Manhattan Birds

Every now and then, I’m fortunate enough to leave my Cape Cod village and zoom down to Manhattan with my very cool sister and very very cool niece. Even if we only stay one night, we live it well, shopping the thrift stores and consignment shops, eating things like fig and olive salads, taking note of street fashion, wondering at what the Whitney considers art, marveling always at the heights, the bustle, the pace.

Several things about New York astound me. One, that every person I see on the crowded streets and even more crowded subways has a life. Two, where does all the trash go? Three, just imagine what’s under Manhattan!

Four, what would it be like to be a child growing up in the city and living on the 45th floor? Five, how does all the food get here because people in New York are always eating. Six, how can you live here without oodles and oodles of money because something is always enticing you to buy it, eat it, try it, own it, rent it, experience it. Seven, where do you go for quiet and solitude? Eight, do people in New York ever use their kitchens? Nine, what is life like without a car? Ten, can you hear the birds singing in the morning?

Passing these two pigeons caught in conversation along Madison Avenue down in the 30’s, I asked several of these questions. They looked quite nonplussed, as if I had come from another planet. “Such silly questions,” one replied. “Just because you can’t hear the tree fall doesn’t mean it hasn’t come crashing down.” Now I look confused. “Listen,” said the bird’s colleague. “You’re in Manhattan. Nobody really knows how it works…it’s a Universe…it just does.”

Barn in Early March

It is a raw and windy day here with four o’clock snow that isn’t sure if it’s snow or if it’s rain. Still I ventured out for a walk down Main Street past the houses all shuttered and silent, past the old weathered barns, the outbuildings, the side yards with the covered boats, down to the sea that today is the color of gull feathers and buried dreams.

March has entered with a roar.

Wearing a gray wool coat, dark red muffler, sturdy boots, two pairs of gloves, and a wool hat that pulls down over my eyes, I decided to pretend I was in New York and opened a leopard-print umbrella to keep the rain/snow off. (New York women do this all the time: carry umbrellas when it’s snowing out.)

It’s a stretch of the imagination to pretend to be in New York when I’m walking down the quiet street that leads to the water and there is nothing and no one in sight. Only the sound of the gusting wind and the smell of the pewter-gray ocean, only the snow falling in circles into the black puddles, only the crows cawing their late afternoon sojourn to the fading day. I try to picture New York with its bright windows and flashing cabs, its sounds of horns and subways, its wide sidewalks, the lights coming on in the Empire State Building.

It’s a stretch all right.

To tell you the truth, I’m oddly enough happy to be walking in silence, looking out under the leopard-print umbrella at the three colors of lichen on the ancient oaks, at the snow dripping from the delicate tips of the bare spirea hedges, at the dove-gray shingled houses turned inward to ponder their empty state, at the way the wind has shaped the cedars.

Today, the four o’clocks are resting in peace.