If you ever find yourself lucky enough to procure a pastry that is so delicate you can barely breathe on it without flakes flying everywhere, and you question, “How on earth do I eat this without it falling apart in a million golden pieces onto the table, my shirt, and the floor beneath me?”, I am with you.
It’s rare to find such a perfect pastry where I live, so I haven’t had much occasion to practice. When we were in Paris, though, we ate pastries daily. This is a thing you can do when you walk miles and miles every day. It brought me joy every time. I went to bed excited to get up in the morning to walk to a café in the cool air, order a croissant at the counter, and sit outside to sip coffee and try to figure out how to eat this crisp golden delicacy without looking like a savage. Pigeons feasted on the flakes that drifted to the ground beneath me.
Early in our trip, we found a boulangerie a five minute walk from our apartment that made the most exquisite croissant I’ve ever tasted. Just looking at it, airy and light and devastatingly delicate, I wondered, how am I going to eat this gracefully? If I bite into it whole, flakes will explode in my face. They’ll stick to my chin and fly into my eye and sprinkle my shirt. If I tear it into bite sized pieces, flakes will explode beyond the rim of my plate and stick like leaves to my fingers, and I’ll crush the crescent’s beautiful airy dome.
I tried both methods — biting and pinching — and got the results I expected. Flakes everywhere. An embarrassment to myself and a picnic for the pigeons. I sheepishly brushed the pile of amber leaf off the table into my hand to at least collect the crumbs on the plate.
I Googled “how to eat a croissant” and didn’t get much help. Google gave the the same options: bite or break into bite size pieces.
The next day, when we went to the same boulangerie, the boulangerie that now that we’re home, I dream about and wish I had access to, I ordered my croissant but sat for a few minutes to watch how other people ate theirs. We were in the natural habitat of croissant eaters, surely there was a way. And in fewer than five minutes, I had an answer.
Two tables down sat a man in a fine summer suit. The tips of his perfect croissant hung off the edges of the tiny plate the boulangerie served them on. He picked up the croissant and held it close to the center of the plate, the fingers of both hands close to one tip. He pinched off a small piece, leaned over his plate to put it in his mouth, set the croissant down, and then sat back and chewed. The flake fallout was mostly contained since he held the pastry low to the plate, and he hadn’t crushed the air out of the croissant since he’d held it near where he pinched a piece off. Once he finished chewing, he dabbed all the loose flakes from his plate with his fingers and thumb and ate them, effectively keeping his area clean between bites. He did this with each bite until the croissant was gone.
Genius.
I mimicked him, and though my technique was not perfect, I felt much more couth. I can maybe get there one day. Now that we’re back home, I’ve been searching for the perfect pastry to practice with. I haven’t found one yet, but I’ll keep looking. The next step will be to figure out how to add jam and still eat with grace.
This is my final week on sabbatical. Over these past months, I’ve gotten a taste of what it’s like to be in complete control of my time, and wow, it was glorious.
Before sabbatical, I wondered if I’d feel unmoored without work. I wondered if I’d feel like I lost my identity. I wondered if I’d not know what to do with myself. I worried I might try to do too much, and it’d rush by too fast as a result, and I’d go back to work feeling like I still needed a break. I worried I might do too little, and I’d become sloth and useless. I worried I’d feel like I needed to be productive with the time off because I felt guilty for having it.
What happened was that I learned to enjoy life, with gratitude instead of guilt. I learned to allow myself more time to do things that add richness to my life: I lengthened my pool time so I wasn’t rushing through my swim workouts, I watched wildlife in our garden for long stretches instead of quick glances, I spent a week with friends in Utah instead of squeezing a visit in on a weekend (or not visiting at all), I stayed in France after my husband and son went home. At home, I visited every coffee shop in town and sipped from stoneware instead of paper cups. I walked to shops instead of driving to them. I napped.
I learned to pay attention to my motivation for doing a thing — am I doing it because I want to do it, or because I feel like I should do it? I did the things I truly wanted to do, and eliminated the things I didn’t. I cooked only when I felt inspired and wanted to cook. I gravitated to swimming and walking, not to bicycling, and that is okay.
I’m in my 50s, and therefore in the second half of life. Retirement is likely on the horizon in the next dozen years. Sabbatical was a test run for what life feels like without work to occupy every day: will I feel empty? Will I be bored? Restless? Or will retirement be wonderful?
It will be wonderful. I can’t wait.
In this final week off, I’m going to soak up this time as much as I can. I’m going to read on the couch during the day and not feel bad about it. I’m going to nap if I feel sleepy. I’m going to hang out in coffee shops and watch the world go by. If I feel moved to, I might think about what I can take with me from my sabbatical life into my working life. It would be a shame to wait for sabbaticals and retirement to live and enjoy. I’ve got my health and energy now, I don’t want to squander it.
I wrote every day during my recent travel to Europe. My goal was 1000 words a day, but I typically wrote 1500 to 2000. As soon as I began my journey home, on the train from Lille to Brussels, I went back to the beginning of my trip journal and started typing up what I’d written. I used my bookmarks on Google maps to find addresses of restaurants we ate at, or my photos to remind myself of places I didn’t write about, and I listed out what we did each day in the digital copy of my journals*. And then I shaped the entries into blog posts with photographs from each day’s adventures.
I am so happy I wrote every day, and that I went back and typed up what I wrote. This is the first time I’ve done that. Between typing my hand-written entries and then blogging about our days, I got to live the vacation of my dreams three times. It was fresher during the beginning, on the travel home and on the first few days back in Blacksburg. The trip felt very close, like I could touch it again, and see the soft golden light, and hear the street sounds, and taste the crêpes, and feel how the art moved me. Now that two weeks have passed, it is fading. By the time I started typing my final journal entries a few days ago, I was already coming across things I’d forgotten about.
During these past two weeks, I’ve barely cracked my regular journal or written anything new; going through my travel journals and photographs and trying to make sense of them in blog posts has consumed most of my time since I’ve been back. Now, the photos are edited, the drawings are drawn; my journal entries are typed up true to their original stream of consciousness form, then blogged slightly more coherently.
With my travel project complete, I’m back to my normal day to day, which is sad in some ways and comforting in others. It feels strange and small going back to our pre-trip normal after such a grand experience. My habits at home don’t include walking to a café each morning for coffee and a pastry or walking city sidewalks every day. They don’t include riding trains or visiting art museums, buying hats at a chappelerie or sitting in the shade of a lush garden by a trickling fountain with beautiful bronze and marble sculpture. They don’t include trying to capture all of these new experiences in writing.
Instead, I eat my overnight oats each morning. I journal by the window with a cat in my lap, trying to think of something new to write about. I swim at 8am, longer sets than before my sabbatical, when I squeezed my workout into 30 minutes at 5:30am. I walk in our green neighborhood, down green Glade Road, through green Heritage park. Sometimes I draw in my sabbatical journal. I eat lunch at home while I watch birds, usually a smoothie bowl, or a black bean burger with avocado, or half a wheat bagel toasted with pepper jack and everything but the bagel seasoning, with avocado smashed on top. I water my plants. I go to a coffee shop to get out into the world, I lay on the couch and read. I write letters to friends.
My days are slower than our days on vacation, and not quite as stimulating. They don’t provide as much fodder for a creative project as the novelty of my travel journals did. But they are comforting, relaxing, and gratifying. I am trying to soak them up and enjoy them as much as I possibly can right now, because they are not truly regular life. That will begin again in two weeks, when my sabbatical ends and I return to what is actually, truly regular life. I’m starting to think about what habits I can take from sabbatical back into my working life, as this has, without a doubt, been the gift of a lifetime.
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.
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
Butterfly Mind 