The Sidewalk Artist

Chapter One This story begins with the rain What truly moves Tulia is not the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame Cathedral or any of the wonderful sights. It is the little things. A windowsill with a pot of geraniums and a glimpse of lace curtain, the way the sun glances off a puddle, the echo of her heels as she walks down a narrow cobblestone street, the taste of coffee at an outdoor cafe, the sound of children calling out to each other in French. And this, this brief moment of rain, a sun shower. Sunlight spinning raindrops into gold. She raises her face to the blue sky, and the drops are cool against her skin. For her, rain has always held the memory of sadness, of lossalthough she has never been able to determine why, or what it is she remembers. The shower is over almost as soon as it starts, but its clean scent lingers in the air, and the sense of sadness is replaced by an equally mysterious sense of promise and renewal. She closes her eyes, the sun drying the raindrops like tears on her cheeks. She stores this moment close to her heart to bring out again on a gray autumn day in New York. This sprinkle of rain like a blessing. Chapter Two Smoke rings like afternoon halos She almost missed the angels. She doesn't know how. But they are there when she opens her eyes. Cool and unruffled beneath the dappled shade of a sycamore, untouched by this short burst of rain, the angels surprise her. She would not expect them here among the vendors with their displays of T-shirts, postcards, and miniature Eiffel Towers. The angels are enough to make her forget her aching feet and the gingko tree she just fell in love with in the botanical gardens. She has seen gingkos before but not one so magnificent, and she wishes not for the first time that her claim to a garden was more than a few pots on a concrete balcony. Not that she has the hundred years it takes to grow a tree so grand, but to start one from a little seedling would be quite a legacy. Instead she will content herself with the pods of seeds she gathered from the garden's poppies in coral shades of pink, orange, and yellow. Already she can picture them, blooming among her cherry tomatoes and geraniums. Will she be allowed to take the seeds through customs? She wonders what harm could come if she did. Unleash a plague of poppies on New York? Hardly the thing disaster films are made of. She loves Paris. With its wide tree-lined avenues, narrow streets of cobblestones, and parks and gardens, it is extremely walkableand without the tall buildings of Manhattan, one can see the sky. She has come to like New York, her adopted city, but Paris has a less claustrophobic feelinga sense that its link with the countryside has not been completely severed. Until the sun shower, until the angels, she was looking for a bench where she could rest. She needed to decide whether to continue to the Louvre as planned or go back to the hotel and change her shoes. The cream-colored, square-heeled 1930s-style Mary Janesan impulsive purchase the day before near the place Vendomewere not made for hours of sightseeing. Ethan, for whom appearances are everything, would tell her to work through the pain as if she were running a marathon, but Tulia prefers comfortable shoesand she thinks this is another difference between them that is irreconcilable. The angels are familiar. Chins resting on plump hands, they look pensively toward an ochre-colored heaven. She stares at them again, reconsidering. Maybe pensively is the wrong word. Perhaps it should be contritely. With their mussed hair, it is possible these little angels have been up to no good. This is no ordinarBuonaguro, Gina is the author of 'The Sidewalk Artist', published 2008 under ISBN 9780312378059 and ISBN 031237805X.