FICTION

Our Summer with Grandmere and Grandpere in Toulouse

The City of Violets

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Unsplash, young woman walking near the Canal de Brienne, Toulouse, France, during daytime, Paul Melki, 2020

One day in early June just after our junior year, we abandoned our stuff to a storage facility and flew from Philadelphia to Toronto to Madrid to Toulouse.

Why we had to go west and north before heading east made no sense, but that route offered the best fare we could find, and there are no direct flights from Philly to Toulouse, not even now. And not from New York either.

There was a more appealing flight from Newark that only made a single stop in Lisbon but we saved money by leaving from Philly. Anyway, I kept telling Miranda it was faster than flying from LAX to Toulouse, which my family did every year, also incorporating two stops along the way.

There had also been the possibility of flying direct to Paris and spending a few days there, then taking a train to Toulouse, but we had both been in Paris the year before. My parents, Pierre and Jayne, would be with us in Toulouse for the first two weeks of July and I knew Mom would be a good buffer between the grumpy grandparents and us.

My grandparents’ house was on the outskirts of the city. It was a simple two-story pink brick structure with pale blue wooden shutters and a matching periwinkle front door. Inside were two bedrooms, a…

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Elizabeth Sobieski
Elizabeth Sobieski

Written by Elizabeth Sobieski

Elizabeth Sobieski @TheMaskedHatter on Instagram, has written for various publications and is the author of “The Masked Hatter-Pandemic Style", Penser Press.