Archive | City Matters

Saturday Song: The Prettiest of Sighs

Uncle Keith's chestDishes are clean, laundry is done, floors are polished, surfaces are gleaming. Permakitten Grace and I are lounging by the open window, basking in the afternoon light, the sailing breeze. I’m reading a Betsy-Tacy book, my jag of revisiting favorite childhood books not remotely over. Grace is perched on the sill, studying the twentysomethings on the street with great interest. Ella’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” comes on the stereo, and it feels just right. It’s quite something when you realize the most you can muster is a pleasurable sort of melancholy, an open-ended longing, but that’s 2016 in a nutshell so far.

Through the Future, Darkly

Screen Shot 2016-04-20 at 8.21.00 AMI wake with the sun. The air is as sweet as it ever gets in Brooklyn; the early morning, as gentle and warm. My permakitten creeps next to me on our fire escape and together we study the city, so pretty while it sleeps. And yet. I keep thinking about how easily sweet the air was in the country. How my sheets and nightclothes felt and smelled when I’d dried them in the sun rather than the laundromat. How I’d slept. Continue Reading →

While Spring Is in the World

13055496_10154732437848942_2644030300139445779_nPacking up to head back to New York City this morning from Northern Massachusetts, where I’ve been perched for the last while–researching, reading, witching, listening. I love my chosen home, I really do, but today I feel so sad about hurtling back into the hustle-bustle of cement, of chatter, of Primary, of what Lou Reed once described as “Oh, oh, my, and who really cares.” April weather is blowing up everywhere, and I’m hoping that upon my arrival I’ll gladly step back into that parade, even slather on some lipstick again. But in the early hours of today, I just feel blue about surrendering the voluptuous quiet, the unadulterated green and yellow of spring outside a city. Someday, I hope, I’ll be such an evolved being that I can carry that within me wherever I go. Today I just wish for one more day to drink my coffee in the sun of an empty field.

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