(nuit blanche)

I wrote a post a few years ago about Nuit Blanche--a night in Paris when the museums and cafés and metro stations stay open all night and the citizens stay out until dawn. The term literally means "white night," referring to the lack of darkness during the customarily universal down-time. It can also refer to what we know as an "all-nighter," that miserable institution of the remorseful college student scrambling to get that paper finished before morning.

Last night Sandra and I enjoyed a different, and my personal favorite, take on nuit blanche. After an unexpectedly lovely evening with a couple other assistants, we moseyed home and somehow just ended up never going to sleep. Instead, we colored pictures, listened to music, watched the daylight savings kick in on the computer clock, read some borrowed Yeats, laughed about the preceding evening and made ridiculous jokes that could only resonate with minds alert beyond their usual boundaries. Then somehow it was 4:30 and it seemed only reasonable to wait for sunrise. The last hour of consciousness, between 5:30 and 6:30, was a bit zombie-fying, but we made it and marched up to one of the lookout spots in town (obvious advantage to living in a town on a hill) to wait for the sun. Best idea yet. I'm sure we looked a bit ridiculous to the couple of cars that passed us--two girls with their backs to the road, palms to ears, doing aerobic steps back and forth to keep warm. We stood there for an hour, until all the streetlights had switched off and the birds had simmered down, until the sleeping cat in the flower pot below us stretched awake and cows appeared on a near hillside to graze. Eventually we headed back home, trying not to feel unsettled by the awareness that our morning escapade was made possible by the fact that we are, in fact, all hurtling through space and spinning. By 7:30 we were quite ready for a hot chocolate, if less ready for bed than we'd anticipated :)