My friends, Ed and Anna, visited Paris five years ago and never left. Now they’re Americans Living in Paris, those chosen people with U.S. passports and EU work visas for whom terroir is a dietary staple and the Champs de Mars merely a neighborhood park. I’ve made a point of visiting them each year, usually in January, around Ed’s birthday. I crash on their big black couch, and I enjoy Paris in short, sleepless bursts. In fact, until recently, I had never stayed more than three or four days at a time. And although I’d become more and more familiar with the city over the years, my mental map expanding ever so slightly with each visit, I envied Ed and Anna their rooted-ness, the way Paris has become for them, in ways, as familiar as an American suburb. I imagined what it must be like to work in Ed’s office with its view of the Eiffel Tower and to come home, as he does every day, to a flat filled with paintings purchased at a flea market at the Seine; to be able to wake up on a Sunday and walk to a bustling bistro on a cobblestone street — like, say, Le Zebra in Montmartre’s little village of Abbesses, one of my favorites — or meander through the Marais with nothing more pressing on the agenda than a stop at the heavenly Cacao et Chocolat (36 Rue Vieille du Temple). Such, it seemed to me, is the blissfully unhurried existence of the Paris dweller; no pressure to see the sights; no need to wait in lines; no return date looming on the horizon. That was the Paris I wanted, and when, several months ago, Ed emailed me with an offer, I didn’t think twice. “We’re going to be in New York for all of August,” he said. “Do you want the apartment while we’re gone?” I booked my Delta flight that day — ATL to CDG direct. “Just one thing,” he said. “Can you water the plants?” Les petites fleurs: They were New Guinea impatiens, five pots perched on a 5th-floor balcony overlooking a quiet side street in the Seventh, and their pink petals littered the sidewalk below. I watered them with pride. For this, along with my other domestic duties — grocery shopping, taking out the trash, doing the laundry — only served as further proof that I had truly crossed that line. That I was living in Paris. And then I made it completely official; I updated my Facebook status: “Current City,” I wrote “City of Lights.” Paris in August has its perks. There is the “Paris-Plages,” for one — that free summer event featuring artificial beaches along the banks of the Seine. Launched in 2002 by the Socialist Party mayor Bertrand Delanoe, architect of many a quality-of-life enhancing municipal iniatitive — including, most recently, the so-called Velib (“free bicycles”), which makes available rental bikes at stations all over town — Paris-Plages was intended to relieve the misery of those stuck in the city for the whole of the sweltering summer. And it clearly has. But come the first of the month, those Parisians who can leave town usually do — creating a mass exodus to places like Nice and Greece and the coast of Spain. And while that means many shops and restaurants are shuttered for the better part of the month, it also makes for a more relaxed atmosphere: smaller lunchtime crowds, emptier Metro cars and quieter, more patron-friendly cafés all over town. It means, too, of course, that many apartments sit idle, in need of a Francophile to water the plants, which are always greener on the other side. — Patrick Adams, freelancer