Archive | Weather Matters

Undwindled Dawn

Sunrise coffee on my fire escape: the gentlest of breezes ruffling my feathers, the rosiest of light pinking up my plans. Even timid Grace steals by my side to inspect the splendor and mischief outside our window. I’m smiling, still living inside this sculpture I saw on Monday at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Such a sweet embrace.

Bloomsburydido

I had so many plans for this weekend–I was coming off a few weeks of nonstop work and had heard temperatures were going to be mild (my favorite roving-around-the-city weather). Instead, I climbed into a caftan, pulled Gracie on my lap, and have been reading by an open window for two days straight with nonverbal jazz by cats like Dizzy and Monk pouring out of my speakers. I began Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky’s book of interviews with David Foster Wallace, an author I only find fascinating for his hold over well-educated white men (who, of course, mostly comprise the literary establishment) and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (“I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker”), and finished The Arsonist, Sue Miller’s latest novel (too polite, too drifting), and The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir about her deceased husband (so emotionally and artistically devastating that I’ll be living in it for years). I haven’t answered a text; I haven’t looked at a screen. The only times I’ve come up for air have been to eat or drink something, and I’ve mostly ordered in. I’d be remorseful about this lost weekend except for how terrifically human I feel again. Part of June’s charm is how little it asks of us.

The Church of High Priestess Mermaids

My aging car Sadie has become permanently fritzy, so I decided to make these last three days a staycation. I’d have minded except the city is absolutely brilliant on holiday weekends, especially ones blessed with such agreeable weather. I wandered, alternately sola and accompanied, through park after park, festival after festival, barbecue after barbecue, reading on lawns, playing with others’ puppies, eavesdropping on benches, drinking wine in backyards, basking in early-morning movies. (3D Max Max in an empty theater; mimosa, bagels and lox smuggled in my purse.) I also got my laundry done, yessir. As I write this, my bedspread is strewn with treasures I collected from three of our five boroughs, and an awful lot of it is gold and lilac and purple and sky blue and turquoise and the deepest of blues. High priestess mermaid colors. Here’s to a really beautiful city summer, full of sirens of every sort.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy