Originally published on August 3, 2016. I’m re-publishing posts I’d had on this blog that, due to some glitch of the internet, got scrubbed. No editing has been done.

Paris is beautiful. It’s wonderful, romantic, exciting, and delicious. It’s also really hard.

I didn’t expect that. I’ve been to Paris several times before. When Mike and I planned this trip, Paris was a city we felt like we should see, but we didn’t make any serious plans for our four days here. We would wander around, see a few museums, and then grab our train south.

But my past trips here are haunting me. I wander along the tree-lined boulevards, and I can’t help remembering why I first came here. It was because of my grandmother. Gommie.

Young Katie was foolish, full of ideas, and in love with Claude Monet. I had read a book called Linnea in Monet’s Garden, and I fell hard for the artist. I got it stuck in my head that I had to see his famous gardens in Giverny, France.

For Christmas, I asked for three tickets to Paris. I can’t believe how presumptuous I must have seemed, asking for international tickets… I suspect I was young enough to not understand what I was asking, and just old enough to think it would never happen.

Gommie got us four tickets to Paris. We were going to see Monet’s gardens, and she was coming with us.

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When your grandparents start to age – really age – you begin to hoard memories. Every conversation, joke, and lesson is heartbreaking and important. Some memories just disappear, and you hate your own brain for not crystallizing every conversation in amber. Everyone goes through it, everyone says it, but you never listen until it’s happening to you.

I recall so little of that first trip to Paris with Gommie, my mother, and John. Decades later, I only have fragments of memory left.

These fragments – smells, tastes, feelings – were fossilized in these Parisian streets. And now, with Gommie in my heart every day, rediscovering these moments is the best kind of pain.

I walk past a patisserie and the smell of rich, French butter takes me to Portlabd. A whirring mixer is the soundtrack of home. I think about the St. Honore croissants Gommie delicately dissected in her lap every morning. Now, when she’s barely willing to eat, she’ll still polish off eclairs and soft French pastries.

On that first trip, we discovered an open air market where Gommie marveled over the quirky bric a brac you only find along the edges of flea market tables. These little characters and figurines live all over our home like a menagerie of the bizarre. Not the cloying porcelain figures you find trapped in glass cabinets. She loved the oddballs. Tiny bronze animals with their ears chipped off. Half-formed clay characters. Egg cups with duck feet.

Being in Paris now, I feel a compulsion to find the same market, to buy the perfect little character for her. Like Gommie will somehow feel me retracing our decades-old footsteps. Like finding the perfect trinket will make her better again. Like any tangible object can give us all the intangible we miss.

When Mike and I visited The Louvre, we began in the gift shop. We chose three postcards for each other of paintings or sculptures in the museum. We allotted ourselves an hour and a half, and we competed to find out three postcards in the museum.

We had the great time racing through the countless marbled halls. I didn’t stroll. I didn’t pretend to understand 17th century paintings. I had a mission. I hustled. I hunted for my postcards, and I let the other art catch me by surprise. I’d turn a corner looking for Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and a Babylonian statue would stop me in my tracks.

Once we were finished (I won), Mike asked where I had come up with the postcard challenge. The idea wasn’t mine – it was hers. When I first visited The Louvre, Gommie told John and me to pick out a postcard, and find it in the museum. We had a blast then, too.

In my Parisian pastry class, I alone licked the croissant dough and pastry cream off my fingers. Gommie always hated when chefs on cooking shows refused to taste their own food. It’s why she always loved Julia Child, who would constantly sample her creations.

I see crow feathers along park paths, and I notch them into my ponytail for a few days. I’m trying to channel Gommie, who picked up every feather she found, tucked it behind her ear, and then stored them all in cups around the house.

I say that I’m honoring her when I retrace the footsteps of that trip now. But I’m trying to bring her back. I’m trying selfishly to give myself one more perfect day, week, month with the smart, sharp, force that my grandmother was even three years ago.

My heart desperately lies to me and tells me if I can find the right trinket – the right quirky tin animal, the perfect little character – I can bring her back.

I can wear feathers in my hair. I can eat the city’s best eclairs. I can return to Monet’s Garden, again and again. But I can’t do more.

My actions are the truest form of loving, stupid folly. Aging is the most tragic phenomenon because it’s the most natural and the most inevitable.

Someday I will get past this body aching pain to see just the beauty in what Gommie gave me all those years ago. She saw my passion, and she showed me it had value. Like she has done for so many children before me and after, she validated my curiosity and let me follow it.

I can’t see the bigger picture right now. Yet even now I understand Gommie’s influence extends beyond the superficial. I may wear the crow feathers, soft scarves, men’s shirts and gold jewelry. I may taste test while I cook, and I already have a menagerie of my own.

But I’m in Paris now – on a crazy four month adventure, writing, speaking new languages, meeting new people – walking along tree-lined streets, making croissants of my own – because of Gommie too. Because of those four tickets.