Farewell, Fall

Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side

Reluctance, by Robert Frost

Out through the fields and the woods

   And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

   And looked at the world, and descended;

I have come by the highway home,

   And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,

   Save those that the oak is keeping

To ravel them one by one

   And let them go scraping and creeping

Out over the crusted snow,

   When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,

   No longer blown hither and thither;

The last lone aster is gone;

   The flowers of the witch hazel wither;

The heart is still aching to seek,

   But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man

   Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

   To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

   Of a love or a season?

That's a Wrap on Autumn

One last look back on my most favorite of seasons...

(Most of the above pics were taken in Central Park or on the Upper West Side, with the exception of that last yellow tree, which lives on the Upper East Side.)

Glory Days

My Scrabble Lady left me a voice mail at 10am one Monday morning: "Kristy, darling, I just wanted you to know that the chrysanthemums are in their glory in the Conservatory Garden.  I don't know if maybe you can call in sick one day this week to go see them, but you should.  All the best - bye!"

I wasn't able to call in sick, but I made a point to swing by the garden that next weekend.  My Scrabble Lady was right - the mums were something to see:

 

Central Park's Seasonal Show

When up in the Catskills, we ate every morning at "Bread & Breakfast," an impossibly cute train-car-turned-diner, where hunters & bikers mingled with locals & tourists and we all stuffed our faces with pancakes and homefries and coffee.  In short: a little slice of heaven.

One morning, as we sat waiting for breakfast to be brought to the table, we gazed out a window across the train tracks, to a picturesque white house perched on a picturesque hill. As we watched, yellow leaves rained down, swirling and blanketing the hill as if on cue.

My friend T. remarked, "You guys - autumn is happening.  It is happening right now."

* * *

Autumn is the season my heart waits for, all year long.  But seasons are slippery and hard to grasp, and life never slows down exactly when you want it to.  Though I lie in wait for this season, I always seem to miss it somehow.  

I am the coyote and autumn is my road-runner:  I see it coming in the distance, I make elaborate plans for it, but in the end?  It speeds by every time, leaving a trail of leaves to let me know it passed through.

Not this year, I thought.  I can't make autumn slow down, but I can make me slow down.  I will slow down and notice autumn, because it is happening right now.

* * *

I spend 45+ daylight hours a week in a beige cubicle that is climate-controlled and season-less.  It is hard to notice autumn happening, from inside a cubicle.  So the past few weekends, I have made myself stop - stop the errands and the cleaning and the running around.  I've forced myself to put down the to-do list and pick up my camera and go for a walk in the park.  Because autumn is happening - it is happening right now.

And here are some of the haps:

More to come...

Summary of my Summer

Riverside Park

When leaving for Israel before Labor Day, I told myself, "Self, when you get back, it will be fall."  It was meant to be motivating, but part of me felt it was also maybe delusional.  Summer doesn't usually give up the ghost so quickly: heat and humidity tend to linger late into September around these parts.

But upon my return I found cool mornings and cooler evenings, a new need for layers, the first crop of leaves on the ground.  And this week the calendar made it official - fall is here.

I'd bid a fond farewell to summer, except...I wasn't fond of it.  At all.  Admittedly, it's never been my favorite season, but this year it seemed extra difficult.  It wasn't the weather that hurt, but my heart, and MAN.  It was such an awfully hard slog through.

Maybe it's hubris to assume that emotional season will be left behind just because we've crossed the autumn equinox, but I'm going to hope against hope anyways.  And look back on the parts of summer that made me smile, the parts so worth the remembering.  Here is the highlights reel:

1 - Jury Duty: an unlikely joy ride; 2 - June's run of Improv shows; 3 - treasure-hunting in Central Park;

4 - Boston fun; 5 - the musical genius of Mr. Joe Purdy; 6 - sketch-writing & performing; 

7 - Costumed culinary adventures; 8 - B-day girl smiles; 9 - Pimm's Cups & Sleep No More

10 - Huey* in concert @ Jones Beach; 11 - Shake Shack scheming; 12 - a trip to Ohio;

13 - life-long learning; 14 - evening on the High Line; 15 - getting inspired by Moonrise Kingdom;

16 - a sweet wedding dinner for friends; 17 - soaking up the Olympic pageantry; 18 - Closer Than Ever

*Don't even try to pretend you don't love him.

Keeping Watch

Riverside Park

Lately I've been watching myself, watching for Spring.  

I usually enjoy changes in seasons, but this year's watchfulness seems heightened somehow.  

Each day I monitor the changes, making mental notes:  

This week the pear trees bloomed; that week the magnolias followed.

Now, tulips in flower beds.  Still - waiting for green leaves to come in.


Here, forsythia.  There, robins in the brush.

Last week, the sun set about 30 minutes after class started.  This week, there was still a little light left when leaving my voice lesson.

Riverside Church through the trees

I'm not sure why I find each change, each shift so fascinating this season.

But, as I've caught myself in watchfulness, it's made me think about waiting, about change, about forward movement more generally.

The way I've been watching for spring is not the way I've been watching for other changes in my life.  The way I've accounted for signs of seasonal change is not the way I keep watch for other sorts of signs.

Granted, spring is an assured change.  It will come, just like it does every year.  No faith required.  The signs of spring are visible, steady, quantifiable.  It's easy to see.

In other areas of my life (and here I refer mainly to larger questions of purpose, plan, direction, vocation, relationships) the results are not guaranteed.  The signs of movement, of progress, are not always as visible as a budding magnolia tree.

And it's easy (for me, anyways) to trend towards despair: "There is no change!  It will be like this forever!  Nothing is happening!"  But rather than defaulting to despair, maybe (maybe!) I could find a way to wait better.  Or use different eyes to watch for signs of forward movement.  

Either metaphorical eyes (like "eyes of my soul" or "eyes of faith" or I dunno - something along those lines).  Or a literal different set of eyes - like the eyes of my friends, who sometimes are able to see (from their distanced vantage point) change in my life that I can't quite see myself, because I'm too close to it.

Henri Nouwen (who I'd quote ad nauseum if you'd let me) wrote often about waiting.  For Nouwen, waiting was not a passive stand-by or a bored limbo, but it had a sense of activity to it:

 "Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment."

I've enjoyed being in each moment of this spring, feeling that feeling that "something is happening"!  I'd like that feeling to extend into those other life areas.  Something is happening! There is a plan and it is in motion.

Elsewhere Nouwen wrote: "We are always waiting, but it is a waiting in the conviction that we have already seen God’s footsteps."

Yeah.  I want to wait like that.

All The Old Left Behind

April is National Poetry Month, so I may be sharing some poems here.  Or I may not.  (I'm so unpredictable!)  But I will definitely share at least one, and here it is:

Heart Spring

Often, even before Easter,
Last summer’s deep
Seeds rebel
At their long frozen sleep,
Split, swell
In the dark under
Ground, twist, dance
To a new beat,
Push through a lace of old
Pale roots.

Invited by an unseen heat
They spearhead up, almost
As though, suddenly,
Their tender shoots
Find the loam light as air
Not dense, not sodden cold

I saw a crocus once
In first flight
Stretching so fast
From a late snow
(a boundary just passed,
A singular horizon close below)
the white cap melted
On its purple head.

Such swift greening of
Leaf wings and stalk
Was clear celebration
Of all sweet springs combined,
Of sungold,
Smell of freshness, wind
First-time felt,
Light lifting, all new things,
All things good and right,
And all the old
Left behind

by Luci Shaw, from Polishing the Petoskey Stone 

Lit Up

Riverside Park trees

Last night I left work and headed uptown to Hebrew class. When I arrived, there was light still left in the sky. Normally it's already dark when class starts.  But last night there was enough light to see beyond the end of my teacher's street - to the stone walls of Riverside Park, and the bare trees beyond, and the Hudson River beyond that, and even a few boats slowly drifting down to the sunset.

Hey!  Daylight Savings Time?  You were totes worth that lost hour of sleep on Sunday.

Just To See

(This photo reminds me the littlest bit of my favorite Van Gogh painting)

On Sunday afternoon, I gave my Scrabble Lady a call to see if she was up for a visit. But after dialing the number of her landline, an operator message informed me the line was currently being repaired.  Strange.

There was no other way to reach her - she doesn't have a cell phone. Neither is she on email, as she's somewhat suspicious of computers. (Although she was inexplicably moved by Steve Jobs' death, going so far as to send a consolation card to his wife and venturing beyond the Upper East Side (a rare event for her) to visit the vigil at the 59th Street Apple Store.)

It was so beautiful outside on Sunday; I thought it might be possible that my friend was hanging out in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park, a familiar haunt of hers.  A slim chance, but I figured there are worse ways to fail.  So I set off across the park, towards the garden in the northeast corner. 

The north end was still pretty winter-bare: fountain was empty and no flowering plants to be seen yet.  These trees along the lawn will one day be full of blooms, but right now their gnarly branches are still exposed.

My Scrabble Lady got married in the garden (near where the above photo was taken) back in 1970.  And in December, if you can believe it.  She married a Tunisian man, 12 years her junior, but that is a story for another time.

Over 40 years later, my friend still lives in the same 6-floor walk-up apartment close to the garden. This place is special to her - she makes a point of introducing herself to all the park rangers who work here. They call her "Sweetie" and seem happy to see her. Every autumn, she picks up quinces that have fallen off their shrubs and makes a pie.

This yellow tree, near the 5th Avenue gate, provided the most color in the garden on Sunday.  (And that blue, blue sky behind?  Enough to make Ella scat.)

Once upon a time, my friend met a couple here, on the entrance steps.  The couple stayed in touch over the years, adding my friend to the mailing list for their home-made political newspaper.  Years later, they invited her to (what she thought was) a party, and she in turn invited me and another young friend of hers, Brando, hoping to make a love match of us.  The "party" turned out to be an off-kilter political meeting in the crowded and dusty home of two hoarders in need of serious help, and there was no match to be made.  But that too is a story for another time.

Snow-drops are fading already.  They'll be cleared out soon for daffodils, then tulips, then summer flowers, then fall plantings.  And so it goes.

The trellis, behind the lawn, is still bare-branched.  When the leaves come in, it'll be a green canopy.  My Scrabble Lady once showed me where raccoons like to nest, up on the joints of the trellis.  I looked for the raccoons, as well as my friend, but found neither.  (I did see a squirrel in a trashcan, though!) (not pictured.)

Beneath the trellis are 13 round tiles, representing the 13 original colonies.  I've lived in 3 of 'em, or approximately 23.08%.  #HistoricalMath

I scoured the entire garden, but no sign of my Scrabble Lady.  Probably she was off socializing somewhere. "I'm lucky I'm so gregarious," she has told me on more than one occasion.  True.

I'm lucky to know her, even if our paths didn't cross (as hoped) this past Sunday.  I left the garden and wandered south on 5th Avenue, past the East Meadow and then skirted the bottom of the Reservoir before heading home. I missed her company, but my path that day was sunny and sweet nonetheless.

Behold: Time Passes

Last Friday I woke before my alarm, sometime around 6:30am. I lay there for awhile, cocooned under my comforter, thinking 'bout stuff.  After a little while I heard a quiet hissing, coming from the far corner of my room. 

Our heat had come on.

In most New York apartments, you don't control your heat.  Your landlord does.  They decide when to turn it on / off for the whole building (although there are regulations to keep them in check), and they decide what level of warmth to blast through your radiators.

Some landlords are stingy with the heat (as was the case at my Brooklyn abode), while some seem to think they're operating a sauna (as was the case at my last apartment, where we had to crack windows in January).

I'm not sure yet how my current building will fare in this radiator season, but that's not the point.  The point?  Just that it IS radiator season now.  As of Friday morning, the heat is on.  This time has come.  Again.

I'm not sure I can explain why I was so excited about this realization last Friday morning.  I do like cold weather, it's true, but I don't love the dry, dry radiator heat.  Plus, when the heat kicks on I can no longer use the radiator as a shelf.  Where am I going to stack my mail now!?

No, my excitement was not tied so much to the hissing radiator, as to the threshold that it represented.  The moving from one season to the next.  From old to new.

Except not exactly new - right?  This happens every year.  Every year the heat turns on.  I think part of my excitement was just thankfulness that we had reached this season again, that time keeps on moving, that life keeps on moving, that we can't get stuck in one season forever.

We move forward.  We come to thresholds and we face changes (some good, some bad) and we keep moving.  "The only constant is change," and sometimes that is a comfort.  It was last Friday, anyways.

If this post doesn't make sense to you, I'm okay with that.  It doesn't make much sense to me, either.  I just wanted to mark this occasion somehow, this passing of time.  Happy heat season, y'all!

Summer-izing:
The Days of Whine & Insomnia

Somewheres in the West Village

I am not the best version of myself in the summer. 

The heat makes me cranky.

Plus, it makes me a bad eater and a bad sleeper.

The crankiness I remember all the year through, but the changed eating / sleeping patterns I always seem to forget until I'm in the middle of them. 

Tuesday night I ate chips & salsa for dinner (and nothing else, because everything else sounded 'gross').  And then I wasted time until the wee small hours (as disinterested in sleep as I was in food), watching re-runs of Cheers and wondering what was wrong with me, before I finally remembered:

"Oh right. Summer is wrong with me."

It's too hot for sleep, and too hot for food.  But definitely not too hot to whine about it.

On a positive note, we have somehow reached the end of July already.  Summer feels speedy this year, and that's all right with me.

Spin On My World*

I knew I needed a break.  After a rough few weeks and a really rough weekend, I needed a break from routine and the ol' beige cubicle.

So I cashed in some vacation time, took a Tuesday off, and went to the beach.

(I don't like much about summer, but day-trips to Brooklyn's beaches are one thing I could file in the "Pro" column of the season. Another "Pro" would be flip-flops...and extended daylight...and iced coffee...That's pretty much the extent of my summer "Pro" list.)

The subway ride out there takes about an hour.  By the time I stepped off the train onto Brighton Beach Ave, the blue skies I left behind on the Upper West Side had turned dark and menacing; it was starting to rain.

"Not on my day off!" I said to the stormy skies. (I said it silently, so as not to appear crazy.)  Anyways, the skies took heed of my scowling threats and cleared up.

I picked up Russian pastry and coffee at La Brioche and then sat on the beach for awhile.  Watched a man do push-ups on the boardwalk, watched a bikini'd woman take a quick dip in the cold water, watched high schools kids work on a photography project, watched life guards watching all of us. 

I read my New Yorker, I read a poster about rip tides.  I saw a horseshoe crab (deceased). I walked down the beach towards Coney Island, where I observed a yeshiva class riding roller coasters and I ate a hot dog.

But mostly I just spent the day sitting, being.  I didn't even think much (though there's much I could/should be thinking through) - just sat. And be'd.

Madeleine L'Engle, in her book Walking on Water, talks about the importance of taking being time.  Why is this so hard!?  Maybe because I'm so easily distracted and dissuaded from being by the golden idol of doing. 

Productivity has a powerful call that is hard to ignore.  But being - just being - is so sweet if we allow space for it.

I'd like to find a way to do a lot less and be a lot more.

*Check it.

Days Like This

Rooftop in Midtown

Yesterday it rained and snowed and sleeted and hailed and thundered.

I complained about the crazy weather, along with everyone else, because that seemed like the socially acceptable thing to do.  "Can you believe this weather?  It's CRAZY!"

But truth?  I kinda dug it, this last hurrah of winter.  I dug the necessity of a scarf and a hat, a sweater, a warm coat.

Spring is lovely, but it can wait another week or two.  Because the problem with spring is that summer comes chasing immediately after it, and I hate summer. Really, really, I do.  It's a sticky, stinky, oppressive burden to be borne, if you want to know what I think (and I'm assuming you do, as you're reading my blog).

So - with an eye to that scarf-less season stretching ahead - I didn't so much mind yesterday's weather, and I didn't so much mind waking up this morning to see snow on the rooftops across the street.  Winter is still alright with me.  For a couple more weeks at least.

Making Me Feel I'm Home

Hudson River and beyond

Hello, blog. I am back from vacation, from aways’ville, from Europe – land of pay toilets, history, destruction, cathedrals, Coke Light, coffee, and cake.

It was good to go. It is good to come back.

I am tired – not so much at surface level, but a deep-down, bone-marrow, heavy, tired kind of way. I stepped immediately into a busy week with little-to-no down time, so my eyes are focused on the weekend for recovery. Sleeping in? Naps? Watching mindless movies? I hope so.

Want to hear something dumb? When considering whether or not to buy my airfare and take this trip, one (small) hesitation was that it would mean missing part of autumn in New York. I love autumn in New York. I didn’t want to miss a minute of October. Of course this wasn’t a real reason to delay, so I went ahead and booked the trip. And lo and behold, can you guess what I found in Europe?

Autumn. Naturally.

Budapest and Krakow were yellow with swirling leaves. (Not so much Vienna; that city just has fewer trees.) It was pretty wonderful to see. One day I will show you picture evidence, but not today. I haven’t even begun to process my 500+ photos.

So instead I’ll leave you with this image of Autumn in New York, circa 2009. “It’s good to live it again.”

Welcome, October

On Sunday morning, weather.com told me that it was 51 degrees.  I couldn't quite remember what 51 degrees felt like, so I went outside to see.

It felt awesome.

Walking through Riverside Park - pre-war apartment buildings up the hill to my right, the Hudson River down the hill to my left - it all felt so familiar.  Granted, I had walked this path just a week ago, but it wasn't the sights and surroundings that were breeding familiarity.  It was the air - chilly and charged - and it was the very faint sound of leaves beginning to rustle, and it was the faster pace that everyone seemed to have adopted.

It was AUTUMN, and it was here at last.  Here at last. Thank God Almighty, it was here at last.

Dear October,

Welcome back!  I missed you.  You smell nice.

Pull up a chair and get cozy, 'cause I want to cuddle up with you, drink coffee, talk about the old days, and maybe watch a little football.

Too much to ask?  

Didn't think so.

Love,

Your Quarterback Princess*

*I have no idea what I mean by that, but did anyone else love that old movie with Helen Hunt?  Classic. (Just like October.)

Coloring

At a playing field on Canal Street

It's muggy tonight.  And temperatures are supposed to reach the upper-80's on Friday.  Summer's last stand.

But slowly, slowly I see the leaves change colors.

Repent, Summer!  Your end is near.

Hi Fall, you blazin' beauty!  I'm glad to see you again.