Birthday, Peaches and Planes in My Dreams

This coming weekend will be our first time as a household celebrating my sister, Lockbox' birthday together. We are planning in some serious shore time, a peaches and cream pie (recipe here!), sparklers, some read alouds, some late night chatting and some cozy mornings sleeping in. We are all still enjoying her presence so much. We'be set up some nice boundaries for personal space and responsibility which are preserving but I think our warm friendship is the most important factor. I have cool siblings. I feel lucky.
We havn't been peach picking in quantity yet. We got a small bag of white peaches from a farm but I aim to pick more like a bushel for canning, fruit leather and freezing for smoothies in the winter.
The garden is clipping along nicely with tomatoes ripening every day, our first cabbages ever and several sweet dinners of baby beets in our bellies. I am really hoping against hope that our sweet potato vines bear.
I have a mad yen for a free plane ticket. A good friend was having a baby shower in Colorado, my sister Foxy is nursing my beloved, tiny premature nephew along in Michigan and I also feel like I am kind of desperate for a small,  careless foray into vernal Vermont. Nobody has shown up with a magic ticket though so I might have to stick with dreamships for transport.
I painting the house madly!!! The trim is starting to look reliably white and glossy around the house. Feeling awesomely capable after charging the drill up myself for the purpose of home rescue.
Tomorrow I do laundry.

City Affection

We were in NYC this weekend, down for a day-jaunt to show Lockbox the sights. So much to see and so much to try to explain. I rambled off and stuttered up a few times when I was trying to specify why New York hits me between the eyes. Lots of it is ubiquitous to any city...energy, cultural diversity, great food, art, sheer beauty. But there are so many little, funny things that are just New York although some of them are hard to describe. 

 The ubiquitous yellow cab. The way pedestrians brazenly and energetically jaywalk anytime and anywhere they please. The rows of stalls in china town with bright heaps of produce side-by-side with the booths selling cheap scarves and knock-off watches. The way people push through almost unfeelingly to cram into a subway car or elevator but also wink at little kids on the sly and help carry strollers up and down subway steps without being asked.

The way cheap black umbrellas accumulate in the gutters after a sudden, gusty rain like a batch of fallen blossoms. The smell of the over-sugared, roasted almonds in the sidewalk carts on a winter day. The glitter that lingers in the street dust the week or two after Chinese New Year. The ultra-chichi ladies with their glamly costumed mini-dogs and the completely wacky, raggy bums in the parks.

 So many, many things....some of them things that sound odd and some obvious but all of them important in some small way.

The first few times I was in the city I didn't like it at all. I felt swept under by the volume, the dirt, the sheer over-done grit of it all and couldn't enjoy it. It was like that the more than once, I'd guess about the first three or four times. New York slyly grew on me when I wasn't looking, the real clincher was when I spent a day walking all over the city with A's cousin, a life-long New Yorker who showed me the city she loved. The affection she felt came shining through and suddenly I could see it too, irreversibly, like one of those Magic Eye puzzles and I wondered why I couldn't see it all along.

So much fun to feel like I own a tiny piece of this city emotionally and to now be able to take my sister along on a tour of what makes me smile here. I hope she understands a little bit of what I'm sharing when I tell her how it feels that ride the Staten Island Ferry in the heat of a July day or stroll the Union Square Farmer's Market and buy rooftop honey from beekeepers living the golden urban life above this pavement. Its a good world, and a strange adventure but one I feel really lucky to be living. 

XOXO, New York City

New York. You are a city of one million surprises. A vivid, bubbling pot of activity and culture and ideas and sights. I love taking my kids to you, slipping them into your busy stream and laughing out loud at what we encounter and learn about and wonder at.

 

 We are lucky to be neighbors, you and I, New York. I talk you up around town. I know plenty of people aren't sure that you're all you're cracked up to be. Dangerous? Overpriced? Stinky? I think you're a jungle gym of a place, all wild with the foment of hopeful, industrious, imaginative humanity. And I hope my boys feel your lovely hum in their bones in the same way I do.

 

 

 

I guess all I'm really trying to say is that I love you, New York. That's all. <3 p="p">

P.S.
New York...I think The Highline is totally bananas! One of your best inventions yet. I'm a fan.