To me, the French café used to feel impossibly exotic. The rich shots of coffee, flaky pastries, slices of baguette, and cultured butter were miles away from the Yuban and white bread of my childhood. I still love cafés, but these days I’m no stranger to good coffee — better than you get in a typical Parisian café, if you ask me — and bakeries turning out decent bread can be found in most big American cities. I regularly buy cultured butter at my neighborhood co-op.

Still, traditional French cafés fascinate me…

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It’s a cliche: smell evokes memory. As profoundly as I know this, it’s something I forget until confronted with a scent that brings back a past world. The smell of warm, dry pine needles reminds me of growing up in rural Northern California. On boarding an airplane, it only takes a whiff of its fetid warmth to call up the hum of jet engines to come. I forget all about the satisfaction of a bowl of spaghetti until I get a hit of oregano, tomatoes and steamy pasta water.

For the past four years, I’ve been lucky enough to housesit for a Parisian friend in August. Yesterday I stumbled, zombie-like, from a seemingly endless flight into the RER, and an inhale later, it was as if I’d never left Paris…

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