January 27, 2025

Good morning!

It’s Monday. Over the weekend, I found a street sale a few blocks from us and thought it would be fun to see what counts as “used” when you’re in a country that’s 1,500 years old.

They call these kinds of sales “vide greniers,” which literally translates as “empty granaries,” referring to the days when people had grain lofts in their barns. Now “grenier” suggests a plain old attic—but very few people have attic storage in Paris either. If you’re lucky you’ll have a small basement storage unit called a “cave,” which gets pronounced with a long and leisurely “aaahhhhh” as if it were an elegant thing to possess when, in fact, they tend to be small and dark and occasionally mildewed and prone to flooding.

In the end, the vide grenier was reminiscent of a yard sale, but without the yard. Or similar to a garage sale, though there was no garage either. It was your usual collection of quirky people selling a fascinating assortment of objects, from fur coats and cassette tapes to hand-cranked coffee grinders and some very old plates that were in immaculate condition because the woman who originally received them as a wedding present thought they were too nice to use.

Two of those plates came home with me, under the condition that I use them every day. I promised I would, and I will.

“Funny how the new things are the old things.”

—Rudyard Kipling

Onwards,

Clara