Susan’s Paris

I agree that Paris is always a good idea but I felt it was a particularly good idea in 2019 since that was the year I lost my mother.

Mother’s Day 2019 (with my husband.)

For me as many times as I’ve traveled there and written about it, Paris will always be hers and mine.

Mom’s last trip to Paris, January 1990

She brought me to Paris to shop when I was a little girl and I hold that trip as my dearest and most indelible memory–she was so gorgeous and so beautifully dressed–the two of us wandering Paris together.

We visited Paris together many times in the years to come, the last time in 1990. I was in my forties and she in her late sixties. On the trip in 2019–Mother’s Day, of course–I was the one in my late sixties and I wondered at being the same age now as she was then when we roamed for endless hours through all the shops and museums, down cobblestone alleys and broad avenues. Even then I always tired before she did.

Mom and Notre Dame, 1988

Yes, Paris will always belong to me and my mother.

This is the painting my mother did of me waiting for her at our hotel during one of our “girls only” shopping trips.  

The photograph my mother painted from. (I notice she eliminated the woman in the doorway!) 1964.