"As soon as it gets a little warm, everyone is howling 'heat wave, heat wave'" a friend expounds.  "and the Meteo reports any thunder and lightning as a major storm.  This is just summer weather."

We seek relief from all these extremes at the garden near our house.  Three blocks from our apartment there is no traffic, no weather forecasters and nobody trying to sell us something.

All is quiet, except for the bandstand, occasional home to a musical group.  This particular day it is a rather irritating rock band, but the older folks are planted, like the trees, apparently listening. I'll bet their hearing aids are turned off.

Sometimes I think I have painted every corner of the Luxembourg Gardens.  Those I haven't painted; Blair has.  While he sketched the ponies (I avoid them, because they confound my idea of horse anatomy), I tried to paint the apple trees.  The apples are already in their white cotton sacs, to ward off pesky birds.  The sun is too hot to let me finish the picture -- I'll finish it at home.

My favorite part of the park is the bee hives.  These industrious fellows sparkle white in the sunshine as they fly to and from their honey-colored wooden hives.  The have a dribbly fountain to drink from, made of copper like the roofs of their hives.  I haven't seen any bee-handlers around this year, and wonder if the course in apiculture has been discontinued.  I would like to don the white suit and carry the smoker myself.

There is an exposition of photos by "journalists without frontiers" hung around the outside of the Luxembourg Gardens on Sorbonne side.  4 x 6 foot images, some startling, illustrate world events since the late 1960s.  Children playing, children starving in Africa; protesters in Peking and in Paris; a young boy manning a gun in the desert; a young American girl offering a flower to a National guardsman.  I am ashamed to find the composition and art so compelling when the message is lethal.

A park policeman blows his whistle as two girls try to peddle their bikes through the park.  Interdit.

We set up our table, and eat barbecue cooked in our fireplace (a "pill" in our building has put the kibosh on the Weber).  Passersby wish us "bon appetit".

Beneath the dappling light of the chestnut trees my painting develops.  A soft summer breeze blows warmly across my legs to remind me how great it is to have summer in the city.




Laurie (painting and text) and Blair PESSEMIER
Bees in the Luxembourg Gardens  acrylic on canvas  9.5 x 12 inches