Urban Summer Living

The weather's turned, everyone is walking around in T-shirts and sundresses, the tables outside restaurants are filled and café terraces are jammed.

The windows of the apartment are wide open to catch the cross breeze and I can hear the clatter of flatware from the restaurant downstairs.  I hear the murmuring of the diners and the sound of the motor scooter accelerating toward the corner floats back to me.  It's summer in the city.

Most of the year the windows remain closed and we live in our insulated world without regard to the activities of those around us.  This is not unlike our lives in the States, where the only sounds penetrating our house are the occasional car climbing the hill, a neighbor's car door slamming or a dog barking down the street, even at the height of summer when the doors and windows are thrown wide.

But with the coming of warm weather in Paris we also welcome the noisy lives of the people around us.  For those unaccustomed to living in a city it's a bit of a cacophony.  Eventually it becomes normal background music.  It rarely lasts very far into the night, but when the sun has not yet set at 10 p.m. the definition of night becomes rather fluid.