The situation improved, however.  Yes, it was cold and quite rainy (not cold enough for snow) most of the time, but we had a lot of time to see Paris, so we saved the nice days for walking around sight-seeing and took advantage of the drizzly days to go to museums, sit in cafés drinking espresso, and relax in our place.  We had found an apartment to rent for the time we were there, and there was a bakery a block away and a grocery store three blocks away, so we had fresh croissants every morning and fifty kinds of cheese with good, cheap French wine in the evenings.  It was so nice to have a home for a little while, and in Paris, of all places.  Despite the weather, the city did turn out to be charming in the winter, with more Christmas decorations going up everyday, people walking around all bundled up in boots and coats and scarves, kids skating on the ice rink in front of Hotel de Ville, and every corner café serving hot mulled wine to go from giant cauldrons.  It was a very different city than the warm, blossoming, sunny “April in Paris” I spent so many years ago, but it was wonderful in its own way, and the Seine still sparkled at night under so many city lights.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but will give a few highlights.  I still discovered the incredible Impressionist collection at Musee D’Orsay to be so much more rewarding than anything at the Louvre, especially the tiny, crowded Mona Lisa.  We spent some time in Montmartre, seeing the city view from the Sacre Coeur basilica at the top of the Montmartre hill, seeing Moulin Rouge, wandering the artists’ haven of Place du Tertre, and having drinks at Amelie’s café, Les Deux Moulins.  We of course saw the Eiffel Tower but didn’t go to the top because the cost and the lines didn’t seem worth it, especially when the best thing to see on the Paris skyline is the Eiffel Tower itself.  And just as the seventeen-year-old me, my favorite place by far was Notre Dame cathedral.  We spent a lot of time walking around it, sitting in the square in front of it or in the café across the river from it, and best of all, climbing to the top of the bell towers.  Anybody who has read Victor Hugo knows the draw of the bell towers, and finally getting to ascend them was amazing.  We saw one of the bells inside, the 13-ton Emmanuel bell, saw the many gargoyle guarding the high walls, and climbed to the top to get a panoramic view of the city.  It was definitely the highlight of the trip in more ways than one.

We also managed to meet up with an improbable amount of friends while we were there.  One of Scott’s friends from Moody, Emily, now lives there with her husband, Nicolas, and they invited us over for a lovely traditional French dinner.  My flight-attendant friend Kate flew in for a couple of days to see Paris with me, visit Oscar Wilde’s grave, eat at Hemingway’s old haunt Les Deux Magots, and drink lots of tasty wine.  And on the morning we left, we had breakfast with my friend Justin (whom I had last seen in Colombia) and his dad, who had just flown in the night before to spend their holidays in France.  It was fantastic to get to see so many friends in such a faraway place.

We made it home in time for Christmas with both families, first in Texas and then in Michigan.  It was great to be home for the holidays again, remembering how lonely we were last year on our solitary beach in Nicaragua for Christmas.  And now we’re settling into Michigan for the next several months, strangely excited to experience winter again.

My parents have had the same house my whole life.  For the first several years of my life, I had the big bedroom with the red carpet.  It was a corner room, and the windows faced south and west.  The western window looked out over the woods and a pond that had very different levels depending on what time of year it was.  The southern window overlooked the back of the woods and a large field beyond that generally alternated between towering corn and golden wheat.  There was a lower roof just under this window from which you could climb down the TV antenna ladder, and even as a five-year-old it occurred to me that I had the room with the best fire-escape plan.

Later I moved to a room down the hall on the opposite corner of the house.  This room’s windows faced north and east.  The eastern window displayed yet more woods, and the northern window faced the driveway so that I could always see who was there.  If anybody came to our house, they came by car, since we were so far away from everything.  Between my window and the driveway was my climbing tree, a silver maple that had a perfect crook about fifteen feet up where I would sit and read.  I’m sure in retrospect that it really wasn’t the most comfortable place to sit and read, but I think as a kid the novelty of finding a seat in a tree far outweighed the seat’s comfort.  I even rigged up a rope and basket from a higher branch at one point so that I could transport various necessities up to my spot without having to climb with them.

When I was eight years old, my family lived in the Dominican Republic for a year.  My sister and I shared a room at the back of the house.  This room had one little window with louvers over it, and you couldn’t see much out of it but brambles and the dirt road beyond, but you could quite often hear roosters crowing or donkeys neighing (do donkeys neigh?) just outside the window.  We had the master suite, and there was also a window in our bathroom on the other side of the room, but this one faced the neighbor’s house, so we didn’t have it open very often.  No one wants to see the neighbor’s house while they’re on the pot, or maybe it’s vice-versa.  I was in this bathroom the first time I ever got a phone call from a boy I liked.  I kept this information from him (both that I was in the bathroom and that he was the first boy ever to call me).

When I finally moved away from home to college in Chicago, I shared a tiny dorm room with an assigned roommate, and we had the typical assigned roommate problems that college freshmen are supposed to have, with the added complications that this girl was crazy as hell.  Our one window view reflected the nature of our relationship: all we could see was an alley (where there were always pigeons fighting loudly) that ended in a brick wall.  The one good thing about this room was that it was where I had my first kiss, which is still a good memory even though the guy didn’t last very long.

The summer between freshman and sophomore years was the last time I went home to live.  I had my old room, but I had inherited an orange armchair from my sister that sat in the corner under the window.  I often sat in this chair to contemplate, as soon-to-be sophomores do, and it was in this chair that I saw one of the most beautiful moon risings I’ve ever seen, and first listened to and learned to love Counting Crows.

For my sophomore year I had arranged for much better accommodations: two fantastic roommates (who became my best friends and still are at present) in a huge, two-section room.  The back section had our desks and dressers in it, and we generally kept those windows shut because they were right above the dumpsters.  The front section, though, was where our beds were and where all the socializing took place.  There was a giant window with one window on each side, and in the morning the sunlight was glorious.  We were on the first floor and our windows were only about eight feet up, so our friends would just shout up to the windows on their way by instead of calling us.  Most of our conversations were held through that window that year.  It was through that window that I received the offer for the babysitting job I had for the next couple years.  I was pelted with a lot of snowballs through that window.  Some of my happiest memories took place through that window.

The next summer I stayed on campus and roomed with one of my friends from that past year.  In the summer everyone who stayed had to live in one dorm, an old brick monstrosity that was a boys’ dorm during the year.  There was no air-conditioning and the building usually felt like an oven.  Our second-floor room had a view of the trash-strewn porch roof and a street of smaller houses, many of them used for student housing.  It was a rather stark and boring room, except for the time the extremely heavy bookshelf fell off the wall and nearly killed me while I was sleeping.

For the first semester of my junior year I lived with the same friend back in our lovely previous dorm, while our third friend was off to a semester abroad.  We had another corner room, coveted among college students, this time on the outside street facing away from campus.  The sound of the traffic was grating at first, but once I got used to it, it was comforting.  On the street corner opposite ours was a Swedish restaurant where I would go for cinnamon-orange waffles or salmon quiche if I felt like a splurge.  I had brought the old orange chair to this room, and here it found another corner under another window where I contemplated more still.  I watched a lot of rain out of this window.

The next semester I went to Egypt for a Middle East studies program.  I had five roommates in my first apartment ever, on an island in the Nile in the middle of Cairo. We had three bedrooms between the six of us, and my roommate and I ended up in a room with far too many beds.  She had a bunk-bed for herself and I had an extremely lumpy double bed all to myself.  There was a balcony next to my bed, and I would open the shutters and step out, and Cairo stretched out in front of me.

When I came back to Chicago, my last roommate had graduated and my other friend and I were both back from our studies abroad, so I stayed on campus again, this time with her.  We stayed in the same dumpy building with roughly the same window view, but it was further up, so the perspective seemed fresher.  We had a wonderful lumpy old couch under this window, where we listened to music while we drank coffee (and sometimes forbidden wine of the extremely cheap variety because we were in college and didn’t know better). Another friend of ours lived across the hall, and when we would put on Counting Crows, she would drift over and onto the couch, where we handed her an already-poured cup of coffee.  We had decorated the room with bright pictures and fabrics, no doubt influence by our world travels.  We felt older and wiser, and this room was a sanctuary.

Our senior year she and I got a campus apartment where we had a room together, two new friends had the middle room, and the crazy girl from freshman year had the back room. (I must have been a little crazy myself to live with her again; I thought we were older and more mature and could work it out, but it turned out she was just older and crazier.)  Our bedroom window had little more than an alley view yet again (that’s life in Chicago), but the living room curved out at the front and had lovely windows angled three different ways.  You could just barely see the top of the Sears Tower, all the way downtown.  I watched a lot more rain out these windows, and once I heard bagpipes and looked out the window, where I saw a man across the street playing them on his porch.  When he was done, I and several others leaning out their windows clapped for him.  On the day the Iraq War started, I could hear someone on the block playing “War” through the window.  “What is it good for?  Absolutely nothing…”  And late one night I got a call from someone who said he was a friend of a friend and that he was stranded and he was outside of my apartment.  Ignoring the creepiness of the call, I looked out the window and first saw the man that I would marry years later.

When I finally graduated college, I got my first real (as in, had to find it myself and pay rent) apartment with my previously-mentioned two best friends.  We rented a condo in a high-rise on Belmont and Lake Shore Drive, and the only way we could afford it was to share one bedroom.  Fortunately, it was a large bedroom and we managed to fit a twin loft and a double bed in it.  I think our rich neighbors thought we had some kind of a lesbian brothel going on, and it didn’t help that we had a red Chinese lantern in our bedroom window.  All our windows faced south, with a breathtaking view of downtown Chicago, and if you craned your head to the left, you could see Lake Michigan.  This was by far the best view I’ve ever had.  I sat many nights (you guessed it, in the orange chair) looking at all the lights of the city.  Our friends would come over and we’d watch movies and have drinks and go up onto the roof to smoke, taking in the whole city and the lake stretching out forever.  Possibilities always seemed endless on the roof.

It was a sad day when both of my girls left Chicago and I had to go on without them.  I found another roommate, the sister of a friend, and we got a great two-bedroom apartment in Edgewater, on the northern edge of the city.  There was a sunroom on the front that was all windows, and it faced a quiet, tree-lined street full of similar brownstone apartment buildings.  There were shots outside our apartment one night and I watched some punk kids run down the street as I called the police.  We had a black kitten that liked to perch on the windowsill and stalk the pigeons that he couldn’t get through the screen.  The elevated tracks were right behind our building and you could watch the trains rumble by from the back porch, where I would sip espresso and write.

Then I got married, and my husband and I found an unbelievable deal on a tiny one-bedroom right on Clark Street in Andersonville.  The view was really only of a grocery store parking lot and a Kentucky Fried Chicken across the street, but you could climb from our fire escape onto the roof next door and look all the way down Clark Street.  We had great parties in this apartment that took place more on the roof than inside.  We lived there less than a year, and then we left Chicago.

We’ve been moving around ever since, traveling both in and out of the country, and there have been too many windows to remember.  The windows in our cabin in Alaska portray evergreens and mountains in every direction, often lit by a constant slanting sun.  There were shuttered windows in Guatemala that opened to the roaring Pacific, sixth-story windows in Ecuador with an amazing view of Cuenca’s cathedral, gossamer-curtained French doors that opened to the center of Paris.  There was a balcony above the Caribbean in Colombia, another above the Pacific in California.  There were steely New England winter skies outside Massachusetts windows, the smells of a Portuguese bakery wafting into New Jersey windows, views of a trash-strewn and watermarked New Orleans street.  There were all the panoramic views of North America rolling past our car windows, South America rolling past bus windows, Paris coming into view from a train window.  There are the well-trimmed lawn and picket fence outside the window of the room where we always stay at my in-laws’ house, and the old view out of my old room where we always stay at my parents’ house, the maple tree that I sometimes still climb and the driveway where our well-traveled car sits, resting before the next journey.