The Agents Immobiliers Can Wait

The view is entirely different now, though the gray, as it happens, is exactly the same.

The apartment on Ile Saint Louis - and the elusive agents immobiliers we argued with for months - have receded into the blurry mental space reserved for unfinished things. 

We were so close this time finding our Parisian pied-a-terre. It was a small glass-roofed studio in an inner courtyard of a 17th century mansion, just steps from the Seine, where the noon light fell straight down through the panes and made you feel as if you would be living inside a lantern in the very heart of Paris. 

We had practically measured the walls for books.

But the dream of that apartment did not end just because of a failed negotiation. It dissolved the moment the phone rang on a Tuesday morning, pulling us twelve hundred kilometers north to this corner of Jutland.

Now we are in Strandby - in the house belonging to Rita's mother. She is ninety-five, and she lives here alone - or she did, until a few days ago when we moved our bags into the spare room.

Instead of the faint, crackling warmth of a morning baguette from our local baker, our days are started by the low, rhythmic thrum of fishing boats clearing the harbor pier in the early gray hours. 

The background noise of our evenings is no longer the multi-lingual chatter coming in our window from people climbing the steep staircase leading to Sacre-Coeur. It is the soft rain, and the silence of the house and the harbor at the end of the street.

Ninety-five is an immense, quiet number. It is nearly an entire century lived with a distinct Nordic stoicism that mirrors the coastline outside her door. But lately, the house has begun to feel too large for her, or perhaps she is becoming too small for it. The stairs have grown steep and risky, the corridors hold too much silence, and a woman cannot live on independence alone, no matter how fiercely she guards it.

This afternoon, while Rita was upstairs sorting through decades of linen, I sat in the kitchen with her mother. The house smells of damp wool and the patient, slow dust of a life lived in one place. I poured us both coffee. No ceremony, no grand conversation. Just the grey light flat against the kitchen tiles.

I thought briefly about that studio in Paris - about how the rain right now might be rattling  against its glass roof, how the reflections on the surface of the Seine would be moving beneath the steep stone wall of the quai. We are good at constructing these futures for ourselves, Rita and I. Very good at it, actually.

Here, in this big house in Strandby, there is only a ninety-five-year-old woman navigating the evening length of her own living room, and an industrial fishing harbor that does not care about Parisian sentimentality.

But sitting here, watching the rain against the window, it feels as though we have ended up, for the time being, exactly where we were supposed to be. 

The agents immobiliers can wait for a while. They are very good at that.