My grandson Danny made this page for me. For thirty-three years I wrote a letter to my mother in Paris every Sunday, and when she died I did not know where to put the Sunday. Now I put it here. This September I went home to Paris for the first time in twenty years. The letters from Paris I wrote by hand in a school cahier from the papeterie, and typed them here when I came back. The newest is at the top, which is backwards, but Danny says this is how it is done.

Sunday, 26 September
Toledo

Two days home. I wake at four in the morning, which is ten o'clock in Paris, and I lie there and listen for the garbage men on the rue Mouffetard, and instead there is the furnace starting in the basement.

Last night the moon was full, enormous, the color of an apricot, over the Sobczaks' garage. I sat on the porch in Stan's sweater. In Paris everyone told me I have an American accent now. "Tu parles comme une Américaine," the fishmonger said, not unkindly. And here for fifty-three years the ladies at church have called me "the French lady." So. I am foreign on both sides of the ocean. I have been, I think, for a long time. I only noticed because I stood in the middle for two weeks.

I have put on the kitchen shelf: one tin of tea from the shop by the Contrescarpe, one bottle of olive oil, a bar of lavender soap too pretty to use, and a little iron key of Maman's that Odette gave me. It opens nothing any more. I will keep it anyway.

Anne-Marie asked if I was glad I went. Oui. And also it broke my heart. Both. That is what I told her.

Friday, 24 September
Detroit, then home

At the airport in Detroit the customs man looked at my passport, looked at me, and said, "Welcome home, ma'am." I did not know how to answer him. I said thank you. Danny was waiting with a sign that said MAMIE in big letters. I held on to him for a long time.

Tuesday, 21 September
Paris

This morning Odette and I took the bus to the cemetery at Montparnasse to see Papa and Maman. We brought a pot of heather, bruyère, because it lasts through the autumn and Odette says the cut flowers are only for show.

The last time I stood here was March of 1979, in the rain, when we buried Maman. I remember I had a black hat from the department store downtown that was all wrong for Paris, too American, and I thought about the hat through the whole Mass. It is terrible what the mind does.

Today it was sunny. There were leaves on the stone. Odette swept them off with her glove. She comes every month; before today I had come twice since 1946. I said that to her and she said, "Ils savent. They know where you were. You were where you were supposed to be." My sister is not a sentimental woman, so when she says a thing like that, you believe it.

I told Maman about Stan. That he is gone two years now. That he was a good husband to me, as she said he would be, when everyone else in the family said an American soldier would leave me on a dock in New York. I told Papa the grandchildren all went to college. He only had his certificat and he was so proud of it.

Then Odette and I had a coffee and a croque-monsieur in a café across the boulevard and did not speak much. We did not need to.

Saturday, 18 September
Paris

Mon cher Stan,

I went down to our street this morning. The market was full the way it is on Saturdays, the whole rue Mouffetard from the Contrescarpe down the hill to Saint-Médard, so many people you move like a cork in the river.

Do you remember it in October of '44? There was nothing. A few turnips. Some sad cabbages. People queuing for an hour for bread. And you came up the hill in your uniform, so tall, asking everyone in the worst French I have ever heard for eggs for your sergeant. "Oeufs? Oeufs?" Like a chicken. I laughed at you in front of the whole street. You told me later that was when you decided.

Today, Stan, there are figs from the south, and cèpes still with the dirt on, and forty kinds of cheese, and a man with a rotisserie of chickens turning in the window, and the fishmonger singing out his prices. The prices are written in francs and also in euros, a money nobody has ever held in their hand. I bought a little goat cheese rolled in ashes, the kind you called "the burnt one," and I ate it standing up on the corner like a schoolgirl.

Our church is still at the bottom of the hill. I went in and lit a candle for you. A tourist in short pants was taking pictures with a flash. I wanted to tell him, monsieur, I was married here. I didn't.

Je t'embrasse. I will write again Sunday, as always.

Ta Simone

Tuesday, 14 September
Paris

Odette and I have become two old ladies who bicker. She puts the butter in the cupboard, not the refrigerator. I put it in the refrigerator. She takes it out again. We have done this four mornings now and neither of us has said one word about it.

Tonight on the television news there was the American hurricane, Floyd, and pictures of cars on the highways in Florida, all the lanes going one way, everyone running from it. Odette said, "Look at your country." And I said, "My country?" and then I did not know which one I meant. She patted my hand.

Her cat, Moustache, has decided I am his. He sleeps on my feet. At home I am not allowed a cat; Stan sneezed. Now there is no Stan to sneeze. I had not thought of that until this moment.

Thursday, 9 September
Paris

I arrived yesterday morning at Roissy after a night on the airplane with a baby behind me and a businessman beside me who snored in German. My nephew Philippe met me with his little car and drove me into the city on the Périphérique, very fast, talking on his portable telephone, and I held the door handle all the way.

Odette lives where she has always lived, on a little street above the Place de la Contrescarpe, four floors up. There is an elevator now, installed in 1987, big enough for two thin people or one American suitcase. We sent up the suitcase. I took the stairs, and Odette was waiting at the top.

She is seventy-seven. She has Maman's face now. I did not expect that. I stopped on the last step and could not go further, and she came down to me instead, and we stood there on the landing crying like idiots, and the neighbor opened his door to see what was the matter, and closed it again very politely.

Tonight she made a pot-au-feu the way Maman did. I ate two plates. Je suis rentrée. I am home. And the next thought, right behind it: am I?

Monday, 6 September
Toledo

Labor Day. Anne-Marie and the family came for hamburgers on the grill, which Danny ran, because Stan always ran it. The suitcase is packed and repacked. I have two good dresses, a raincoat, walking shoes, and presents for everyone: Ohio maple syrup, a Mud Hens cap for Philippe's boy, and for Odette a good wool sweater that she will say is too much.

In the bottom, wrapped in a scarf, the wedding photograph. Stan in his uniform, me in the dress my mother made from a parachute that a cousin found. I don't know why I am bringing it. I only know I am not going without him.

Tomorrow Danny drives me to Detroit. My passport picture is terrible. I look like a woman who has just been told the price of something.

Wednesday, 25 August
Toledo

Fifty-five years today since Paris was free. I always light a candle on this day and Stan always said, "Here we go," and poured two little glasses of something.

I was nineteen. For a week that August the city was holding its breath. The police went on strike, and then the people put up barricades in the streets with paving stones and old bed frames and a cart from the market. Papa would not let us near them. We heard shooting in the afternoons and did not know from where.

And then the night of the 24th, very late, the bells began. First one, far off, then Notre-Dame, the big bell, and then every church in Paris, all at once, all over the city. The first French tanks had come in to the Hôtel de Ville. Papa opened the shutters and we all leaned out, Maman and Odette and me, in our nightgowns, and the whole street was leaning out, and people were crying and singing La Marseillaise in the dark. Maman held my hand so hard. I have never heard a sound like that since. I do not expect to.

The next days there were flags in every window, flags we had hidden for four years under mattresses. Two months later there was a tall American asking for eggs. But that is another letter.

Sunday, 8 August
Toledo

Well, I have done it. The ticket is on the kitchen table under the sugar bowl so it cannot blow away. Detroit to Paris, the 7th of September. Home again the 24th.

Twenty years. Odette has written every month to say viens, viens, come, come. Always there was a reason. Stan's knees. Money. Then Stan was sick, and then Stan was gone, and I thought, I am too old, and the airplane is too long, and what will I do there, a widow of seventy-four, in a city that went on without me?

Then Danny sat me at this computer and said, "Mamie, you have a sister. Go see your sister." He is nineteen and he says things very simply.

So. I am going to see my sister.

Some kind people have written to me since Danny put up this page. A lady in New Jersey, also a war bride, from Lyon, sent me a letter so beautiful I read it aloud to Odette on the telephone. Merci, madame. If you would like a little note when I write a new letter here, send me a line and Danny will show me how to add you.