changing and unchanging things

This evening, between the aleatoric raindrops, we scootered to the Musée Marmottan for a nocturne musicale - a musical evening - to celebrate women painters at the time of Proust. Amid the many Monets downstairs, we listened to the trinity of vocalists singing Fauré against the rain outside.

The museum is near La Muette, a neighborhood so named because of the hunting lodge where King Henry IV would bring his falcons every year to molt, muer, to shed their feathers. Listening to the unintentional duet of music and weather, I wondered what the opposite of molting would be. Doctors tell us that our bodies change every seven years and physicists say that atomic particles are moving at the speed of three billion something per second. But the heart, on the contrary, retains and accumulates everything, layer upon layer growing around everything it remembers - as in the creation of a pearl, when a mollusk grows successive and overlapping layers of nacre around a foreign object which has transformed its soft tissue.

My heart grew an annual ring, another layer of love last night. Post concert and post rain, we picniced at the Pont des Arts, in the same spot where my past successive Parisian years celebrated enormous changes.

Happy Anniversary, GL