. Being raised makes a big difference because bike lanes in the US are often full of broken glass and litter of the road. In Ghent, raised off the road and of equal width to the grey-white paver sidewalk, is a brick-red paver thoroughfare for cyclists. So the dedicated space for walking and cycling takes up as much or more surface area as the space dedicated to motor vehicles. And most of the motor vehicles we saw were busses or taxis rather than individually owned cars.
It was refreshing to experience infrastructure that showed a clear value for non-motorized transportation. The hardest part as a pedestrian was to remember that the red-bricked portion of the sidewalk was specifically for bicycles. We frequently heard the polite ding of a bicycle bell trying to make its way through.
I loved the bicycles everywhere.
Our destination in Ghent was the Castle of the Counts, a medieval castle that dates back to 1180. We walked in the rain through the modern parts of the city to get to the historic center where the castle and cathedrals were.
The sky was still spitting when we entered the castle, and the air was cold and damp even though it was early June. I was happy to get inside the castle for shelter from the wetness, but the stone walls added no warmth, and wisps of hair around my face curled in the chill humidity inside. Being there gave me a chance to feel the cold dampness I’ve read described in so many novels that take place before electricity.
We climbed spiral stone stairs to the ramparts where we looked through the slits and weapon openings to see the skyline of Ghent. The stone pathways glistened in the rain and looked slick. I put my umbrella up and listened to rain tick against it while I tried not to slip and fall off the castle wall into the courtyard below. I looked out over the Northern Europe cityscape, all bundled up in my sweater, jacket, jeans, and hat on a June day in Belgium.
Castle of the Counts, Ghent
Before our trip to Belgium, I had read somewhere about something something medieval and something something torture chamber. I didn’t remember specifics, so I didn’t realize that was where we were until we entered a room with what looked like a well in the middle of it. It was a dungeon hole. I looked down into it, into the hole where prisoners would be held in this stone-walled pit, and was reminded of a scene in a post-apocalyptic book I’d recently read where the dad pried open a door to a cellar full of writhing people being held there to be eaten. Both the scene in the book and this very real dungeon pit were chilling.
We entered a room filled with armor and weapons of the day, including a two-handed sword that was taller than me, and maybe even taller than my 6′ husband. I wondered if I’d even be able to lift the sword, much less wield it. Especially wearing my body weight in metal armor. Seeing these suits of armor and weaponry in their natural habitat of a medieval castle instead of in the sanitized space of a museum made them feel much more real. I was struck that specimens like this, as well as art from each time period, are what make it possible for modern creators to craft realistic representations of warfare and medieval life in cinema and novels. So much of what we saw looked familiar from movies, but this was the real thing.
Throughout the castle are cartoonish depictions of what happened in the torture chambers, or what I assume were torture chambers since neither of us listened to the audio tour the castle staff really wanted us to listen to. Beheadings. Boiling in cauldrons. Pegs through the tongue. It’s all very gruesome.
Lots of gore in the Castle of the Counts
By the time we emerged from the castle, the rain had blown through, and the sky was a beautiful, scrubbed-clean blue. We walked the historic district along the river, popped into a couple of cathedrals, and headed back to the train station, trying to remember to stay on the grey-white pavers of the sidewalk instead of the brick-red ones.
We stopped in the bakery directly across the street from our apartment to get a pastry. The line was out the door. The boulangerie smelled of warm golden crusts. They had great hunks of brown bread that they sliced slabs off of for people to purchase by the kilogram. Next to the line was a plexiglass partition where you could watch the industrial sized mixers with bowls the size of washtubs. I watched a great vat of dough be kneaded next to me. Round and round the paddle went. The baker, a young man in a flour-dusted navy blue apron and backwards baseball cap sipped coffee from a metal insulated cup covered with floury fingerprints.
– June 5, 2025
I felt relaxed in Brussels. Excellent beer abounded, and every meal came with frits (fries). On our first night, I ordered a Grimbergern Brune beer to go with my “typical” Belgian meal of Flemish beef stew which was made with Grimbergern Brune. I really wanted frits (fries) — I’d been wanting them since we’d gone to Lille two days earlier — and when I asked our server if the stew would come with frits, he said, “Everything comes with frits.”
Hell yeah!
I took one bite of the beef stew, and it transported me instantly back to childhood, to Mom’s beef stew on a winter night, leaning over our bowls around the family table. The stew in Brussels was rich and layered and velvety and hearty, especially on chilly wet night, with wind blowing and rain lashing us as we walked glistening cobbles. I sopped up the thick broth with my frits, which were golden crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, and perfectly salted. It was so good, I had an almost identical meal at a different restaurant on our second night, except this time the stew was made with Chimay Bleue, and so I ordered a Chimay Bleue to go with it. The quality was even higher than the first night’s meal, the beef tender and the broth dark and rich.
Brussels reminded me of Athens, Georgia, where I went to college, except Brussels is much bigger, speaks French, Dutch, and English, and is full of adults instead of college students. Brussels felt like Athens in that it’s edgy, kind of punk rock, and it feels like it would have a good music scene. On one of our walks around the city, my husband and I happened on a doorway with a sign over it that said La Porte Noir, The Black Door, with a brick stairwell that spiraled underground.
We of course investigated. We found ourselves in a dungeon-like bar with a bunch of unknown-to-us beers on tap. I asked the bartender for a recommendation for a dark beer. He said Lupulus Hibernatus. I said yes. The logo is a wolf passed out on on its back, pouring the last drop of beer in its mouth.
Our son loved Belgium. In his 2 days there, he ate waffles on four separate occasions. As soon as we dropped our stuff at our Airbnb, we found a cool coffee place nearby that serves waffles as a side to savory brunch in the same way we serve toast in the US. The brunch waffles came with spreads — some savory, some sweet — rather than syrup. A few hours later, he got a second waffle, this one covered in Nutella, banana, strawberries, and chantilly cream. He got it at one of the scores of waffle places near the Grand Place central square. In every direction just off the square, every other door you walked by smelled like waffles and had their own spin on toppings or presentation.
As with Paris and Lille, we walked and walked and walked. I felt like I was going to walk holes through the soles of the cheap white sneakers I bought for the trip. I got tired of carrying stuff after a while. Walking around Brussels, and on our day trip to Bruges, I didn’t take my camera, just my phone. I didn’t feel like carrying my backpack all day long, and my tote was already full with an umbrella, notebook, ereader, and sometimes sweater. So my photos aren’t as crisp or high quality as I’d have liked, which is a bummer, but.
But the Fritbar made up for it.
In Bruges, we walked a lot, and we stopped a lot for snacks. Our son wanted another waffle, which he got — this time with strawberries — and after that, he wanted a salty snack. He wanted frits.
Lucky for us, there was a place whose entire menu was frits, sauces, and beer: Fritbar. Our server was a lively, funny man with a German accent who was very involved in our orders. I ordered a dark beer on draft, and he said, “Oh, I have something even better for you, it will make you fly somewhere you’ve never been before.”
Of course I said yes. Bring me whatever you recommend. Our son said, One for me too, please. When he brought the beers, Straffe Hendrik Quadruple, our server poured them into the goblets tableside. He started with the bottle touching the glass’s rim, then lifted the bottle in the air to create a long stream from the bottle to the glass, swirling the goblet as he poured to build up the perfect head which was probably 2 inches thick.
The beer was strong, dark, and hearty, and I loved it. Our server kept stopping by our table to check on me, his eyes twinkly with mirth, telling my husband and son to watch and wait. The beer did feel wonderful, and I smiled at the fun the server was having, but I thought, he’s making a bigger deal than this is going to be. Then it snuck up on me, in the same way the anise drink did in Istanbul, where suddenly I felt high as a kite, and thought thank god I don’t have to drive anywhere because I would be incapable, and I might not even be capable of walking, and I laughed until my eyes watered, and my son and husband laughed, and our table was joyous, and our server stopped by and got a huge kick out of it all. I probably made his whole shift. Then, just like the anise drink in Istanbul, after about 5 minutes the high mellowed, and I just felt happy and content and soft around the edges.
As we drank our foamy delicious beer and dipped our perfectly fried and seasoned potatoes (I got sweet potatoes) into various sauces (our son and I got truffle mayo), I thought, why has nothing like this taken off in the US? It seems like everything we love best. All this place served was French fries, sauces, and beer*. I can’t believe every college town in America doesn’t have a Fritbar.
*I realized later that they also serve burgers and other stuff.
Our son loved walking in the rain on the cobbled streets of Brussels, and he loved the architecture in the central square. He saw it in the day and requested to go back after dark. He wanted to see the buildings lit up and the lights shining on the wet cobbles against the darkness of night.
Brussels Grand Place
I personally loved the Justice palace and the ferris wheel.
Palais de Justice, Brussels
My husband, son, and I took the train to Bruges, where we walked among canals with greenery tumbling over brick and stone walls, ornate cathedrals, bicycles with baskets and teenagers riding double on the cobblestones, and bike bells gently dinging to ask all the tourists to please make way. We ambled without aim, just turning down streets when they looked cute, or pointing ourselves towards tall spires.
Do you have weird things in your memory that stand out from childhood, things that you’re not sure why you retained those particular bits of information? I have very specific words I remember from art lessons way back in elementary school, like the different types of columns (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian), like the names Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, Sistine Chapel and Venus de Milo. Of course I know all these words in my adult life, but I specifically remember that as a child, the words and the images they conjured made me feel some kind of good way, maybe one of my first experiences of feeling awe that those people and those pieces of art existed. They seemed too good to be true, like they couldn’t be real, or at least were totally unreachable to me on the other side of the world. I didn’t conceive that I’d actually be able to ever see any of them myself.
One of the things that has always stuck in my mind from those lessons is bas relief. I don’t know why it stands out to me (har har), but the term has always been there in my brain. I did not feel awe about bas relief when I learned about it because I did not understand why it was important. Maybe that lack of understanding is why the term stuck: if they were teaching us about it alongside Michelangelo and Da Vinci, then it must be special. I assume I’d never seen a compelling example of bas relief, or I’d only seen one represented in two dimensions in the pages of a book, and I just didn’t get it. For 40 years, or however long it’s been since I learned about it, I did not get it.
Now I do. In a little hallway, in what I might have thought was a throwaway room in a dark passageway from one gallery to another, Lille’s art museum has a marble bas relief from 1435 that took my breath away: Donatello’s Feast of Herod.
It turns out, at least with this particular bas relief, and I assume with others as well, that light, once again, is everything.
The Feast of Herod hung alone on a dark wall with tiny hidden light sources in an arc around and above it. The default lighting lit the surface of the carving from the sides and top — not from out in front, which would flatten the image — so that the shallow lighting shone across the carved marble to highlight raised elements, and so that the recessed portions fell into shadow. This created a sense of depth, an illusion that the hallways and recesses in the carving disappeared into the museum wall. They looked inches deep, like I could stick my finger into one of the arches. But those dark halls are only a few millimeters behind the foreground. The entire carving is less than one centimeter deep.
A plaque next to the carved marble slab invites you to press a button. When we pressed it, the light faded to dark, then began to illuminate one side, then the top, then the other side, so that you can see how the image changes depending on where the light falls. Perhaps this lighting replicated how it would appear as the sun rose and fell on it throughout the day wherever it was originally displayed.
Donatello, Feast of Herod
I didn’t get a photo in flat light to show the difference, but you can click here to see one on the museum’s web site if you’re interested. It looks completely different from the image above. The front-lit image on the museum’s website was likely the kind of photograph I saw when I first learned about bas relief and didn’t understand why it was a special kind of sculpture.
When I saw the lighting reveal the magnificence of Donatello’s creation, it blew my mind. How did he and all these other artists figure out the mathematics and perspective to create masterpieces like this? And not only figure out the math, but conceive of the idea to begin with — to create depth in something shallow — and then plan, calculate, and execute it. It’s just unbelievable. I can’t believe it. Except I have to believe it because I saw it.
Spirituality is important to me. Not spirituality in the sense of going to church or worshipping capital G God, though being in a church can sometimes make me feel the connection I seek, to a oneness vaster than me or humanity or earth. When I say spirituality is important to me, I mean that I place a lot of value on tapping into that connection with oneness.
The times I feel spiritual, when I feel that connection, most frequently happen when I am in the presence of great beauty or excellence. Sometimes that’s through food. Sometimes it’s through art, literature, poetry, cinema, humor. Sometimes it’s something in nature, like the wind in the trees or wavelets sighing on sand. Sometimes it’s in the wonder of mathematics and physics and engineering. Sometimes it is a person’s goodness.
When I’m lucky enough to tap into that connection, I feel awe and wonder and humility and euphoria. I feel the universe in the cavity of my chest, which has become vast in its presence, and I believe that the universe is in all of us. When I feel that connection, I know everything is going to be okay, even if only on the time scale of the oneness.
I felt this when I saw Donatello’s Feast of Herod.
Though it was the most staggering, Donatello’s bas relief was not the only one of the day’s delights that fed my spirit. I also loved the paintings that showed everyday people doing everyday things in their everyday settings, like Therese peeling potatoes, like Durant’s man sleeping, like a funny still life of crêpes and waffles and rolls.Below are photos of some of my other favorite works from our day at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille and La Piscine in Roubaix.
La Maison de Therese, SaloméL’Homme Endormi, DurantNature morte aux crêpes, gaufres et cougnole, Francken
I was moved by a marble sculpture of a pieta (another word I remember from art lessons). From across the room I thought it was a sculpture draped in a fabric cloth. I wondered why it was covered, so walked over to see. When I got closer, I realized the cloth is made of stone.
The Architecture of Empathy, John Isaacs
I loved the dramatic lighting on the plaster Satyr and Bacchante. The light was even better than what we saw at the Louvre, though the sculpture itself wasn’t quite as fine.
Satyr and Bacchante, James PradierLa Piscine in Roubaix
Vanilla painted brick walls rise up on all sides of me, with red doors to each apartment and red frames to the windows. The walls create a little grotto that is insulated from the sound of cars and mopeds and rattly strollers and suitcases on the cobbles outside the front window of the apartment. Instead, I only hear the pleasant tinkling of outdoor diners’ wine glasses and cutlery.
-June 2, 2025, Lille
We arrived safely in Lille on a train from Paris. Trains run frequently between the cities and the ride is a smidge over an hour, so it’s not hard to get back and forth. This was good for me to know — maybe I could go back to Paris after my husband and son left and I would be on my own in Lille.
Vieux Lille, the historic district we stayed in, is charming with different architecture from Paris. The apartment units are narrow, more like row houses, and the cobbled streets are smaller and narrower, too. Maybe the architecture is more Belgian-style — Lille is practically on the border and was once a part of Belgium — or maybe it’s just a smaller city.
Airbnb in Lille from the back, from the quiet of the Cathedral grounds
It is much calmer in Lille, and quieter and easier than Paris. In our immediate vicinity were a pasteis de nata patisserie called Dona Bica and a café we could see from our open window; a chocolatier and macaron shop a couple of doors down; a cheese shop and multiple boulangeries, beer gardens and waffles, a crêperie and a Cathedral all within a 2 minute walk; and the Grand Place central square and plenty of shopping for shoes, clothes, food, and wine within a 5 minute walk.
Views from our window
We all needed some alone time once we arrived in Lille. I went upstairs to unpack, and when I came back down, I found my husband asleep on the couch in the living room with his book on his chest. Our son retreated to his room for some quiet time as well. The washing machine tumbled round and round.
I took a snack and a glass of the Anjou wine to the little wooden table on the terrace. The wine was cold and crisp, though I did not need a cold crisp wine that day. The air was cool enough that I wore a sweater with my white peasant skirt. My toes were chilly but I liked the feel of the wood planks under my bare feet.
The terrace we shared with other apartments was filled with pots of red and white geraniums, purple salvia, pink and yellow petunias, bamboo and ivy. As I sipped my wine and wrote, I heard the gentle sound of a neighbor washing up the dishes in the kitchen sink after dinner: the clink of glasses, the rush of water from a faucet, hands dipping in and out of the stream. Silverware clinked together as they rinsed. Church bells chimed.
I liked it there in that little nook. I need quiet time with pen and paper to take care of myself. Bread and brie, flowers and wine, church bells don’t hurt, either.
I want to take a brief break from my Europe journals to participate in a photo challenge my mom, Beth of wanderingdawgs.com, is hosting. She recently joined the Lens-Artist team of photographers who prompt bloggers with weekly challenges. This week is Mom’s first time hosting, and she has challenged us to share stormy images.
My mom has been blogging on her WordPress site since 2013, when she and my dad took their RV to Alaska. She started Wandering Dawgs to chronicle their adventures. In recent years, they’ve slowed down their RVing, but Mom still blogs regularly. She’s found community through her blog and frequently tells me about RV and photography friends she’s met online. For several years now she’s been active with the Lens-Artists and participating in the weekly Lens-Artists Challenges. I’m excited for her that she was recently asked to become part of the team of hosts. Congratulations, Mom!
On Tybee Island, where I grew up and where Mom and Dad still live, thunderstorms and hurricanes are as much a part of life as humidity, seafood, marshgrass, and Spanish moss. It seems only fitting that Mom selected storms as her theme.
I’ve got lots of images of storm clouds in my photo archives. The cloudscapes of Georgia and Florida were a favorite part of living there. Here in Virginia, I don’t have as clear a view of the sky to see unobstructed cloudscapes, but we do get pretty good ice and snow in winter, and some great cloudbursts in spring. When looking through my photographs for this challenge, I realized I have no good shots of stormy weather in autumn. I’ll have to remedy that.
Spring
Spring at the nursery during a cloudburst
Shopping for plants at the nursery, I got caught in a sudden downpour. I dashed into a greenhouse doorway to sit it out. It was over within minutes.
Summer
I love storm clouds in summer, so that’s what my favorite storm-related pictures are of.
Thunderheads over the Gulf of MexicoThunderheads at sunsetDouble red flag before Tropical Storm Isaias, Atlantic Beach, NC.After Isaias.
Fall
I have no images of leaves blowing, or wind in jewel-toned trees, or a good autumnal downpour. The best I have is a shot of a walk in the park after a storm in Munich.
After the rain in Munich
Winter
Most of my winter photos are of the aftermath of storms rather than the storms themselves. We do get spectacular ice storms here that make for pretty pictures.
Walking in a snowstormEvidence of an ice stormGust of wind after snow
Thanks for the fun challenge, Mom!
If you’re interested in following or joining the Lens-Artists challenges, John from the team has more information here.
Butterfly Mind 