A force of nature

"We're here watching it," she said.

I thought she was answering my question. She wasn't.

My first time in Paris, a small park near the Tuileries Gardens, where we'd wait for our daily adventures to be revealed at the one hour photo. It was well past midnight. The gates had already closed, yet the fountain was still running and the lights were still on. I asked her why they would leave them on when no one was allowed inside.

"We're here watching it."

It took me years to realize she wasn't talking about the fountain.

For almost forty years, I've studied the French. Not the language. The people. Most of what I learned came from one of them.

Years later, I brought Emmanuelle back to where I came from. Five years after arriving in New York, I returned to my alma mater as a guest of honor. Just hours after we landed, she stopped.

She pointed—not at the buildings or the trees, but at the light, as though it were something you could reach out and fold.

She smiled the way I smiled when I first saw snow.

"Look at the light," she said. She told me how beautiful it was. How it seemed almost tangible.

I had been born there. Only then did I see it.

She was always stopping for things I hurried past. A fountain after midnight. Light on an old building. A meal that deserved another conversation.