Walking Down the Eiffel Tower
A summer day tinged with iron
I have a photograph taken from the ground pointing up at the great gray mass of the Eiffel Tower, shortly before my dad and I took the elevator up it in July 2006, then walked back down.
I was eighteen years old, on my first trip to Europe, and indeed on my first trip outside of the United States. Before Paris, we had rented a car and traveled the length and breadth of the U.K. in seven days.
I fought off a cold and now I was fighting off the depression and homesickness I had battled my whole freshman year of college in Philadelphia.
But Paris — it was full of the grand monuments that I adored, and nothing was grander than the Eiffel Tower. What was more exciting than to take the elevator up and stand at the viewing deck looking down at the city spread out below?
At the time these photographs were taken, when we chose to forgo the elevator on the way down and take the stairs instead, I only knew I was looking at something that snatched my breath away.
Now, twenty years later, I know much more about the Eiffel Tower than I did then.
