La Seine

This is an excerpt from chapter ten of Screen Saver.

"The Seine was a being. It had personality. In the spring it was high and brown; in the summer it was more subdued, still brown. In the winter it was high and brown and intertwined with an occasional maelstrom of seagulls all whirling and chanting their raspy calls to the waves. In the autumn it was a shattered mirror of infinite glinting flashes; it was bounded by the brilliant yellow poplars wandering its banks. It was the home for an endlessly interesting parade of barges and boats. There were the working barges thrusting themselves furiously against the current, laden with gravel for some upstream dumping point. There were the barges that had become homes for river dwelling Parisians. Although those barges floated, they never left their mooring; they clustered instead at points along the river, where the cobblestone riverside quays widened enough to allow pedestrian access and traffic. These tiny water-borne sub-arrondissments were bedecked with tomato and pepper plants in the summer, cascading chrysanthemums in the fall and Christmas trees in December. "