I write a lot and often about my months in France, but I neglect to talk about what happens when that time is up. The transition back to my life in New York happens often enough, and it is not always easy.

After being away for three months, I feel guilty that we were gone the entire summer, leaving our home for that long. I miss my French routines of slow mornings when the US is still asleep, and waking up to fewer messages and emails. Coming back to New York, I feel like all the stuff in our apartment is superfluous. I can live on less, and do, while we’re away. Why do I need so much here? I just want to throw everything away.

In Provence, I can turn a crank and open the window. The chorus of cicadas pours in. Immediately the room fills with the scent of dried herbs and lavender. In New York, the windows stay closed. I hear voices from the street. Sirens from blocks away. Construction machines erecting bigger and bigger buildings while the rest of the city just looks up.

This week, I am not doing much about any of it. The suitcases have been emptied, but there are still piles that need to be put away. I’ve come home enough times, though, to know the cicadas fade. The sirens become part of the background noise and you stop noticing them. In a few weeks, we’ll have seen all of our friends and gone back to the restaurants we’ve missed, and the apartment will stop feeling like too much and start feeling like home again. Knowing all this lets me be useless for a few more days. I’m not going to panic about it.

For now, I’ll continue to unpack and get organized. I’ll be social when I want to be. I’ll let the sounds of the city embrace me and welcome me home.

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I gave my paid Substack tier some advice this summer to not buy what you love when sourcing. It’s one of the biggest mistakes small business owners make when they’re starting out: Coasting on their great taste and vision and not on what’s actually selling and what’s the most profitable. After a decade of putting this into practice, I’ve held onto this advice for myself all summer in Provence. As I’m packing up to leave after nearly three months here, almost everything coming home with me has a job to do. Sourced for Postmarked Paris (these next few editions are going to be so good!), set aside for clients, or things earmarked for future projects.

But a few personal things have slipped through the cracks. Sometimes, in the moment, something moves you and discipline is thrown off the table. You stop following your own rules and just collect.

Here’s what made the cut.

This decorative plate stopped me in my tracks. I’m not normally drawn to this type of design, but the colors and shape felt like it was a reflection of my summer and the aesthetics of Provence: Folky, colorful, and a bit of whimsy. When the seller quoted me the price, I didn’t blink and forked over my 20€. No hesitation. And it’s my favorite thing I’m bringing home.

From what I can tell, the plate is tin-glazed earthenware, called faience. It is painted in the old grand feu technique, decorated with metallic oxides and fired once at high heat. This process limits the palette to a handful of colors that can survive the temperature: cobalt blue, copper green, brown-purple, and, traditionally yellow. The plate’s hand-painted design features four heart-shaped petals holding delicate springs connected by dark blue vines (and peacocks?) over a deep green ground. At the center is a monogrammed “B.” On the back is an entwined monogram (possibly an A and an N) that sits above the date 1881, with a small flourish beneath it.

The monogram and date suggest this wasn’t ordinary tableware. Personalizing faience with initials or a coat of arms was a documented practice, a way of marking a piece made for someone specific rather than an item off the shelf. This piece was likely commissioned, perhaps a wedding gift or for a birth. It was made to commemorate a day to remember, and now it’s coming home with me to remember my summer.

A few things I’m packing home are more utilitarian. This handful of small tins are part of my personal haul. I’ve collected them for years, and I found this batch across different markets over the past few months. Several came from one of my favorite vendors, who kept a running eye for me all summer, bringing me more tins to sort through every time I came back.

It’s connections like these that keep me returning to flea markets throughout France, for the relationships I’ve built over so many years of coming here.

What I especially love about these tins is that not only are they beautiful, but they all have had specific purposes. Phonograph needles from Switzerland. Vintage pen nibs, several different brands, these boxes still filled with them. A roll of film from a movie, still inside its metal canister, from a Paris film-editing house. Even a tin of “Menstruine Pill’s,” a four-leaf clover promising relief from monthly cramps for six francs (ha!).

Now they hold my art and journaling supplies when I travel. A tiny watercolor palette, a few broken sticks of charcoal, a small collection of water-soluble crayons. Small, portable, and completely useful.

The last item on the list was 3€ and required zero deliberation. A 5” round porcelain lion’s head bowl in the traditional creamy white. I found a whole box on the ground at a market in the Vaucluse, and bought two.

There’s no research needed for this one. There is no mystery monogram, no maker to trace. Just a good, useful little bowl that was conventionally used for soup. I will use it for apéro, out on the table before dinner is served.

And that, my friends, is how you mostly have discipline when shopping is your job. Sometimes you have to disregard your own advice, and just live in the moment.

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At a flea market, before I ever ask a vendor “c’est combien?” (it’s how much?), I’ve already named my price in my head. This takes years of experience and the willingness to walk away if we’re too far off. It’s imperative that you go into a negotiation knowing what you’re buying, and what a fair price actually is.

Earlier this summer I found a small stack of antique postcards. I know the going price and was ready to fork over 10€. The cicadas were deafening, however, and the vendor was several feet away and blocked by another table, so we had to shout the whole exchange over the noise. He said what I thought was 3€. “What a deal,” I thought to myself, and I promptly pulled out my wallet without negotiating. When I handed the coins over he laughed and said “tu as mal compris” (I misunderstood) “it’s 60€!” What he said was so absurd I repeated it back to him, certain I misheard. He nodded. I laughed too, mostly out of frustration, said no thank you, and walked away.

This exchange inspired a game I’ve been playing with my Instagram followers in Stories called “guess the price.” I post a photo of an item from a flea market, and everyone votes in a poll of what they think the market price is. In the second slide, I reveal it. People have really enjoyed it, and it’s been fun to create.

What’s missing on Instagram, though, is what’s exactly going through my head when I ask the price of something at a French flea market. So let’s take a deeper dive on a few of the more popular game questions from IG. Come along with me as I find a few items and talk through what the fair value prices should be together.

I am a long time fan of French confit pots. I have a small one on my kitchen counter in New York that holds wooden spoons and utensils, and I used to sell out of them constantly when I ran my home decor brand, Meridian. Traditionally used in 19th century South of France to preserve duck or goose confit, these stoneware jars were wheel-thrown with rolled rims, which were used to tie down a cloth or parchment cover. These particular confit pots are huge: roughly 15” in diameter and height. In the US, I’ve seen extra large pots of this size retail for at least $300.

I guessed 80€ for an individual pot. The vendor was asking 35€ - 45€ depending on the size. That’s a fair price! If I were outfitting a butler’s pantry or had a large kitchen countertop or even a garden room to fill, I would have jumped at these.

One of the many reasons why I love antique furniture, apart, of course, from the character, is the scale. Rooms were built around multiple uses, and more often had cozy corners rather than the open layouts favored in modern day. People themselves were more petite due to childhood diets and healthcare. They also followed rigid, upright seating etiquette, particularly in the Victorian era, so there was little furniture around for lounging. The scale of antique furniture also means that it’s perfect for apartment living. This pair of walnut-toned bedside tables are Louis XV-inspired with cabriole legs and a gallery rail around the table surface. These are likely a 20th-century reproduction of the style rather than a genuine 18th-century antique given their consistent, matched pair condition. The finish looks excellent and in great condition with no obvious veneer damage or hardware issues. A pair like these would easily command $850 or more in the US.

I would have paid 150€ for the pair. The vendor had these marked at 90€! That’s an incredible deal. If I were furnishing a Paris apartment, these would be high on my list to source.

Souleiado is a famous French textile house based in Tarascon, Provence. Their roots date back to 18th-century block printing, and their maison holds an archive of original antique wooden printing blocks, which means even their reproductions carry genuine historical design lineage. Vintage pieces of Souleiado fabric are especially coveted because older runs used richer, more saturated natural dyes. The brand earned instant cult status in the 1980s when Princess Diana carried their Adiana quilted handbag, which they still sell today for 169€.

I found this pair of curtains from a textile reseller at a flea market. They are 274 x 124 cm each (about 108” x 48”) and in perfect condition. There is no evident fading, tears or mending. Vintage Souleiado fabric sells for $75 a yard in the US. Using a rough estimate of 6+ yards for a pair of curtains of this size, that puts the raw fabric value alone north of $450, before any costs for construction, lining, or labor. The vendor was asking 330€, which is a relatively good deal if you factor in the value of the fabric. But I’d be hard pressed to jump on something like this, given the complexity of matching curtains to an existing window or room design.

Three objects, three prices, three decisions. Would you have reacted the same?

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I am not one to really take big risks. You will not see me at the high roller’s table in Monte Carlo or betting it all on black. As an entrepreneur, there is a delicate balance to risk taking, because much of what you do is venturing into the unknown. This type of risk taking is more calculated, and built on information you’ve been collecting for a while mixed with a bit of instinct. And then, there is Facebook Marketplace.

Last week I decided Facebook Marketplace was worth the risk. A man named Louis (Lou-ee in French) was selling off his lifelong collection of stamps. He had multiple listings of seemingly organized stamps by category. Each of the titles for his listings started with “Bonjour.” “Bonjour des milliers de timbres” (“hello, thousands of stamps”) or “Bonjour jolie lot de 70 cartes postales anciennes” (“hello, pretty lot of 70 antique postcards”). His profile photo was of himself and his wife, kissing his cheek.

So I reached out. And on Friday, we ventured the long drive to Lunel, in the Occitanie region of southern France, about an hour or so from where we live in Provence. Driving past wind farms, endless sunflower fields, and even more roadside vineyards tucked between hills and forests, we arrived around 2:30 in the afternoon.

I pulled into the parking lot of his apartment building and called to let him know I arrived. His accent was muffled, like he had something in his mouth while he was talking. There is a deep southern accent in France that I’ve encountered a few times before, but his was one of the more difficult accents to understand. A few minutes later, his wife appeared at the building entrance and instructed us to follow her inside.

Now normally I wouldn’t enter someone’s house on a Facebook Marketplace pickup. This is exactly what they tell you not to do. Don’t go alone. Don’t go inside. Don’t be an idiot. But something about this gentle man and his overly polite marketplace listings (“bonjour!”) made me feel like we weren’t going to get murdered over a bunch of old stamps. Plus, I wasn’t alone; I was with my 15-year old son and barely 4-pound Yorkie, Margot. Surely they would protect me!

On the way up the four flights of stairs, the woman noticed Margot in my bag and told me she had a very large dog but that it was friendly. My son and I looked at each other wide-eyed. What were we walking into?

We arrived to a dark, small, cramped apartment. The oversized TV was on as background noise, and Louis was seated at the kitchen table. A gigantic 200-pound dog – I think a Bordeaux Mastiff – greeted us at the door, and then promptly went to lay down in her bed on the floor. Louis stood up and shook my hand, and offered me a seat.

He asked me why I wanted the stamps (I collect them), why I liked the ones I chose (I love the symbology), and why I don’t want any of his stamps from the US (because I love France). He nodded quietly in approval.

He revealed the stamps I had come to buy: A very large selection of Marianne stamps, my old favorite. Louis lifted a torn and tattered shoe box of loose stamps and slid them across the table my way. He then pulled out another shoe box of hundreds of envelopes, with countless stamps organized in each one. He slid the second box across the table and said “my gift to you!”. I thanked him profusely, and paid him what we had agreed upon. I began to rise from my chair and he promptly said “do you want to see more?”.

He revealed a stack of first day of issue stamps, each more beautiful than the last, each little works of art commemorating French history, culture and citizenry. “Do you like postcards?” he asked. I nodded. He got up to the buffet table across the living room and came back with a stack of postcards he wanted to show me. “Do you like Charles de Gaulle?” (I mean, what was I supposed to say to that? I said “of course”!). He uncovered another large shoe box exclusively of stamps dedicated to the French WWII General turned President of the Fifth Republic. I went through all of his piles, found a few things that interested me and he named his price.

And that was that. I took no photos of this interaction. For once, I don’t regret it. Somewhere between the third and fourth shoe box sliding across the table I stopped thinking about wanting to document the moment and just let myself be in it, enjoying Louis’s pride in each stamp, his wife peering around the corner from the kitchen checking in, the mastiff and Margot sizing each other up and deciding to ignore each other. All that lives on are the stamps that came home with me, and the memory that the risk, this time, actually paid off.

Some of this collection will be the foundation of some new projects I’m working on. Others will find their way into future editions of Postmarked Paris. If you’d like to receive the next edition, the waitlist is now open.

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I’ve finally learned to drive in France. I think I understand the actual logic of it now, which has taken me a lot longer than I’d like to admit. Nobody cruises in the left lane. Everyone lives in the right, and the left is just a place you dip into to pass, then dip back out of, closer to the car ahead than any American driving instructor would ever allow. For years it looked like chaos to me. It’s a different relationship to lanes here altogether. Nobody stays anywhere. You weave in and out in constant motion that gets you where you need to go.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this summer, my third here as something closer to a local than a visitor, because it’s roughly what’s happening to the rest of my life too.

For years, I’ve stayed in lanes the American way. A career in television and media, then I built an award-winning home decor brand, and now: antiques sourcing, retreats in France, Postmarked Paris, and a writing practice I never planned on. Each one felt like its own lane, its own commitment, something I’d chosen instead of the others rather than alongside them. I’d finish one thing and merge fully into the next, rarely looking back at what I’d left behind.

This summer, for the first time, they’re not individual lanes anymore. They’re the same road. The broadcast years taught me how to tell a story quickly and visually. The interiors and decor work taught me how to see a room the way a buyer does, which is what I use every time I’m standing over a table at a market deciding what’s worth taking home. The writing, which I always thought of as separate from the business entirely, turns out to be the thing that makes the business make the most sense to anyone watching from the outside.

I don’t think I understood, arriving here this summer, that I wasn’t building separate things anymore. I was just driving the old way, the American way, camped permanently in the left lane, the speed lane, chasing a destination that looked like scaling a business or another rung on the corporate ladder. Now I’m finally driving the way they do it here. Dipping into one lane, then another, then coming home to something that finally looks like one destination instead of many.

I packed for a version of this summer that never really happened. Half my suitcase is still hanging in the closet, untouched. I live in white t-shirts and loose khaki pants now, mostly because they let me bend over a flea market table or sit on the ground without a second thought, which turns out to matter more than anything I thought I needed when I was packing back in New York. Things I wear regularly in New York (layers, jewelry, the color black) have no place here.

We don’t have air conditioning, and I spent the spring quietly dreading that idea from afar. Three canicules, or heat waves, later, I’ve learned that heat is manageable in a way I didn’t expect. Ice packs, fans, closed shutters in the afternoon, the kind of small daily adjustments that stop feeling like sacrifices and start feeling like a natural rhythm.

The bigger surprise wasn’t the heat or my wardrobe. It was how much room in my creative process opened up once I stopped scheduling every day. I finally have enough days at home to just work, to let an afternoon be nothing more than an afternoon. I’ve been writing more than I’ve told anyone, filling notebooks with things that are becoming something larger. It’s the kind of work that only happens when the days aren’t accounted for.

Cooking has become part of that same unhurried rhythm. Peaches have been everywhere at the markets this month, and I’ve made this (lettuce free!) peach salad at least three times already, which feels like the most honest description of the summer I could give you: something simple, local, made slowly, and worth repeating.

Where does that leave the actual business of the summer? Postmarked Paris sourcing is in good shape, further along than I expected to be at the halfway point. An antiques retreat in Provence is in planning mode too, more than I expected to be by now. I’ve also been sourcing for private clients, and I’m circling a few new ideas, the scribbles in notebooks coming together in all the right ways.

Halfway through, this is where I am. Weaving between lanes the way they do it here, one thing dipping into another, all of it somehow becoming a single road home.

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Imagine a shop owner. She flew to France four times last year. Visited the same two markets every blog recommends. Checked three suitcases, wrapped everything in hotel towels and the bubble wrap she brought from home, held her breath at the baggage carousel. She bought pieces she loved and couldn’t bear to sell, alongside a few she could. She came home each time with less inventory than she’d hoped for, and a credit card bill that made the math hard to justify.

She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She just didn’t know yet that there’s a difference between visiting France and sourcing in it. That’s the difference between a hobby and a real business.

Know the rules before you go.

Not every market in France is built for professional sourcing, and knowing the difference matters. A leisurely brocante, even a weekly one, is the kind where locals stroll on a Sunday morning with a coffee in hand. It is not the place to arrive with a wagon or a Hulken bag and clear a table before anyone else has had a chance to look. That’s not sourcing. That’s disrupting a community that was there before you and will be there after you leave.

Professional markets have their own etiquette, and it starts before the market opens. Vendors need time to unload, unpack, and arrange their tables. Showing up with a flashlight, picking through boxes while a dealer is still setting up, is one of the fastest ways to burn goodwill. Let people prepare at their own pace. Show up when the shop is open, not before.

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People assume I’m drawn to the prettiest thing on the table. I’m not. I’m drawn to type. To handwriting, especially the flourished kind, the loops and flicks of a hand that learned to write in a schoolroom that no longer exists. Color comes after that. Everything else comes after color.

I am, more often than not, the person on the ground. Sitting beside a box someone has left at their feet under the table because it isn’t the good stuff. Or I’m crouched over a table opening a box that’s still taped shut, because that’s where the real material lives. Not in the display cases. In the boxes nobody’s bothered to sort or empty.

I keep a list. It lives on my phone, long and constantly updated, organized loosely around the themes of whatever Postmarked Paris edition I’m building toward. But I try to hold the list loosely too. Some of the best things I’ve found this summer weren’t on it. They weren’t anything I knew to look for until they were in my hands.

I know prices going in. Before I ever ask a vendor “c’est combien,” I already have a number in my head, and when they answer, I know instantly whether it’s worth negotiating or worth a polite merci and walking away.

That knowledge is the single most useful thing I carry with me to a market, more useful than the cash, more useful than my professional buyer’s card.

Condition matters, but it’s rarely a dealbreaker. A stained corner, a torn edge, a page that’s lost its partner, none of that stops me. It’s a negotiation, not a disqualifier. Bad corners get trimmed. Damaged pieces become collage paper or framed fragments. Almost nothing goes to waste if you’re willing to think about what it becomes instead of only what it already is.

I don’t buy single pieces if I can help it, at least not for Postmarked Paris. One beautiful letter, on its own, isn’t enticing to me. I want the bundle. A stack of forty is a story in a way that one letter alone never is. It’s also leverage. A vendor selling in volume is a different conversation than a vendor selling their one prized piece.

Postmarked Paris specifically demands its own kind of discipline, because everything has to be flat enough to fold into an envelope and then mailed to someone’s door. The beautiful three-dimensional things, the tins, the boxes, the trinkets, the pottery, the paintings, the textiles, get passed over more often than not, no matter how much I love them. When I’m sourcing for private clients, I have more room to say yes to those. But for Postmarked Paris, I have to fall in love with paper, specifically, and let the rest go.

Mostly, though, I’m looking for a story. Not the object itself, but the evidence of a life around it. Who made it? How did they write? Was it sent to someone who kept it? Or did it sit untouched in a drawer for a hundred and fifty years, still creased from a fold no one ever undid?

I found a stack of documents held together with a straight pin instead of thread or glue, someone’s makeshift solution from long before staples existed, still holding after all this time. That’s the kind of detail that stops me. Not the document itself, although sometimes that’s it, but the decision behind it. Someone reached for whatever was on the desk instead of looking for the string. And it still holds.

I found a notebook belonging to a girl named Marie Louise, age nine and a half, her handwriting still finding its shape, practicing the letters that would become her signature for the rest of her life. I don’t know anything else about her. I just know that on some ordinary school day, she sat down and wrote, and it survived long enough to end up on a table in Provence more than half a century later, and I was the one who picked it up.

I also fall in love with faces. The photographs above of an older man and woman, he in a stiff collar and she with her hair pulled back, both photographed with the same unsmiling formality of another era. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what I’ll do with them yet. I bought them anyway, because some things don’t need a plan. They just need someone willing to cherish them.

Not every instinct is right the first time. Earlier this summer I passed on a box of ornate cigar bands, gold and crimson, embossed with crests and portraits, because they weren’t French. I remember thinking they didn’t fit. I think about that box more than almost anything else I’ve found this summer, and I regret it every time.

That’s sourcing, too. You don’t always know what you’re looking at until it’s gone.

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The vendor’s tables were full of rusty metal tools and old clock parts. Nothing I would have stopped to look at, my eyes glazed past and I nearly moved on. But there was a box on the floor.

It was filled to the brim with white and blue envelopes, each one affixed with an Empire Français stamp, each one addressed in flourished, hastily written ink. There were probably 800 of them in the box, waiting to be discovered.

I sat down on the floor and started to dig.

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Each envelope was letter-locked, the paper folded and tucked into itself, a technique used before envelopes existed to keep correspondence secure during transit. To open one is to undo 160 years of careful folding.

The envelopes were all addressed to the same person. Monsieur Sortais, négociant, 4 et 6 rue Hoche, Versailles. Some were addressed to Sortais fils – Sortais the son – which immediately told me this négociant, or merchant, was running a family business, a trade passed from father to son. The kind of small commercial enterprise that formed the backbone of 19th-century French commerce.

The letters span the 1860s through the 1880s, a period of extraordinary turbulence and reinvention in France. Napoleon III was remaking Paris through Haussmann’s grand boulevards. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 brought Prussian troops to the gates of Versailles itself, and the Palace briefly became a Prussian military headquarters, the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors. France emerged from that war diminished, humiliated, and determined to rebuild. Versailles, stripped of its imperial associations, was finding a new identity as a bourgeois city of merchants and civil servants.

Into this world, Sortais sold beautiful things: Porcelains, faïences (ceramics), verreries (glassware). The decorative objects that furnished the homes of a city reinventing itself. His shop sat on rue Hoche, a respectable address in the heart of Versailles, one block from the gates of the Palace. The building is still there today. It’s a bank.

What arrived in his mail, week after week, year after year, were the invoices of a man doing exactly what many of us small business owners do: sourcing. Placing orders. Building an inventory of beautiful things to sell to customers building out and decorating their homes in the Parisian suburbs.

In his invoices, I recognized my own business.

I dug through the box, me still sitting on the concrete floor in light khaki pants, inevitably getting covered in dust and dirt. Most of the letters were routine. Small orders, unremarkable quantities, the ordinary pulse of a business ticking along, day by day.

On the 27th of July, 1881, Sortais ordered 467 francs and 50 centimes worth of Baccarat crystal. Yes, that crystal which had already been around for 100 years as a French luxury house and official manufacturer to royals and celebrities. A single invoice, one transaction. At a time when an average French worker earned three or four francs a day, this was four to five months of wages, spent in one order of glassware. I held the paper and tried to imagine the crates arriving at rue Hoche. The unpacking of crystal glasses one by one, of the high-pitched chimes when they tapped together.

On the 22nd of April, 1868, he ordered 474 francs of Limoges porcelain. The invoice is detailed in the careful hand of a sales agent who knew his customer well: 100 coffee cups. 100 tea cups. Garnitures, jardinières, decorative pieces whose exact descriptions I can only partially decipher, the handwriting more flourish than legibility. But the quantities tell the story: this man was stocking his shelves for the season, the way any small business orders ahead of demand.

And then there is the wine. On the 14th of March, 1867, he purchased 590 francs worth: 1,000 litres of corked bottles, and 1,200 of Bourgogne in the generous 70-centilitre format favored by French merchants of the period. This was the height of the Second Empire, when Haussmann’s new boulevards were lined with homes of a prosperous bourgeoisie who entertained seriously and stocked their cellars accordingly. Sortais knew his customers. He sold beautiful things, and apparently, he also made sure they drank well.

I sat with the box for a while longer, turning envelopes over in my hands. With hundreds of letters in the box, I had been there for some time.

I bought a small selection of the letters and left the rest. Someone else will find that box, or they won’t. Someone else will see the value in preserving this small business’s history; another person will see it as something to toss. Eight hundred envelopes, the paper trail of an entire working life, sitting on the floor of a market in Avignon, Provence.

I’ve been thinking of Sortais since. About what happened to the business after the 1880s. Did Sortais the son carry it on? Was there a grandchild who decided not to? Did the shop on rue Hoche close with fanfare, or was it absorbed into something else much larger and without the charm of a family business? I don’t know. The letters don’t say. We may never find out. The letters only show me the years when the business was good enough to order 1,000 litres of wine and 100 coffee cups at a time, when the crates from Baccarat arrived and someone unpacked them carefully onto shelves that no longer exist.

What I do know is that objects like these – the paper records of ordinary people living extraordinary ordinary lives – are exactly what Postmarked Paris exists to find and share. Each edition is sourced by hand, in France, from markets exactly like this one, where I found Sortais on the floor.

The next edition is in progress. I’m sourcing it now, while we live in Provence this summer.

If you’d like to be the first to know when it’s available, the waitlist is now open.

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There is a moment before the gates open at the professionals flea market when it feels like everyone already knows everyone.

I arrived early, or so I thought, and found a crowd already formed, easy with the kind of chatter that comes from people who have done this together before. Old friendships, rival dealers catching up like colleagues, the particular warmth of a community that gathers in the same place every season. Espresso in hand. Someone laughing two people ahead of me. It didn’t feel like waiting so much as a reunion.

Then the gates opened, and the conversations stopped. Paces sped up. Some people took off running, a destination clearly already fixed ahead of them. Others fell into a brisk speed-walk, polite on the surface but unmistakably racing to reach their favorite dealers first. Every person knew exactly where they were headed and why. I picked up my own pace just enough so I wouldn’t get swept along by the crowd, and let the speeders go ahead of me. I was not here to win a race.

This is not the Provence of postcards. There were no straw hats here, no one debating whether to buy the lavender or the olive soap. Buyers were loading entire containers on site, the scale of it closer to a trade floor than a flea market. It recalibrated something in me, being back here.

I watched a group of men heave a forty-food farm table off a dolly and set it under a bank of large shade trees, the kind of unveiling that would anchor an entire afternoon at a market built for browsing. Less than an hour later, I passed by the same table again. It was already back on the dolly, already sold, already being wheeled toward someone’s truck. Hand trucks moved everywhere I looked, stacked high like mis-matched Tetris pieces of seventeenth-century French chests, gilded Italian mirrors, and grand portraits five feet tall. A woman nearby was livestreaming in Japanese, picking up and setting down objects with the speed of someone who has done this many times before.

I found a stack of boxes filled with what looked like genuinely interesting antique documents and reached for them. C’est déjà acheté, a man called out before I’d barely touched a single one. Already purchased. I had been on the grounds for twenty minutes.

This is buying, not browsing. Everyone here came with intention, and the market rewards exactly one speed.

This professionals-only market was exciting, the energy palpable and a little intense, the kind of setting built for someone ready to source serious antique furniture, someone prepared to ship a container or a crate home. But not every market in Provence moves at that pace, and most days, neither do I.

On weekends throughout the year, villages host brocantes and vide-greniers, the more casual cousins to the professionals market. A brocante is closer to a true antiques market, vendors with some expertise and a curated table, while a vide-grenier, literally an “attic emptying,” is closer to a community-wide garage sale, where anyone in the village can set up a table and sell what they no longer want. Both include high-quality antiques, and both require a bit of a dig. There are treasures to be found at either, and some of my best finds have been at vide-greniers. Markets like these are built for wandering rather than racing. Prices are reasonable, vendors are friendly, and no one is going to call out that something is already sold before you’ve even had a chance to look at it.

Then there are the weekly village markets, not antiques at all but local crafts and produce, often grown or made no further than the next village over. Some of these draw tourists by the busload. Others remain quieter, known mostly to the people who live nearby, and they’re not lesser for it.

I’ve spent the last few weeks, my third summer living here as a local in Provence and my fortieth year in France, keeping time with the rhythm of all of them. Which markets rewards speed and which reward patience. Which ones are performances and which ones are simply someone’s Tuesday.

This isn’t a skill any guidebook teaches you. It’s earned over years of practice, knowing when to navigate the crowds and when to slow down and enjoy the quiet moments Provence is known for.

I’m putting together a small group experience for next year, an inside look at how I actually source antiques in Provence: the professional-only markets, the brocantes that don’t make it onto any tourist map, the conversations with dealers I’ve known for years. This is not a tour. It’s access.

Spots will be limited, and the list is open now.

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There is a market in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue that appears in every guide to Provence. I had been once before and left unmoved, but I gave it a second chance yesterday, the way you sometimes do with a restaurant that disappointed you, hoping the first time was an off-night. It wasn’t an off-night.

The town itself is lovely. It sits on the channels of the Sorgue river, the water running fast and clear beneath the old, moss-covered mill wheels. Before the throngs of tourists arrive, it earns its reputation as a charming stop in Vaucluse with a large weekly market. But by the time we arrived and found parking, the crowds arrived with us. A particular kind of American tourist has discovered L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, and they brought their friends. They arrive in organized vans and waves wearing the same shades of natural linen and floral dresses, clad in straw hats they purchased days earlier at another market, carrying the same woven basket, stopping to photograph the same items they will ultimately not buy. Their voices and accents hang in the air above the din of market exchanges, the market sellers clinging to what English they know to entice them to purchase at a higher price than the natives quietly shopping nearby.

I actually did buy a couple of things: the sweetest strawberries I have ever tasted, berries that are actually soft and red when you bite into them, their juices running down your chin. I also purchased some toile placemats to use in our home here.

Then we left. There is no shame in admitting a time and a place isn’t for you.

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This is the part that took the day from ordinary to something I’ll remember: we drove to a lavender field outside of town, unmarked on tourist maps, with no gift shop. We were the only ones there.

No parking lot. No ticket booth. Just a field, the relentless heat of the summer’s second canicule, my teenage son, and Margot, who decided the fields were far more interesting than the crowded markets in town.

The bees were busy. A constant warm and loud chorus as they buzzed from flower to flower in what will no doubt make the sweetest lavender honey later this summer. The cicadas joined their orchestra, the way they do when the sun climbs high in the sky, that dry and insistent percussion that you stop hearing after a week but then suddenly miss when it goes quiet. It is lavender season in Provence, it is in full bloom, and the color is a dull, deep violet that’s a stunning contrast to the earthiness of the valleys.

We didn’t talk much. Just took it all in, listening to the sounds and breathing in the delicate, herby scents of a lavender field in full bloom. Margot found a bee that was minding its own business and supervised it with great seriousness.

It cost nothing, and it was the highlight of our first few days in Provence.

I’ve been here for less than a week, and I’ve already relearned the thing I learn every time I’m here: Provence does not reward the planned itinerary. It rewards the person who is willing to drive past the town in the guidebook and see what’s on the other side.

I’m here until mid-August. Two months, which is long enough to make mistakes and recover from them, and find the places that aren’t on anyone’s list yet. I’m here working, sourcing for future editions of Postmarked Paris as well as private clients. I’m sketching when the light allows, and writing from wherever I happen to be sitting when the afternoon gets too hot to move.

This is my first summer dispatch.

If you want to know which markets I’d actually recommend, how I’m sourcing, and where I’m finding the real Provence, I’ll be reporting back.

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There are 14 days until June 11, the day we leave for Provence, and my to-do list is longer than it has any right to be for someone who has done this before. We will be in the South of France for nearly three months (my son Luca, my Yorkie Margot, and me) and getting there is its own small undertaking.

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Where Do You Stay?

We will be staying off-the-beaten tourist path in an AirBNB. I picked the location because it’s close to the places I want to visit, but quiet enough that we can just live and not be bothered with large crowds. This will be our third summer in Provence, and our longest stretch, so I’m eager to slow our pace and immerse ourselves in French culture and life.

Will You Have a Car?

It’s critical to have a car in Provence as towns are not all connected by trains. In years past we have rented a car in Marseille to use during our stays, but I’m trying something different this year. I leased a car rather than reserved a traditional rental, which was a method recommended to me by an ex-pat friend of mine. We leased the car through a French company and will pick it up in Marseille after we land. It ends up being more cost effective, includes insurance, and we have unlimited mileage which is one less thing to worry about. I always make sure that my cars are automatic because manual vehicles are more common in Europe and those are not my forté!

How Do You Bring Your Dog?

With Margot coming, she has her own list of preparations and boxes to tick. Margot has a French passport, but those were recently invalidated for non-EU residents (ugh) so she is getting her American paperwork prepped. It’s an expensive process that involves USDA clearance, all to prove she’s up-to-date on her rabies vaccinations. You have to go through your American vet, who ships the paperwork to the USDA for approval, and then they ship it back to you only a few days before travel. It’s not for the faint of heart. You also need to add the pet to your airline reservation and follow all of their rules about the size and type of in-cabin carrier. Margot has made the trip with us before so I’m not as worried about the long flights as I was the first time. She’s a good traveler in general and goes pretty much everywhere I go when we’re in NYC, so France is no different. France is a dog friendly country in general, and they are welcome at places like restaurants, cafés and shops. Margot basically lives her best life in France and I joke that she becomes Margaux when she’s there!

How Do You Pack?

We’ll purchase most of our toiletries at the French pharmacy, so I don’t have to worry about bringing enough to last the whole summer. Clothing is another story; I will try to limit myself to about two weeks of mixable separates because in true French fashion, we will have a washer but no dryer. So I will need to air dry our clothes, which can take extra time if there is moisture in the air. I’ve stocked up on some basics (white t-shirts) and am packing a lot of dresses. France just had their hottest day on record for May (it was nearly 95 degrees), so this summer will be a scorcher.

Will You Have Air Conditioning?

Nope! This is normal for France and something Americans really take for granted. There is nothing like walking in a muggy sauna, chasing the shade, and then coming inside to your home and finding it’s like a pizza oven ready to melt you like a pile of mozzarella cheese. We cope by loading up on bags of frozen peas and using them as ice packs.

What Will You Do There?

Both of us will be working remotely. We don’t view this as a long vacation but instead just a different place to live for a while. I plan to hit several flea markets while I am there, and will be sourcing for private clients as well as Postmarked Paris. I’ve found the flea markets to be different in Provence than they are in Paris, with a more Mediterranean feel, such as lighter woods, pottery, and art. I’m always looking for a few things. This year my list includes an antique inkwell, vintage office supplies, vintage art supplies, and jewelry.

My personal goals for this summer are to write, read, and make art. I want to read as much as possible, which means I need to bring enough to last the whole summer but also not feel guilty about leaving them behind when I finish. I’m collecting any recommendations, if you have any!

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It’s easy for me to get obsessed with what art supplies I will bring, but I’m a chronic over-packer so I’m trying to be strategic. It’s a wonderful procrastination mechanism I’ve developed: Do I have actual work I need to do? Yes, so let me lay out all of my colored pencils and select a pretty palette of colors. Is there something I have to get done today that’s very important? Wonderful, let’s refill my paint palette and let it dry.

What Is the Most Difficult Thing to Pack?

One thing that stresses me out a lot before we leave for this long is if I will have enough of my medications to last the whole summer. I’ve been in the position of needing them shipped from the US before, and it was a nightmare I don’t intend to repeat. Sometimes you have to pay out of pocket for an extra month if your insurance won’t let you get extra pills off-cycle. It’s super annoying but worth it in the end to not worry you’ll run out.

Le Fin

Every time I do this, only weeks out from departure, I wonder why I put myself through the chaos of getting there. And every time, about 48 hours after we land, with a glass of rosé in my hand and the cicadas singing me a lullaby, I remember exactly why. I’ll be writing from Provence all summer… the markets, the heat, the light, the finds. I hope you’ll follow along.

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I made something recently. It’s in response to my personal need for digital detox, to go analog, to hark back to the days when we used pen and paper and postage stamps and film cameras. When we corresponded with each other not through DMs, but through letters.

Postmarked Paris is that project, and only a few spots remain before enrollment closes on May 29th (or before) for edition no. 2. If you’ve been curious about what this is, now is the time to join.

Each edition is a personal letter from me, paired with a curated collection of vintage French papers and ephemera I have sourced by hand in Paris and Provence. The first edition’s theme was The Art of Correspondence, and included one-of-a-kind items, some as old as the 18th century. The second edition’s theme will be different, seasonal, and collectible.

Enrollment for the second edition closes May 29th, and the issue will ship via post before I leave for the South of France for the summer. If we reach the maximum number of subscribers before the 29th (and there are only a few spots remaining), I will close enrollment early.

A quarterly subscription is $49. An annual patronage (four editions reserved for the year) is $196, and includes a bonus insert.

I intentionally keep Postmarked Paris small because it’s a kitchen table operation in my apartment. The papers and ephemera I source in Paris are limited in quantities, and won’t be available forever. If you’ve been reading my posts for a while and wondering what Postmarked Paris actually is, this is it. It’s something I’ve been working on, sourcing carefully in France, assembling from my NYC apartment, and sending it off to people who love paper, French collectibles and keepsakes.

Will you be one of the final few to join me, and receive Postmarked Paris in the mail?

Join Me Here

From Postmarked Paris subscribers:

“My daughters and I love junk journaling and getting creative with unexpected materials, so opening Postmarked Paris and discovering so many wonderful gems felt magical and transported us straight to the City of Light!” – Christina, California

“In a move to add an analog experience to my life in 2026, I subscribed to Postmarked Paris and then promptly forgot about it . . . which made the day it arrived especially sweet. It was so satisfying to look at all of the postage stamps on the mailing and realize how they connected. The envelope was deceptively slim with a small cache of treasures inside. I’ve been slowly finding homes for each piece: tucking the hand-painted postcard behind a pinboard ribbon, using the vintage calling card as a bookmark, and scattering a few beautiful stamps in a trinket bowl. I can’t wait to see the next mailing.” – Debbie, New Hampshire

Receive the next edition >

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She saves menus from restaurants. She reads the postscript of a letter first. She has a drawer full of papers she will never throw away.

She has matchbooks from bars that have long been closed. Photographs of friends she hasn’t seen in decades. Ticket stubs from concerts, back when tickets were made of paper. Diaries from high school that are embarrassing in the best way: unguarded, certain, entirely herself. Paper planners filled with dates and notes and plans.

She is drawn to paper. Old paper especially. She likes to keep it. Collect it. To hold on to it. Maybe she has a use for it – a junk journal, a collage – or maybe she just likes to know it’s there. It feels precious enough that she doesn’t want to waste it. She is a paper keeper.

After a long day, she reluctantly checks the mail box. More catalogs or bills. Something stands out. An envelope. It’s covered in vintage stamps. Hand addressed to her. She had forgotten.

She rushes inside and throws the mail on the entry table, but takes the decorated envelope and brings it to the coffee table. She sits. Puts her feet up. And opens.

Inside: vintage French papers. Handwritten letters stained from wax seals long gone, calling cards that beg to tell a story of their origins, postcards with notes from abroad, stamps from exotic locales. One-of-a-kind treasures from another decade, another century, another era. Curated and assembled just for her.

If this is you, there is room in Postmarked Paris. A few spots remain.

There’s a place for you here.

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I finished a journal last month. I made it by hand because I wanted it to feel special and motivate me to write: marbled endpapers I made on my kitchen table, a hand-sewn binding with a Coptic stitch, a label I found in Paris where I wrote the date. It was beautiful. About halfway through filling it, I realized I wanted thin lined pages. So I bought a Moleskine for my next one. This is what analog looks like in practice: imperfect, particular, occasionally contradictory. You are not trying to be perfect. You are trying to be present.

I know I’m not the only one turning to analog. Search “journaling” on any platform and you’ll find millions of people talking about it. Film camera sales have been climbing for years. Fountain pen communities have tens of thousands of members. Journal shops – real stores dedicated entirely to paper and ink, my actual fever dream – are opening in cities with lines out the doors. People are taking calligraphy classes, pressing flowers, learning to develop their own film in darkrooms. None of this is practical. All of it is intentional. Something in us is pushing back against a world that optimizes everything, that makes every experience instant and frictionless and identical. Fed by an algorithm and not taste. Instead, we are reaching for texture. For slowness. For proof we were actually there.

In March, I brought a disposable film camera to Paris. I shot a full roll in 10 days: at the flea markets, along the Seine, in my neighborhood. The roll is sitting in a bag waiting to be developed. It turns out it’s a lot harder to have film developed in 2026 than I realized. My local CVS in New York no longer has the machines, and won’t even send it out. That adds to the mystery. Not only do I have no idea what’s on it, but I’m going to have to wait a lot longer to find out.

Of all the analog practices I keep turning to, correspondence is the one that has required the most of me. A journal entry is messy and private. I don’t really care if I misspell something or my handwriting is illegible. A photograph ends up being archived in an album or put in a frame but not necessarily broadcast for everyone to see. A letter, on the other hand, is a shared experience. Still private, but shared between two people. It asks you to think about another person, to say something worth their time, to be intentional about following through and actually sending it.

When you write by hand to someone you care about, your pace slows. You choose words carefully. You commit to what’s on the page. There is no delete button. No backspace.

I built Postmarked Paris around this idea. Not nostalgia for the sake of it, but a genuine belief that correspondence still has something to offer that nothing else does. That it’s worth holding on to.

If you’re looking to capture the same emotion, I’d love to share it with you. There is still room in Postmarked Paris Edition No. 2, and I think you’ll love it as much as I do. Each dispatch is a personal letter and a curated collection of vintage French ephemera I source in Paris and Provence. Use it in journaling, craft projects, or to send to someone you care about. This edition ships before I head to the south of France for the summer. Enrollment closes May 29th, or when the final spot is filled.

Go analog with me

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Somewhere in the south of France, in a town small enough that everyone knows your name but large enough to have its secrets, there is a woman at the center of it all.

She is the first to know when a telegram arrives. She is the one who hands it across, who watches the recipient’s face as they open it. The news of a death. A soldier’s return. A debt called in. A new baby. Every piece of correspondence that enters or leaves this town passes through her hands: the registered letters, the money orders, the parcels wrapped in brown paper and string. She is trusted with everything and speaks of nothing.

She is, in the precise language of the French Republic, the Receveuse des Postes et des Télégraphes. The Postmistress of Chalabre. Her name is Madame Emile Bibaut. She works in the walled town of Chalabre, deep in the department of Aude, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. And sometime — we don’t know exactly when — she walked into the print shop of François Cahuc, Imprimerie-Librairie-Papeterie, and ordered a box of calling cards. Those cards found their way to a Paris flea market nearly a century later, waiting for someone to find them. That someone was me.

It was not a market I had planned to visit. On a bustling street in Paris, on a morning when a market appeared out of nowhere on folding tables and picnic blankets, I turned a corner and found it.

On a tabletop filled with old pen nibs, printed vintage high school graduation photos, and fountain pens, was a beautiful little paper box. I didn’t know what it was, but I picked it up regardless because I thought it was pretty. A paper label, printed and glued to plain cardboard, decorated with flowing botanical lines in the Art Nouveau style. Imprimerie, Librairie, Papeterie. François Cahuc. Chalabre (Aude). I had no idea what was inside.

The cards were stacked neatly, as if waiting for me to find them. Cream cardstock. A name in flowing script at the top. A title beneath it, in small capitals. A town at the lower right, almost an afterthought. Madame Emile Bibaut. Receveuse des Postes et des Télégraphes. Chalabre (Aude).

I stood there on the pavement and felt the quiet thrill of it. I was sourcing for the first dispatch of Postmarked Paris, “The Art of Correspondence,” and a calling card was on my dream list to find and include.

I have no idea who she was personally. Whatever record she left on this earth, it hasn’t made it to the internet. No obituary, no mention in the local gazette, no photograph. Only these cards, surviving her by who knows how many years, in a box from the print shop she once walked into.

We don’t know how many she ordered. We don’t know how many she gave away, or whether she gave away any at all. We don’t know what occasion she imagined, or whether that occasion ever came. Her mystery remains, and I’ve sent her legacy on. One of her cards is now in the hands of every correspondent who received the first dispatch of Postmarked Paris.

If you’ve been thinking about subscribing to Postmarked Paris, this is the dispatch you would have received. An antique letter from the 1800s. A calling card from Madame Bibaut, archived in a glassine envelope. A hand-painted postcard. Vintage ephemera sourced from the Paris flea markets, chosen exactly for this kind of story.

Enrollment for Edition No. 2 is open now. It closes on May 29th, or when the final spot is filled. If you’d like to be on the receiving end of the next one, I’d love to have you.

Join here.

Postscript for Paid Patrons: The date question, the significance of women in the French postal system, and one detail about Madame Bibaut I can’t get out of my head

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The moment I sealed the final stack of envelopes, it hit me. The first Postmarked Paris dispatch was heading out into the world. I spent months curating vintage postage stamps for the envelopes, researching types of papers to find the best one to match the vintage ephemera, and, of course, countless hours in Paris sourcing the perfect pieces to tell a story that feels special, original, and distinctly French.

Introducing Postmarked Paris No. 1 — The Art of Correspondence

Last week, I hauled an oversized bag full of stuffed envelopes containing centuries old French artifacts and ephemera to my local post office in downtown New York City. I waited patiently in line until it was my turn and approached the window. I could have easily deposited everything in the mailbox on my corner but I wanted to make sure everything was perfect. Although I had triple checked the stamps on the outside no fewer than a million times, this was my last shot. The lady took out a calculator and added them up – seven unique stamps in total – and confirmed they were good to go. She then hand-canceled every single one and that was that. The first dispatch was out of my hands.

Then came the wait. Silence. No “read receipt.” No alert that they had arrived at their destinations, scattered across the US. Slowly messages started trickling in, East Coasters a few days later and Californians after a week.

If a grey envelope decorated with thematic vintage stamps arrived in your mailbox recently, you already know.

“It was so satisfying to look at all of the postage stamps on the mailing and realize how they connected. The envelope was deceptively slim with a small cache of treasures inside…. I can’t wait to see the next mailing” – Debbie, Postmarked Paris subscriber

You are among the first correspondents of Postmarked Paris, and I have been thinking about you since the moment I sealed the envelopes and let them go.

For everyone else, I have been keeping something from you, until now.

I have been thinking about correspondence for longer than Postmarked Paris has existed. What it means to send something, to receive something, to keep something. That is why the first dispatch is called The Art of Correspondence.

I lost my own practice of letter writing for many years. It slipped away the way slow and careful things do when the world speeds up around them. I have only recently found my way back to it, and Postmarked Paris is part of that return. But what brought the theme into focus for me was something more specific. Not long ago I found a bundle of letters in a storage unit: correspondence between my parents, before they were married, written in their early twenties when they were living separate lives and not yet sure how the story would resolve. I read them aloud to my father, who is still here and was glad to hear them again. Those letters told me things about my parents I could not have known any other way. Without them, that version of them would simply be gone.

It’s the same feeling that draws me to French ephemera; letters, stamps, postcards, calling cards. Each piece was one part of someone’s record. Gathered together around a curated, intentional theme, they now become part of yours.

The Art of Correspondence is the first theme. Every dispatch will be unique, with its own theme, its own story to tell, shaping everything inside: What I source, what I write, and what I choose to send to you.

What’s Inside the First Edition

Inside each envelope is a hand-painted vintage postcard of France. Blank on the reverse, ready to be sent if you’re willing to let it go. These are not printed. Not reproduced. They’re painted by hand, each one a different scene: a château, a cathedral, a river, a street. No two are the same.

There is also an antique handwritten letter. In French, in an unknown hand, dated somewhere in the latter half of the nineteenth century, 1870s. No two correspondents receive the same letter. Each one is genuinely one of a kind, antique, and has outlived its author.

I chose to include a vintage airmail envelope, because the story of correspondence and communication feels incomplete without it. These envelopes traveled the world, their journeys still marked on their surface. Correspondents also receive a large collection of international stamps, from countries and decades that span the better part of a century.

Finally, there is a calling card. Small, cream colored, printed in careful script: Madame Émile Bibaut. Receveuse des Postes et des Télégraphes. Chalabre (Aude). Mrs. Émile Bibaut. Postmistress of Chalabre. I found her on a flea market table in Paris, her cards still in the box that François Cahuc printed them in. I kept the box. I sent her to you.

No two dispatches are identical. Every object in an envelope I sent exists nowhere else in this combination. They were made to travel, and they have made their way to you.

And now, the second edition of Postmarked Paris is already in motion. Each dispatch is limited; the ephemera I source in Paris is finite, and I will never send more envelopes than I can curate, and curate well. Every edition tells a different story, built around a theme, and is filled with vintage French ephemera I have chosen by hand. Each one goes out quarterly, and when spots are filled, enrollment closes.

I am already excited about what edition no. 2 holds.

If you would like to join the correspondence, enrollment for the second dispatch has reopened now, for a limited time. Everything you need to know is here.

One last thing.

When I sealed those first envelopes and let them go, I trusted they would arrive. They did. That is the oldest gesture in the world, and it still works.

Yours affectionately, Ashley

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Packing for March in Paris is challenging. The weather can be unpredictable, with spring hinting through the clouds, but also chilly and wet. You pack rain coats and umbrellas and warm sweaters, and resign yourself to a particular shade of gray that settles over the city until mid-April. This trip was different. I stepped off the plane into sunshine and warm air that lasted almost a week. It was unseasonably beautiful. Even the Parisians seemed caught off guard by it.

I was alone for the first five days. After, I would co-host the Paris Curated antiques buying retreat. But until then, it was just me and a list and a city behaving better than I had expected her to. I had come specifically to source the first Postmarked Paris dispatch.

I source differently than I shop. Shopping is reactive; I wander in stores or markets and respond to what I love, or what moves me. Sourcing begins before I arrive. It begins with a question: what am I looking for, and why? For the Postmarked Paris mailing, I needed objects that speak to each other. Papers that tell a story when put all together. I am looking for the right things, pieces that feel intentional.

I had a theme for this inaugural mailing (which I will reveal at a later time) before I left New York. I had a list of what I wanted to find and six markets to hit, plus a loose route through several antique booksellers and stationery shops scattered across arrondissements. I deliberately skipped the large, famous market that every visitor goes to and focused instead on smaller, more esoteric ones.

My first stop on my first morning was a vendor I knew from previous visits. I had decided in advance that I would buy vintage postcards from him because I knew his stock and I knew what I was after. Sometimes it matters most to check something off your list right away, so you feel a sense of accomplishment.

He was still setting up when I arrived. The postcards were scattered across two large crates, thousands of cards within each, and I unstacked them myself in the early morning quiet and went through them one by one. I was looking for beautiful images on the front, beautiful handwriting on the back, and a range that included both written cards and blank ones not yet filled in. I went through every single one while the vendor finished setting up around me.

On Saturday alone I went to three markets. Two were large and well traveled. The last one was essentially two men with folding tables in a small square. I bought something at all of them.

It was at the two folding tables that I spent the most unexpected hour of sourcing. The men had bins of vintage stamps, and I went through them by hand and selected over a thousand French ones. Preparing for Postmarked Paris has made me genuinely interested in stamps in a way I wasn’t before; I love it when the research pulls you in directions you don’t anticipate. Going through stamps that were exclusively French meant I kept finding examples of Marianne, the allegorical figure who has appeared on French postage since the Revolution and whose face has changed with every era. A different Marianne for every decade. I kept finding her, over and over, each time slightly different. I stood at that folding table in the sunshine, chitchatted in French with the vendor about everything and nothing, and lost track of time entirely.

I finished my sourcing in a short yet productive few days. Postmarked Paris existed, at least in my mind and in the folders and bags I had brought to hold it all. The days that followed were a different pleasure, generous, outward-facing, full of other people’s discoveries. But the work that mattered for Postmarked Paris had already been completed across five warm days in a city that was, for once, cooperating completely.

What I found will be in your mailbox later this month. It is old. It is paper. And it carries, I think, the particular weight of things that were made to travel.

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On my last free morning, before my retreat group arrived and my focus became something else,

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We stepped inside Passage du Grand Cerf on a cold and wet March afternoon, through an unremarkable door on the street, and the city fell away behind us. Inside: warmth, amber light, the soft patter of rain on a three-story glass ceiling held aloft by ironwork so finely made it looks drawn rather than forged. Mosaic floors worn smooth by a century of footsteps. Shopfronts lining both sides of the arcade: a paper store, a textile merchant, a fabric seller, a wood turner, an architect’s office behind a frosted glass door. The smell of damp stone and warm plaster, a mustiness that belongs to rooms that have been quietly inhabited for a very long time. My group went quiet the moment we crossed the threshold. That quiet is the only appropriate response. Paris can often take your breath away.

I had arranged the afternoon differently (other streets, other shops) and when the rain settled in with the particular persistence of a chilly Parisian March, I changed the plan. I knew exactly where we were going. I have lived in Paris long enough to know which door to open when the weather turns, and this was the right door, at the right time.

My relationship with Paris began the summer I learned how to read. When I was very young my parents lived here briefly, and when we arrived I immediately fell into tears because the letters and words I had just learned to master at home meant nothing. I had to learn a new language. I was motivated. And I fell in love. I have been returning ever since. Several months a year now, moving between New York and Paris in the way some people move between a city and a house in the country: each one necessary, each one a different version of home.

Over decades that feeling has become something more practical. I know which markets open early and which dealers will negotiate. I know which pile at which table is worth turning over completely and which is decorative chaos with nothing beneath it. I know how to ask for something in French in a way that is respectful rather than transactional — a distinction that matters enormously in a culture that regards commerce as a form of conversation. And I know, without consulting anything, which door on which street opens into something worth seeing.

This is what I bring to the Paris Curated retreat.

I co-hosted the week with Lucy Farmer of Lucy’s Inspired, whose eye and sensibility make her the ideal collaborator. Together we welcomed a group of women from around the country who had come to Paris with a shared intention: to shop the flea markets, to find things worth bringing home, and to understand how to do it well.

The week began as all good weeks in Paris should, at a table, with wine, in a bistro overlooking the Opéra, the city doing what the city does in the evening when it is lit and full and entirely itself. Everyone tried the escargot. Only one person regretted it.

The days that followed moved between the planned and the improvised. We began with a private shopping experience at L’Officine Universelle Buly in the Marais. One of the most beautiful shops in Paris, its apothecary shelves and hand-lettered labels are a masterclass in how objects can be presented with intention and restraint. We wandered specialty shops, stopped for lunch wherever the afternoon suggested, and explored the covered passages, Passage du Grand Cerf among them, on that wet and amber-lit afternoon when the rain made the decision for us. We ended the day at the French pharmacy, which is its own education in the particular French conviction that daily life deserves beautiful things.

On Saturday we went to a local flea market, and this is where the week found its rhythm.

A flea market rewards knowledge. It benefits the eye that has been trained by years of looking, the instinct that arrives before the reasoning catches up. I walked alongside my clients, watched what stopped them, and helped them understand the difference between what was interesting and what was worthwhile. Two things that are not always the same; the gap between them is where my expertise lives.

One client paused in front of a large contemporary painting. I looked at it, asked for the price, looked at the dealer, and knew. The painting came home with her, along with a pile of antique books, for twenty-five euros total. Her joyful expression when I told her what she’d paid is something I will keep for a long time.

My own best find that day was a tiny round silver box with a blue and white ceramic top, the kind of object that serves no purpose and is therefore entirely right. I knew what it was the moment I saw it. I actually had passed it over on my first walk through the market, but at the end of the morning on my way back I saw it was still there, and got an incredible deal as the vendor was packing up for the day. A personal treasure.

Sunday took us to a professional’s market that convenes twice annually, slightly outside the city. You can’t just happen upon this market, you have to know it exists. My clients arrived as visitors and left as collectors. By the end of the day they had purchased so much that the on-site shippers were enlisted to assist. Suitcases had been exceeded. Excitement was at an all-time high.

That morning one of my clients found something and pressed it into my hands with a smile — an antique stamp she had spotted and thought of me. That she thought to find something for me, in the middle of her own searching, is the kind of thing that stays with you.

The last day was gentler. A cooking class — cheese soufflé, chocolate soufflé with salted caramel sauce, a salad with vinaigrette — and then sitting down together to eat what we had made. There is something particular about a meal cooked in Paris, in a kitchen that is not yours, with people you barely knew five days ago. Our friendship sealed in our week of adventures, and toasted at a meal of our own creation.

That evening we boarded a boat on the Seine as the city lit up around us. Iron lamp posts illuminating the bridges. A long golden reflection on the water. I have seen this many times, from every angle, from every time of year. I never grow tired of it.

What I love most about a week like this is a specific moment that happens, without exception, at some point at the market. The moment when someone who has never done this before stops at the right table. When their instinct arrives and the treasure hunt begins. When they reach for something without quite knowing why and then look at me, and I nod, and they understand that the nod means: yes, that one.

That moment cannot be taught. It arrives when someone is in the right place, moving at the right pace, paying the kind of attention that Paris, more than any city I know, asks of you.

I have been learning how to pay that attention my entire life. Sharing it, it turns out, is its own pleasure.

Yours affectionately, Ashley

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Paris is flirting with spring. They’re not quite in a committed relationship, but the signs are promising. The mornings are still cool enough for a jacket, and the light has that particular quality of early March, tentative and lovely, arriving at an angle that makes everything look slightly more beautiful than it probably is. The trees are beginning to bloom, their buds holding their breath with anticipation. Les terraces — the outdoor seats at cafés — are the hot spots. All it takes is one person to decide it’s warm enough to sit outside, wrapped in a chic scarf with a coffee and a cigarette, to watch the street, and everyone else has followed. It’s one of the first signs that we’ve turned the corner.

I’ve spent the last several days moving through the vintage markets, used book stores and paper dealers. What you see below is a small window into what I’ve found: objets and paper and fragments of other people’s lives that tell stories of the remarkable and the mundane.

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There is a particular kind of letter that requires no reply. The postcard is the purest form of correspondence I know: an image, a few lines, and the knowledge that anyone who handles it in transit can read exactly what you wrote. It is the most public form of private communications. There is an honesty built into the format’s constraints. You have only this much space, which means you have to arrive at what you mean before the card runs out.

I have been thinking about this since I decided to start sending postcards again.

Sometime around 2003 — a year or so out of college, in Paris for what I think was the first time on my own — I bought a stack of postcards and addressed two of them to the little girls I had babysat through college. Two sisters who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, young enough that Paris would have seemed entirely mythological. I wrote something on the back of each one. I dropped them somewhere in a bright yellow mailbox near the Seine and walked away.

Did they arrive? I have no idea. I haven’t spoken to those girls since, haven’t thought of them in years until recently, when I found myself thinking about postcards and why I stopped sending them. They are grown women now, somewhere in the world, who may or may not remember a postcard from Paris that arrived when they were children. The not-knowing is complete and permanent, which I’ve come to understand is simply the postcard’s intention. You send something and release it entirely. What happens after that is no longer yours.

There is a postcard pinned to my bulletin board, near the photograph of my mother as a teenager. It’s a black and white image reproduced (according to the back) from an anonymous photograph titled Fillettes avec leurs nouveaux jouets. “Little girls with their new toys.” Five of them, walking together down a Paris street, all smiling, each carrying wrapped parcels. They look like they are on their way somewhere. They look like they have no idea they are being photographed. They look joyous. And they look like they might feel this way forever.

I don’t know when the photograph was taken or who took it. I don’t know where they were walking, or what was inside the parcels, or what their names were. What I know is that something about this image stopped me — the same instinct that stops me at a flea market table — and I’ve kept it where I can see it every day, alongside my mother’s teenage face, two images of girls frozen in moments of uncomplicated joy.

The two sisters on the Upper West Side are in that postcard, a little. So is my mother. And so, perhaps, am I.

The postcard was invented in the late nineteenth century and became a phenomenon almost immediately. By the early 1900s hundreds of millions were sent annually — a golden age, collectors call it, when people sent postcards casually, constantly, and for no particular reason.

“Arrived safely. Weather’s fine. See you next week.” The mundane took center stage. The act of sending mattered more than what was said.

That era faded, as eras do. The telephone arrived. Then email. Then the phone became a camera and a photograph could cross an ocean in seconds. I stopped sending postcards somewhere in the early 2000s without quite deciding to. I couldn’t tell you which postcard was the last one I sent or who received it or what I wrote. It simply stopped, the way certain habits do when the world quietly moves on.

What was lost in that stopping is harder to articulate than what was gained. Speed, certainly. Ease... but also something else. The type of communication a postcard requires — a few lines, a deliberate image, the knowledge that you have only this much space to say what you mean — produces a particular kind of honesty. You can’t ramble on a postcard. You have to arrive at the point because there is no room for anything else. You are simply saying: “I was here. I thought of you. This is what it looked like.”

Which is, I’ve come to think, a kind of unanswered letter. The letter that asks nothing back.

I leave for Paris this evening.

I’ve been thinking about the postcards I’ll collect there — at the markets, in the shops, wherever something stops me. Not the obvious ones, not the monuments and the famous views, but the ones that feel made for a specific person. The ones that have perhaps already traveled before I find them.

I’m going to send them. To my father. To my son. To say: “I was here, I thought of you, this is what it looked like.”

Whether they arrive is another matter. It always has been. The postcards I sent in 2003 may or may not have. The five girls with their parcels have been walking down that Paris street for as long as anyone can remember, still smiling, still on their way somewhere.

The chain of correspondence across a life is long and not always legible. What matters is that you keep sending things forward, into the not-knowing, and trust that some of it lands.

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