When I was growing up, I used to save everything. Letters, homework papers, candy wrappers… just in case. In case of what, I’m not sure–I don’t know that I knew at the time. It was some sort of validation, some sort of proof. It was a way to share those experiences–the letters my dad slid under my door after I’d fallen asleep, the French homework with stickers like “superbe” and “magnifique,” the flattened tinfoil wrapper painted like Santa Claus that came with the chocolates we were handed on the last day before Christmas break in the first grade. It was a way of being able to prove to the people who were important to me who weren’t there to witness what were, at the time, extremely important moments in my life, that these moments had happened.
But things change. As we grow up, we move further and further away from our parents and families and friends–perhaps not quite so literally as I have, but even if you’re still living in the same bedroom you slept in when you were a child, you start to have your own life, separate from that of your parents and family and friends.
It can start small. Maybe you don’t recount your day at school as much, or maybe you start sleeping over at friends’ houses on the weekends. Maybe, like me, you actually move, and maybe you don’t. You develop new friends, a new family with whom you do things… and sometimes, you do things all on your own.
There are things I don’t share. Things that, for whatever reason, even if I mention them on this blog, are things that I experience completely on my own. I don’t mind it, really. I’ve always been the sort of person that’s comfortable being in my own head, and besides, there are some experiences that, no matter how hard you try to explain, you can’t force anyone to have with you.
To supplement my freelancing lifestyle here in Paris, I teach English as a second language twice a week: once in the 5th arrondissement near the Jussieu métro stop and once in a small suburb on the Transilien outside of Paris called Meudon. The first time I stepped off the train into that tiny village, I was flooded with memories of my first experiences with small French towns: Mouvaux, when I first moved to the north, with its thatched houses and roads that curved, disorienting the Manhattan-grid-mindset I thought was universal. I remember my first visit to Paziols, how pleasantly surprised I was to see the one main road that ran through the center.
Meudon’s train station lets off in a main place; as I leave it, there are a handful of businesses–a pharmacy, an alimentation, a bar with a Tabac: all of the essentials. I wander down the roads after dark–it’s always dark before I arrive–and wonder what it would be like to have grown up here, only fifteen minutes outside of the city that I call home, but feeling like it’s so far away.
I’ve been having trouble sleeping recently, a combination of Christmas coming and too much coffee and too many things on my mind that I can’t or don’t put into words for lack of time or the appropriate amount of dexterity in my numb fingers after coming in from the cold. Instead, I try to let my mind go blank and spend my time in the kitchen instead: I bake cookies and quickbread, and when I can’t think of anyone else to foist baked goods on, I make midnight tomatoes.
I heat up my tiny toaster oven–I’m used to it now–and I line a baking tray with tinfoil, flooding it with just a little bit of orange juice, cherry tomatoes, salt, olive oil. I bake them low and slow for hours as I dreamily accomplish tasks I forgot about during daylight hours, times when normal people fold laundry and sweep the kitchen floor. I’m not entirely sure what one is meant to do with midnight tomatoes… I throw them into dishes–pasta, chili, plain lentil salads–but mostly I just pinch them, piping hot, between my fingertips and eat them as I stare over the dark courtyard out my kitchen window, looking at the thin veil of snow that has covered Paris.
Midnight Tomatoes
500 g. cherry tomatoes
2 tbsp. orange juice
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. olive oil
Toss the ingredients together and pour them onto a foil-lined baking sheet. Bake at 200 degrees F until the tomatoes have shriveled slightly and the orange juice has darkened, about 2 hours.