Getting ready......

I will have 100 days in Paris. I land on January 17, 2012 near my favorite city in the world. It always smells like a farm when you land at Charles de Gaulle airport - and I always cry. Then there is the magical ride into the city, where after all the tawdry suburbs with their graffiti endlessly rushing by, you enter Paris as if you are entering a movie set.



It will be cold and the trees will not have leaves, but the beautiful off-white buildings will wait in whispers there along wet roads, their huge Haussmannian chests standing tall.




It will be early on a weekday and the traffic will be thick, but as we enter the city limits there is another kind of sound - an almost interior sound from another time. And I will hear my first siren go by with its shifting pitches, falling as it passes. We will whirl through the Place de la Concorde, spinning as the traffic seems to do there, remembering Joe McElroy's imagery of the Seine having water lilies in it - past the Jeu de Paume, turning, past Napoleon's obelisque, turning, past the naked trees of the Tuileries and over the river.




We will pass the Eiffel Tower and UNESCO this cold morning...







on the way to my place...a fourth floor apartment on the back of an old 19th century house, facing a garden. The entry hall will be cold in stone and wood, unheated and silent. Somehow I hope to find the souls whose auras still inhabit these walls - or as my psychic said, 'All good things come in from the north.'