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.”

Bike on Lane

I can still feel the heft of the old bulkhead door as my sister and I lifted it one day in early April, then scrambled down the cement steps into the dark stone cellar to drag our bicycles, all cobwebby and coal-dusted, up those steep, subterranean steps to the sun.

It was a primary ritual of spring, as essential to our well being as stories and dreams.

In upstate New York, there could still be traces of snow in damp, shadowy places under porches and behind barns, but the unmistakable scent of spring was in the air:  sweet, colored with longer light, tinged with the fragrance of yet unborn lilacs. A scent that awakened us, excited us and made us wild.

We would drag up those blue bikes, dust them off, walk them up to the Dodge dealer at the end of West Main and give the tires bracing shots of air. And then, we were off, out past the muddy cornfields, past the barely budding maples, past the limits of town and winter’s edge. We rode hard and fast with the cold April wind in our ears, mad with joy.

And now, so many years later, I still ride my bike with the girl in me calling the shots. She loves the downhills, sets her heart racing with the uphills, is lost in the glorious moments of green wind and pale sun and lilacs and lilies yet to come. She is a lost girl finally found.

My friend David and I went to Newport a week or so ago to celebrate the first sunny day we’d had in over a week and the decidedly unofficial first day of spring. What a wonder it is to take off your coat and cast it into the back seat! To jam your gloves into the weary coat’s pockets. To feel like you’ve lost a few years, a few pounds, regained something flirtatious, fickle, alive…even if you’re wearing a sweater over a top and a skirt over jeans and walking shoes.

Newport smiled back at us with our cameras and reveled in our ooohs and aaahs at its old houses built so long ago by men with names like Jacob and Jeremiah, Silas and Samuel. These are not the mansions of Bellevue (those are a whole other story) but the simple square structures of the seafarers and their wives.

Life would be good here, I think, living in one of these crooked houses with the sea air shaking the windows in January, wafting the curtains in July. No doubt the salty ancestors of these houses rattle around the attics, closets and cellars of these houses and are frequent guests at tea or cocktail hour.

The only thing that would have made this day absolute perfection would have been a chance to go inside one of the old houses and have a good look around. Or sit in a chair by a wavery window, look out at the harbor and listen for the silent stories the old house might be inclined to tell.

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.

Dream House

This is a little gray house with tiny rooms and a sagging roof nestled into a hillside that looks out to the headlands and the cold blue sea beyond. I am an Irish girl wearing a ruby petticoat under a brown tweed skirt, sturdy almost galumphy boots, and a warm moss-green sweater with worn elbows. This is my house, and the rooms have ceilings so low you have to stoop in the doorways. There is a sooted little fireplace in the sitting room with two wing chairs in front of it and golden reading lamps bent over the backs of each chair.

At night, when the wind off the sea howls round the corners of the little gray house with the sagging roof, I sit in one of the chairs and read old books that are fragrant with paste and lavender or scratch out lines of words with a jagged fountain pen in yellowed journals. Sometimes a friend takes his or her place beside me in the other wing chair, and we talk and listen to the sea wind and let the fire blaze and then die, waiting for the shadows to creep back into their corners, waiting for the first whisper of pale light to fall around our shoulders, waiting to begin again.