I have travelled to many places and slept in many different beds, but only here in France have I become aware of there being so many different types and sizes of pillows. Each night for the past week or so, we have had a different shape to put under our dreams. Their interiors all seem to be of a similar no-feather, synthetic stuffing, but the shapes and sizes are so varied. In the Cité intérnational des arts, where I am lodged for the next five months, the pillow is a sausage shape as wide as one single bed and here, we have pushed our two single beds together to make one pretend double bed. The pillowcases, of a similar shape have cords at each end, which I have to tie to keep the sausage pillow from sliding out at night. The hotel in Villandry where we stayed on our bike trip through the Loire Valley had a sausage pillow that went the whole width of the double bed, but the bed was made of two single-bed frames shoved together with a double mattress on top. The next night we stayed in a chambres d’hôtes (bed and breakfast) at Couzier that had rectangular pillows like ones at home. In Mirebeau, where we stayed in a friend’s house, they were square and flat, but the bed was wide and almost the only thing in a room that was bigger than my entire appartment here in Paris on the Seine. The house fell under the shadow of the church spire and after its last bell had rung and I climbed the stone stairway to sleep, the silence and the darkness lapping gently at the edges of the bed and I knew I was in a boat in the middle of the ocean.