Butter in the Air
A Small Moment
from My Paris Travel Journal
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” Oscar Wilde.
It’s one of my favorite quotes about travel and journaling.
Whether you’ve kept travel journals for years or are just beginning the practice, I suspect you understand what Mr. Wilde meant. A journal doesn’t simply record a trip — it gives you a way to return to it.
Over the years, my travel journals have become treasured companions. They hold memories in ways that scrolling through photos on a phone simply can’t.
Inside their pages, I tuck bits of the journey itself — pages torn from guidebooks, museum tickets, playbills, the occasional café receipt or take-out menu. Between those small artifacts, I jot down fragments of the moment.
Sometimes just a single line.
Like this one, written during my trip to Paris on a rainy spring morning:
“The air smells like butter.”
When I read that line now, months later, the entire morning returns.
It was raining — the kind of steady Paris rain that seems to soften the whole city. It was my last morning in the Montmartre apartment I had rented before meeting my tour group later that afternoon. There was a small shop I had read about before leaving home, and I was determined to visit before I left the neighborhood.
So I waited for a small break in the rain, grabbed my beret (oui!) and my raincoat, and dashed out the door.
The shop was called L’Objet Qui Parle. Do you know it?
Inside, I found the most wonderful assortment of vintage curiosities — plaster Madonna statues, long-forgotten oil paintings, rusty skeleton keys, stacks of antique linens, even a few slightly creepy old puppets. The proprietress was charming, and we spent nearly an hour chatting, mostly in French, about the stories behind the objects in her shop.
By the time I left, I was carrying two paper grocery bags filled with small treasures.
Merveilleux.
Thank goodness for the roomy suitcase I had brought along.
As I walked home through the rain, something made me stop in the middle of the street.
I looked around for the boulangerie that had to be nearby.
Surely I had just passed it.
But there wasn’t a bakery in sight.
And yet the air was rich with the scent of warm butter.
Standing there alone on the wet street, I said out loud, “The air smells like butter.”
I shook my head, laughed a little to myself, and continued walking home, thinking:
Oh Paris, you are a wonder.
Months later, that entire morning — the rain, the shop, the conversation, the smell of butter drifting through the street — returns to me in vivid detail.
All because I wrote down a single sentence in my journal.
The air smells like butter.
Sensational, indeed.
Sometimes a single sentence written in the moment is enough to carry an entire memory forward.
