Packing was hard. Outside, the ice storm had passed, and the Georgia January sky was balmy blue. I was wearing a tank top, and I was trying to force wool sweaters into a suitcase originally bought to hold bathing suits and sunscreen. I had been lured into graduate studies in French via Tahiti-French Polynesia and had been doing just fine with the South Pacific thing until I made the mistake of leaping at my university’s offer of a year in Paris. They didn’t warn me about the weather, it goes without saying.

Imagining you share a language with the British can be a perilous thing. Growing up, I had assumed “sunny France” to be, well, sunny. No one had explained to me that British authors described France as sunny because they had glimpsed blue sky there a couple of times during the Hundred Years War. Therefore, on my first trip I had wasted a great deal of space on things like short-sleeve shirts and other items you could bring out in Paris only one month a year. For a while there, I’d thought that dating Sébastien had cured the weather, but then I’d spent the Fourteenth of July freezing my tail off while we tried to watch the fireworks with his friends on the Champs de Mars. Trust me, five adults in sweaters and jackets huddling together for warmth is not something you’d see at a Fourth of July celebration in Georgia.

“Everyone told me the weather here got nice in May!” I wailed, shivering madly as blue, white, and red flares went up behind the Eiffel Tower. Although our two countries share the same patriotic colors, the French refer to theirs always as the bleu, blanc, et rouge, exactly the opposite order of our red, white, and blue.

“It does,” Éric had answered, offended. “But this is July now. We’ll start to get more and more cold nights.”

“Anyway, it’s America’s fault for not signing the Kyoto Treaty,” Virginie said. “We never used to have such bad weather. The Gulf Stream is moving.”

I could never complain about anything French without the French pointing out how it was my fault.

“You know, you wouldn’t complain so much about the cold and rain if you’d dress properly,” Valérie had once said to me, around the first week of October when any normal country would have brisk, balmy, clear blue days. That had been at the start of my first year, and therefore my first winter, in Paris.

“What are you talking about? I’m wearing a jacket and gloves, inside, at my desk, and I’m still freezing.”

“You call that a jacket?”

“You don’t?” I clutched it, alarmed. I had been there only five weeks by then, and I kept hoping this extraordinary cold spell would snap.