March 8, Saint-Ismier.
Isabelle and I could be sisters, we share a childhood that was lucky enough to sometimes be full of hidden wonders.
We grew up together, she a year older than I, our parents close friends, in Vence. Now settled in Nice she hosted us, the kids and I, and with her four-year-old son, Amssane, they made a killing trio.
Isabelle, her older sister Sophie and I were a girls' trio growing up, in each other's stuff and each other's lives, secretly in love with hero of our favorite TV series, and later, in our adolescent years, a summer in the coolness of Isabelle's room listening to a radio program, the life of Elvis unfolding each afternoon and I can still hear the melody of the announcer's voice, listening to the same records too, vinyl back then, up to our shared years in Paris.
With Sophie the ties had grown looser, and I have never met any of her two kids, now teens themselves.
Their parents in the same house, still, cavernous spaces of art collectors, the dark staircase, treacherous, the tight rooms, the smell of waxed wood, the posters on Zaza's wall, the sunshine outside. Our house was airy and light, and they never visited, a pattern that has continued through the years, and even now, with this visit.
In the small village garden of her parents' house there is a tiny stone building below the patio with on one side a workshop and on the other a room where we dreamed up our magical universe as little girls, a room of our own, a room that is magic itself. It is a room you do not enter if you've outgrown it, or the loss of its wonders would scrape you raw and leave you bereft of all that's cherished about childhood.
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