Édition No. 1

“Je suis Française,” my teacher had said. Even though she looked like me. This was day one at Alliance Française de Dallas, after a 18-year hiatus from taking French, my last class in the spring of 2001. I found myself looking at a whiteboard staring at familiar words again. A few months before that I stood in my office and watched Notre Dame burning in the heart of Paris at Ground Zero.

This started my crawl back into the language, one that I had never really grasped. I simply wrote down what was on my mind at the time, a few ramblings and thoughts. Some trips were planned and one was made in the Winter of 2019 to Brussels and Paris. Another was skirted when the world shut down due to Covid-19.

I would eventually return when things started opening up, to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude's posthumous work, the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in the Fall of 2021. And I'd make my way north to the shores of Normandy and see the landscapes of my youth, the ones imagined on pages in books.

I continued on with classes through 2022 and took a break. French Crawl didn't exist yet, but the seeds had been sown.