Paris in Cleveland (Bellamy)

My husband and I planned to go to France this summer with close friends. We all did what people do: We made reservations and checked our passport expiration dates. We signed up for Global Entry, bemoaned our faded conversational French, and waited to pounce on luggage closeouts at TJ Maxx.

Then, two arrivals coincided. The pandemic was one of them. Shortly thereafter, our Paris travel companions drove a rental car to Cleveland after a Midwestern business trip, rather than fly home to Florida. Coronavirus was on the rise. We offered to host them for an open-ended stay, depending on how the pandemic faded or unfolded. Travel plans moved from April into May and, before anyone knew it, slid into June and now July.

Soon, it became apparent there would be no trip to Paris this summer. We all worked from home—food writing, preparing grant applications, editing music for online church services, and doing telemedicine. Somewhere along the line, we started imagining we were at a bed and breakfast, maybe even one in France.

We now breakfast on the front porch, as if it were a sidewalk café. We recreate meals that Peter Mayle wrote about, and drink rosé wine with lunch when we feel like it. We snap cell phone photos of our dinners and inflict them on friends. Front porch happy hour observations are equal parts people watching and classic cocktails.

We distract ourselves with theme dinners—ideas like only red-and-white foods, or foods that all start with the letter P as in pandemic. We bake crusty bread and make cream puffs. Sometimes we sing cabaret songs at night with piano and violin accompaniment.

On the afternoon we were scheduled to arrive in Paris, we had lemon crepes with berries, and our dinner was an amalgam of recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child and Simone Beck, and ideas from Georgeanne Brennan’s France: The Vegetarian Table. We imagined we were in France. We sipped flutes of Champagne out on the porch. We wore masks.

Gail Bellamy is a food editor and former Cleveland Heights poet laureate. Her books include Cleveland Food Memories, Cleveland Christmas Memories, Cleveland Summertime Memories (Gray & Co.), Design Spirits, and two poetry collections. She co-authored The Vegetable Storybook with Vicki Draeger; their Spanish language novella is forthcoming from Teacher’s Discovery.