Letters To Stina

Kære Stina,

This morning was cold and foggy like you wouldn’t believe. It would have been the perfect morning to commit a murder or even an entire invasion—I couldn’t see the end of the sidewalk when I was walking to school. You could have gotten away with anything, disappearing into the grey silence. The good thing about foggy mornings, though, is that those are the kinds that leave you with the sunsets where the sun looks like an egg yolk in the sky.

Brief history lesson: During World War II, the city was completely shelled, for good reason. It’s a major port, with train tracks and boats and factories, and plus it would have been easy to fly planes across the Channel from pretty much anywhere on the coast. That, of course, couldn’t happen. So it was flattened. Thus, this isn’t really the prettiest city—in fact, people make jokes about it being the ugliest, because they had to rebuild the whole thing, and post-war architecture was not kind to the retinas.

Yes, there are parts that are not that great, and no, everything is not charmingly historical. But I think that once you start walking around it, you can find a very rough beauty in it. I have never more regretted not being a mermaid.

Emily Windsnap, I envy you.

Plus, since it’s right on the coast, the sunsets are absolutely gorgeous.

The city is full of little port-things. I don’t know quite what to call them in English, but the French word is bassin. They’re rectangles of water. Thus, even though the Channel is about a twenty-minute walk away, you can always find water. The bassins have signs saying no bathing allowed, but of course lots of people do. On hot days, it smells like something between the Anacostia and the Atlantic. Like salt and industry, maybe? It’s not a horrible smell, but not refreshing either. I don’t know if I could be tempted to jump in. It makes me wish I were doing crew, though.

Is mum still going through her Sail phase? If so, she would find plenty to shout about here.

SAIL!

Lots of the flowers are the same. There’s quite a lot of Butterfly Bush, and Queen Anne’s Lace as well.

You’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky / As we walk in fields of gold

Since we’re near the water, there aren’t really all that many trees that grow on their own. There are trees, just they’ve been planted in perfectly straight lines. I don’t fully understand why—just scatter the seeds around and they’ll grow if they want to, or plant saplings at random. None of this militaristic precision. I don’t understand it. I’ll put pictures in the next letter or maybe the one after.

Love,
l.de caps

Profound comment about the futility of restraining nature