Of Crumbs and Crustaceans
Notes from the Red Sweater
My Substack buddies Andrew (
) and Morgan ( ) have probably found a cozy Substack café, noses so close they’re almost touching as they lean in to discuss, “She didn’t seriously skip out on moderating the flash fiction battle” murmurs Morgan.If anyone here is good at lip-reading, you might even catch Andrew saying, “I mean, she’s moving, but come on! Just pack it all up, sweep behind you, and you’re done, right?” And Morgan, ever so subtle, adds, “Don’t you think she’s milking it? Like... ‘poor me, I’m moving’ as a content strategy? I mean, she hasn’t added anything to our collaboration in over a week. A week, Andrew.” I imagine Andrew nodding in solemn agreement.
But, dear readers, I swear—this move has been endless. Just one last haul of gardening and cleaning, and it’s like their voices keep echoing through it all, reminding me that real life isn’t supposed to take this long.
Chapter 1: Taking a Break from the Move with Art (and Snails)
Amid the moving chaos, I managed to steal a moment for some impromptu art this week. Normally, my projects take a year or more, with endless weeks of obsessive fine-tuning. So when Hortense invited me to join her for a spontaneous art performance, it felt like a breath of fresh air.
We gathered one morning, each bringing our own peculiar setup to a roundabout for a performance Hortense called “La Commune Libre de L’archipel des Rond-Points”—“The Free Commune of the Archipelago of Roundabouts.” Or, as Hortense described it, “a roundabout that spins, swallows cars whole, and lets us throw the world into a new logic.”
I came equipped with about 15 snails in a white bucket, wearing my red sweater with the floppy wide collar, my red rain boots, and a little notebook. My role was simple: to observe and record everything—not just the snails’ movements but the entire stage around us. I watched as the snails lifted on the yellowish skirts of their bodies, secreting little trails before moving surprisingly fast once the whole machinery was ready to go.
In my periphery, Hortense waved a black flag, its shadow sweeping slowly across the rocks, while Tina’s drum pulsed with a surreal rhythm as she walked the large roundabout in “contre sense”. Dominique appeared in full costume—a glimmering silver crustacean, something between a lobster and a shrimp—scaling the rock wall where our performances were centered, his movements catching the corner of my eye as I scribbled down every detail. And then there was Antoine, stationed just above me on the stone wall where my snails explored, his voice low and steady, slipping into the air like another layer in our strange ritual.
My focus on the snails and the surreal scenes surrounding me created a strange solitude. It felt like we were truly on an island, shipwrecked in a sea where the speeding cars were a distant surface, an uncrossable limit. I was the scientist, engrossed in studying this new ecosystem, absorbing each snail’s minuscule moves to the beat of Tina’s drum.
When we finished, I gently released the snails into the crevices of the stone wall, which had served as our stage. I felt dazed, as if I’d been somewhere else entirely, unable to quite put together a sentence in this world after so many hours immersed in another.
Tina had baked an apple pie for my birthday, and we sat near our cars on surprisingly spikey stone pavement, drinking coffee out of thermoses and eating pie. I wiped the crumbs from my oversized sweater, hands still a little sticky.
At some point, Tina cracked up, suddenly remembering that, as a kid, she had kept a “Snail Journal.” She told us how, every day, she’d document what each snail had eaten and its precise position—each entry nearly identical to the last. We laughed about her “dedicated research,” and I glanced at my own notebook, thinking maybe I hadn’t strayed too far from her childhood obsession.
Chapter 2: Writing with Senses
After the morning performance, I felt my senses unusually heightened, my attention to detail so open and honed that I wanted to try and share this with my student—someone often very interior and reserved. Instead of drawing, we’d take a sketching session in writing using our senses, letting each observation exact into words.
We grabbed our notebooks and went to different spots around the neighborhood, sitting apart and choosing one element at a time to describe until there was nothing left to say. We would catalog one sense at time, and attempt to “epuise” this sense entirely. Still in my red sweater and rain boots from the morning, I settled in and began with the visual.
My student had chosen the graffiti on a nearby half-wall as her subject, while I focused on a man and woman in a car parked in the secluded lot. The windows were barely cracked, and the woman leaned forward slightly, her white-blond hair catching the light and creating a halo around her head. She seemed suspended, on the verge of moving closer. I watched, wondering if she’d lower her head, breaking that bright line of light around her hair. Would she dare?
Then, we moved to a new location and turned our focus to sound.
Sound proved to be unexpectedly complex. My goal was to capture just one, but each noise seemed layered into a single texture, blurring together. I honed in on the chiming bells from different clock towers, each falling in and out of rhythm as though they were calling across the neighborhood in staggered echoes. Another bell would answer, then another, and in between, I could faintly pick out the hum of distant traffic, even the river’s soft rush, merging almost like a color, deepening and filling the experience in a way that was impossible to separate.
After sound, we shifted to smell.
Smell required a different kind of attention; my student couldn’t smell anything right away. I suggested she take a big gulp of it, to really pay attention. After a moment, she nodded, saying, “Yes, now I can smell all the green!” I could smell it, too—the river’s slightly mossy scent, dank but healthy. It mingled with the sharper, sweeter smell of fallen leaves, their decay carrying a tangy, almost fruity edge.
As we wrapped up, we each chose one element from the day’s observations and tried to build a scene around it. I began writing about the hidden, suspicious couple, imagining a man who came to this secluded parking lot seeking solitude, a quiet respite from his dreary life.
By the time we finished, I was totally absorbed, writing quickly, as though each sound, smell, and sight from the day had unlocked something. The simple act of noticing and recording had somehow deepened each moment, giving weight to what we usually overlook. It was a quiet ritual of paying attention.
Chapter 3: Pizza Wars in the New Neighborhood
A few days later after Aymeric and his son spent the entire day dismantling my enormous etching press, we decided to celebrate with a walk to “Happy Pizza.” Fog clung to the street, blurring the edges of the lights as we waited, a little worn out and eager for a decent meal.
Under the streetlights, my older son came walking back with the pizzas, his expression a mix of bewilderment and apology. He looked up at us, holding four tiny boxes—each pizza absurdly small, laughable compared to what we’d expected for the 50 euros we’d paid.
I decided to question the owner, after we compared the website to the crumbled receipt my son was holding. Politely, I smilingly revealed my utter disappointment in the pizzas, and the owner announced that it was simply too expensive to update his site. I suggested that he might update the website menu with a quick photo, just to show the correct prices. He frowned, saying, “That’s not professional.” I pointed out that having two-year-old prices listed seemed far less professional, and that’s when the tension escalated.
The owner slammed the 50-euro note on the counter, daring us to take it and go. He demanded that we take our pizzas as well, since they would just land in the garbage. Aymeric, trying to salvage the situation, suggested we simply pay the advertised prices instead. But the owner was too angry to listen.
We took the pizzas, feeling a mix of rebellion and relief.
Back home, with three hungry teenage boys, a young girl, and two adults, dinner quickly degenerated into an act straight out of Lord of the Flies. It became a survival scene as our respective civilized children, devolved in front of our eyes. Everyone scrambled for slices, balancing plates on every available surface, laughing at the absurdity of our miniature pizzas. It was a meal to remember, half for the ridiculousness, half for the fact that, inevitably, we were all still starving afterward. The pizzas were pretty good, but, since the dough wasn’t made of solid gold, they just didn’t merit the price we narrowly averted paying.
Chapter 4: Settling into a New World
This new neighborhood, barely a few kilometers from the old house, might as well be a whole other universe. Early one morning, I went out to explore. Fog lingered low over the narrow streets, and just ahead, I saw a man still in his black silk robe, moving as if he were still drunk from the night before, ambling across the road toward an open window across from him. I caught a glimpse of someone’s elbow resting on the windowsill inside, and I imagined they were brothers, having moved across the street from one another just to be able to talk through their windows.
Then I imagined that this whole neighborhood had once belonged to their grandparents—maybe a farm or a manor, back before it was divided into separate homes.
Days later, our house was buzzing. My eldest son had invited his two Arthurs, while my younger son had invited Raphael—legendary names, right? The place filled with that restless teenage energy that’s somehow both chaotic and comforting.
Snacks and bits of conversation were like trails, along with the splattered remnants of pasta carbonara on the tile stairs. Screams from the rooms upstairs had me periodically wondering whether I needed to get involved or if it was just wild fun being had.
One image I won’t forget: Raphael, my younger son’s friend, sweetly waving at me from down the long corridor to the back bedroom as the door swung closed. “Is everybody ok up there?”
That night, the house was alive with the sounds of the sleepover upstairs—faraway whelps and shouts echoing through our new home. In my own quiet little universe, I sat at my new window desk, looking out over the tree-filled parking lot as fog curled around the streetlights, transforming them into soft, smoking orbs. The story of the man in his car drummed through my mind, rhythmic and steady, like Tina’s tambour the other day.
Cozy in my red sweater with its large, floppy collar, I began typing a short passage for the project with Morgan, imagining him and Andrew in their café, exchanging smug glances and subtle sighs, thinking, “Finally, she wrote something.” I could almost hear them remarking on each delay, shaking their heads at the pizza drama, or sighing over the quiet moments I’d lost myself in throughout the move.
I paused to take a sip of my beer, looking back out the window. The fog, the streetlights, and the hum of voices from down the hall, all felt like the start of something—a new world and its future stories to unfurl1. I thought about the changes, about everything we’d accomplished in these past weeks, feeling a quiet joy in our new home. In just two days, my dad and stepmom would arrive, bringing their practical magic, ready to help me with this final sprint to turn the page on an entire era.
Then, something caught my eye, I glanced down at the loose collar of my red sweater, and I saw, as if waiting there for me, a single perfect slice of apple left from my birthday pie. And do you know what I did?
If you’d like to see the whole roundabout performance video, here is the link:
I try to make Amy cringe, slipping this despised word in wherever I can.
i was so enthralled in this, I couldn't stop scrolling. congrats on winning the pizza war.
Hurrah to new beginnings in your new home. Enjoy your time with your folks. 🤗