Our lady, and the onions of Chartres

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Our Lady, and the onions of Chartres

Her mismatched spires grow like flamboyant Gothic stalks of wheat and corn out of the fecund plain of Beauce. In medieval days the bounty from these fields was stacked on the cathedral steps, which served as the town bazaar. On the south porch, onions, potatoes and turnips were sold from baskets and wagons under three arches where Jamb’s saints and martyrs in stone supervised. For centuries pilgrims have crawled to Mary’s treasured dress inside—the Sancta Camisia— the sepia’d muslin garment the virgin mother wore over her labor-convulsing body when her boy was born, frail now as onion skin, behind glass and guarded by seraphim. Where has she gone, that woman? I want to feel her warm belly through the dress, the baby kicking. I want to hear her croon to him when his little paw jerks in the air and she nudges her nipple into his trembling mouth.

I am standing under the red and blue pools of brilliant clerestory windows beholding how the brown and buff stone of the labyrinth floor curves and hooks. In the stunning Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière (our lady of the beautiful window) Mary wears a dress of lapis lazuli (the pigment patrons bought for painters more valuable than gold, to give her honor). She is impossibly high, with censers swinging over her crown. The straight, plain wooden chairs have been removed from the floor this one day in a month, so I can walk the labyrinth, slowly. I invite her spirit to rest upon me. It is the year of epiphany, the zenith of my soul’s quest, yet as a result of my measured steps no flames fall from the windows or maternal roots of mystical spirituality curl around my pilgrim feet. The virgin does not bare her glassy breast and offer sacred blue milk. The womb of the church is empty, dark, silent.

We go out and cross the cold street into a cozy brasserie for rustic onion soup, the tables close and crowded under centuries of beams. I excuse myself to find the toilet up a winding stair and half-way up come to a room with its door ajar and window open. Light from the late afternoon sun reflects off the stone building across the street, pouring in on nothing but sacks and sacks of onions wall to wall and piled, spilling upon each other like stones in a quarry, like the fallen stones of Jerusalem. I stare what seems a good while at the nimbuses of holiness surrounding each little onion head and their burlap wraps. How sleepily alive they seem. I go up to the toilet and come back down, pausing one last time at the onion nap room. Back at the table the soup has arrived. I stir the hot salty broth, twirling the white rings, playing like a dervish in a schoolyard with my spoon. I consume, and am consumed by, the labyrinth of the onion.

Listen to Hans Christian play a cello improvisation, from his album
Sancta Camisia, recorded in Chartres Cathedral:

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Photos: Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière and labyrinth from wiki commons; Sancta Camisia Metis Linens; onion photo mine. 

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Poem: In a train

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In a train

Never have I loved so well
the life given me
as when I was rocked
by the four o’clock train
from Chicago to Lansing in 1968,
the lap and arms of iron and steel
holding me, window-framed,
a vibrating twelve-year-old witness
to the dusky backside balconies
of yellow brick apartments
with Hancock’s black tower fading behind,
and I, eating the cool green grapes
my married sister packed, cold
fried chicken, a red and white
paper napkin tucked in a brown bag,
lumbering slowly past city windows
reflecting Magikist neon, where red-trim-
aproned women, the same
high-heeled secretaries I’d seen
on Michigan Avenue, were now fingering
the radio knob for jazz or polka while my train
lullabyed me home toward the small town
of my dull, window-gazing life,
but for a few minutes more, still here,
alone, humming along in the city.

Poetry should be heard.

Posted for the dVerse train poem challenge. This is my first time participating in this really terrific poetry community called dVerse Poets Pub hosted today by Claudia Schoenfeld of jaywalking the moon.

Paintings by Edward Hopper: "Approaching the City" and "Woman on a Train"

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Seamus Heaney: "Digging" in Ireland

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Portrait of Seamus Heaney (b. 1939), by Peter Edwards

National Portrait Gallery, London;
I have a postcard of this painting
taped to my file cabinet at work.

For St. Patrick's Day stores are sprouting plastic shamrocks, a paltry substitute for the island rock of green that grows deep down in many of us, even if we're not Irish: green and purple hills, icy lakes, soft woolen caps, pocked stone fences and crosses, rain on the roof, a fiddle, a fire on the hearth, a glass of stout, a never-ending talker on the other side of the table, an old history of pain and struggle, faith, and writing. A smile, a song and a lament.

Poet Seamus Heaney is a lighthouse in an island country cultivated with literary lighthouses. He was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland, and many of his poems are rooted there in the rural countryside of his childhood. I just love this one, one of his most famous, about his father the digger. See how he alludes to a gun, which was a familiar and ugly character in the Northern Ireland of his youth. In the YouTube video is a montage of clips in which he recites "Digging" in many different venues, at different ages, with different timbres in his voice. Think of that. One life, one family, one man, one poet, who harvests and feeds us riches like this, in and out of just one poem. Oh my dear friends, the world in one person! See the spade and hear it slide into the wet dirt. Smell the iron, the wet steel, the potato mold. Feel the hands of father and son, one with a shovel and one with a pen. Hear the pen, Heaney's shovel, that digs for sustenance, and replants it too, to come up for us again and again, like Swift, Wilde, Beckett, Lewis, Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, and a lot of other pen-diggers. (There are no women in my list, for I have not studied Irish women writers, but here is a list to explore; no doubt you could help me too.)

After the video, I've lined up my own St. Patrick's Day parade of photos taken over two summers, 2006 and 2007, while I helped students traipse around Dublin, Killarney and Cork. I have not been to Northern Ireland, or I would share scenes from those counties. Six out of thirty-two Irish counties are in Northern Ireland. As you probably already know, Southern Ireland became the Irish Free State in 1922, now known as the Republic of Ireland, and is no longer part of the United Kingdom. I knew Ireland as the Celtic Tiger in the mid 2000s high-tech boom, but now, Ireland has the highest ratio of household debt relative to income of any developed country in the world. I really feel for those young families who thought prosperity would last forever. As Roger Cohen recently said, maybe it's time for "emotional prosperity" since the financial kind is becoming a thing of the past for many of us.

Digging

   by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.


- from Death of a Naturalist (1966)

 Students on study abroad program, Cork

Graveyard on the Hill of Slane, site of St. Patrick's Paschal Fire

County Meath, Ireland

Killarney National Park

County Kerry

 Residential neighborhood
Kinsale, County Cork

 Cork, County Cork

Kinsale, County Cork

 Trinity College, Dublin, County Dublin

 Killarney National Park
County Cork
The sheeps' heads are red, not because they are Irish redheads, 
or because they are bleeding, but they are marked by their owners

 Killarney National Park
County Cork

 Street in Cobh, County Cork

Window in Cork, County Cork

 Blarney Castle, County Cork

Ha'penny Bridge, Dublin

 My dear friend of the mind-heart, Inge,
at Four Knocks, the 5000 year-old passage tomb
in County Meath; Inge taught on the study abroad program

Me, photographed by Inge, who taught in the program in 2007,
looking at abstract art in the 5000 year-old passage tomb
at Four Knocks, County Meath

Beech tree in the church yard at Tara
County Meath

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The Bridge

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This is Farwell. I don't know if that's his name there on the motorcycle, but that's the name of the little town whose population doubled when these bikers stopped for breakfast. Three years ago this weekend I was on my way north for a solo weekend away, because it was the 50th anniversary of the construction of one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. The Mackinac Bridge spans the Straits of Mackinac between the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan. The anniversary was an excuse for my Aveo, my camera and me to run off together and cross that 50-year-old bridge, one year after I'd turned 50 myself. We ladies have to support each other (nyuck nyuck). (Did you know that bridge is feminine in German, but masculine in Spanish?) I left home (southeast of the star on the map at the capitol, Lansing) and a couple hours later drove into Farwell (not too far from Midland on the map), a town where you don't have to stop since there are no traffic lights or stop signs going through town. But I did stop, to check out this caravan of motorcycles. I sat down on a bench across the street from the diner where these bikes were parked, and waited with my camera. After reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in college, I always wanted to take a cross-country motorcycle trip (I'd love this pre-1916 Cannonball Coast to Coast Vintage Motorcycle race). Maybe this was my chance?

When the bikers came out of the diner, they took their time, chatting about where they'd stop next. The gentleman with the Harley-burly beard in the foreground of the photo at the top of the post sauntered across to his bike parked in front of me on my bench and immediately asked if I'd like to go for a ride? Hmm. Here was my long-awaited opportunity to ride in the open air, hair flying from under a helmet, bugs on my teeth. Route 66, here I come!

I declined, however, with all the courtesy I would give the President of the United States. If I think about it too much, traveling alone as a woman can be a little creepy. So I don't think about it too much. (I admit that once or twice in motels I have gotten pretty weirded out if the Psycho shower scene sneaks past the doorlock in my head.) I have found that if I treat people with respect, they treat me the same way. When I'm in Chicago or NYC, and I'm lost? I'm going to ask a construction worker for directions, even though they sometimes come off as being, well, aggressive, toward women (or has this changed?). Something in me really likes to confront assumptions in myself, and in others about me. I have never experienced anything but the most genteel behavior in these encounters (except a few times from whoever is with me, who thinks I've lost my mind). I have approached the thuggiest looking people (I don't mean construction workers are thuggy-looking), and while they may look surprised at first (aren't we all surprised when a stranger comes up to us?), they are always helpful. Something gets bridged between you. If you've never tried approaching the least likely person on the street for help, try it, it is liberating.

I'm careful and don't put myself in dangerous situations. I get a sense if a person is not the kind I want to approach, maybe it's a sixth sense. I always have a cell phone. I only explore in public places, and always in daylight. But I love to travel, and I love to do it alone sometimes, which Don graciously understands, if for some reason he can't join me. He says he doesn't worry about me, although there is one artistic neighborhood project in Detroit I am eager to explore, and he won't let me go alone, even in the daytime. Being vulnerable, because I'm a woman, can be very frustrating in its limitations.

Perhaps my trust in strangers began on my first day of school in kindergarten, when I lost my way home and was crying on the sidewalk. A strange man in a truck stopped and asked if I wanted a ride. No matter that everyone had told me not to get into vehicles with strangers. I said, Sure. He drove me two blocks home. To this day, I don't know how he recognized me, but I didn't know him.

Have you ever traveled overnight alone, just for fun, not business?

my Aveo parked in front of the motel in St. Ignace, Michigan in October 2007

where I was the only guest for the night;
St. Ignace is the first town over the bridge in the Upper Peninsula

state park beach along Lake Huron

northern Michigan farm

Harbor Springs, Michigan

Five Mile Creek, a one room school

wild turkeys in northern Michigan 

(by "northern Michigan" I mean the northern part of the Lower Peninsula)

Mackinac Bridge, between the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan
from the upper peninsula in St. Ignace

Mackinac Bridge, from the Upper Peninsula
in its 50th year, 2007

Mackinac Bridge, on my way to morning coffee and breakfast at a diner

rustic boat on a rustic beach

wild beach yarrow
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The turquoises and blues of the Great Lakes are better in autumn

I am severely disappointed that we did not get up north this summer, and our plans for going this fall have also fallen through. That's why I'm posting three-year-old photos, because of my wanderlust for that magical part of the world just a few hours away.

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Thirteen ways

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The Jungfrau in Switzerland is one of dozens of primary peaks of the Bernese Alps,

where I am standing in 1975 during my college study trip mentioned in the last post.

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

~ from the poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" written in thirteen haiku-ish stanzas and published in 1917, was one of the first poems Diane Wakoski taught in my poetry class (in East Lansing, not Lauterbrunnen, alas). Thirteen Ways is an imagistic poem, a Modern (as in, the period) way of writing poems with clear, sharp language, unlike the focus on lyricism of the previous so-called Romantic period. Another famous Modern imagistic poem is Ezra Pound's short two-lines "In a Station of the Metro," written four years earlier after Pound was touched by a visual moment coming out of a Paris metro train:

    

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

It's so zen. William Carlos Williams, another Modernist, suggested that when writing good poems there are no ideas but in things. In other words, paint images with things instead of descriptions. Show, don't tell.

Back to Thirteen Ways. Marvel-ous as our eyes are, we can't see twenty snowy mountains all at once. Our eyes have to scan gradually. We can't see the eye of the blackbird either, in a scene like that. Our brains are censoring what we perceive every second. I suppose most often our eye catches what is moving, like that blackbird's eye, if the moving thing is big enough to be perceived. But we can imagine the scene painted by Stevens in that stanza. It's one of the thirteen ways he paid attention to a blackbird. I've posted the whole poem below. I hear you sigh, either out of bliss, or out of poetry fatigue. Is it long? you ask. See, about the different ways?

Feel the mystery in each way he looks. In some of his lines I don't know what he means. What is Haddam, without looking it up? But it doesn't really matter, when he writes:

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

Because he's not just writing about looking at a blackbird. Bien sur. We live in days of change and mayhem and people knowing about it like we've never known before, more than the terrible decade of WWI when these poems were written. There are "thirteen" ways of looking at anything. I kind of like how that slows things down.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

Terresa's sensual womanly-writerly post Random Marigolds and Yosemites reminded me of this poem this week, which led to the post. 

Read more Wallace Stevens poems here. My favorite is The Snow Man, because I have a mind of winter too.

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cross cultural rhubarb & my peeps

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I had been picking rhubarb and strawberries, making pie and photographing the process (hahaha, only a blogger) during Memorial Day weekend, nagging myself: If you post at sync about making a beautiful pie you might mislead people into thinking you are like Nigella Lawson (the British food maven who showed me that food is sensual). You are not like her, except that you love food.

I'm not going to show you all my "warts", but I also don't want to misrepresent the facts.

So I was happy for something to synchronize with strawberry-rhubarb pie and divert from oh-aren't-I-a-food-goddess fantasies when I read something about Samuel Pepys in the Writer's Almanac on Memorial Day. Thanks to Lorenzo, I resubscribed to the Writer's Almanac. I like reading the poems Keillor picks, and also the literary birthdays and histories. The May 31st post said it was the last day Samuel Pepys wrote in his famous diary, in 1669.

This jiggled loose two 1975 London eating memories, one with my peeps, I mean Pepys, and the other with rhubarb.

When I was little, our neighbor had rhubarb growing in the back yard. Jimmie and I used to go out in May and pick and munch a stalk right there, its sourness making our faces twist up like this just born punk rhubarb head in Don's garden this spring, below.

Raw rhubarb is an adventure, but I love rhubarb best in pie with strawberries. Rhubarb feels gritty on your teeth, especially raw. Even in a pie by itself, it has a texture that makes your teeth feel like the enamel just dissolved. But when it's paired with strawberries, the grittiness goes away.

At the end of the summer that I turned 14, I sat on the cabbage rose carpeted floor of my parents' house (which by the way had been Jimmie's, the one with the rhubarb, whose grand-in-a-soul-sense house we bought when I turned 12) while my brother Bennett showed slides on a big screen of his tour through Europe on a history study program with his college. I vowed sitting there under the snow-covered Jungfrau that I would go on that same trip when I was in college. The summer I turned 19, after one year of college in Illinois, I hopped on a plane with twenty-some students from Boston and fulfilled my vow getting my brand new passport stamped in 10 countries over an eight week period. Those were the days of eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of the backs of vans, sleeping in campgrounds outside Paris and Amsterdam, crawling out of the sleeping bag and tent and stepping in a cow pie, with Elsie the cow chewing grass ten feet from my face.

I was somewhat prepared for Europe to be different than the U.S., where English was not the native language. But I didn't expect England to feel as different as it did, which resulted in my having more culture shock there than in other places. How could we speak the same language but have so many different words for things, like lorry for truck and jumper for cardigan sweater?

London came in the second of eight weeks, and I was already feeling a tad homesick. My friend and I found an inexpensive restaurant on a London street, and when I saw rhubarb pie on the menu, I felt like my parents' back yard was behind me, and I asked for some. "They have rhubarb in England!" I declared. Little did I know that Europeans had it first and took it to America with them back in the day. (When I say "first," I mean before us Americans. The Chinese had rhubarb thousands of years before any of us.) The rhubarb tart was warm and served with warm custard in a small white pitcher on the side to pour over it. I had never in my life had warm custard on anything, and it was fabulous. Boxed instant vanilla pudding does not translate into this experience. There was something in that moment that morphed home and foreign into something new inside me.

It's funny, the things that educate you about life. I first heard of Samuel Pepys and his diary at a restaurant with his name. When you're 19 and trying to make your pocket money last for eight weeks, visiting shops and museums and falling in love with things that have price tags, you eat a lot of street food, like white cheese, tomato and butter sandwiches on baguettes. I had never eaten or seen a tomato and cheese sandwich, had I even had cheese other than plastic cheese known as American? Nor had I ever eaten tomato, butter and bread in one bite. I liked it. I liked it more than Miracle Whip, and at least as much as mayonnaise. But one evening some of us decided to splurge and make reservations at the Samuel Pepys restaurant overlooking the Thames River after a play in the theater district. I felt sophisticated eating a prime piece of British cow with my new Boston friends, dressed up in the one dress I'd packed in the suitcase between one pair of cut-off jeans, one pair of straight-leg red-tab Levi's, three t-shirts and a sweater for the summer, as we dined by candle light with flickering London lights reflected in the river outside. I remember John-of-the-khaki-pants, the bearded student who never wore blue jeans because he wanted to be different, pontificating about Samuel Peeps when we entered the restaurant and saw pages of the diary under glass. I saw how Peeps was spelled, and I silently learned that even English names can sound nothing like they appear.

And that weird spelling of that other word with a silent letter, the "h" in rhubarb? The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

rhubarb - c.1390, from O.Fr. rubarbe, from M.L. rheubarbarum, from Gk. rha barbaron "foreign rhubarb," from rha "rhubarb" (associated with Rha, ancient Scythian name of the River Volga) + barbaron, neut. of barbaros "foreign." Grown in China and Tibet, it was imported into ancient Europe by way of Russia. Spelling altered in M.L. by association with rheum. European native species so called from 1650. Baseball slang meaning "loud squabble on the field" is from 1938, of unknown origin, said to have been first used by broadcaster Garry Schumacher. Perhaps connected with use of rhubarb as a word repeated by stage actors to give the impression of hubbub or conversation (attested from 1934).

Rhubarb is a great world traveler, starting in China at least 2,000 years BC. You can read more about the history of rhubarb, including Marco Polo's excitement about finding it in China, because Europeans were crazy for Chinese rhubarb's medicinal qualities, here. 

I leave you with the recipe for rhubarb pie. The version with strawberries is toward the bottom. Oh, and you know how you can find anything on the Internet? Here is a site with daily readings from Samuel Pepys' diary.

-Betty Crocker

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What is NY?

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What is New York? It's big, that's what New York is. Which means this is a big apple big post. Believe me, I tried to keep it to a minimum. I spent three days in the City last week. Yum. Wow. Fun. (That's me using small words, trying to keep it short.)

So, what is New York? What can I say, I was a tourist. This is not a deep look into the heart of the City. Just a middle aged woman's snapshots.

New York is neighborhoods. Sixth Street in the Village, above, is inhabited by many Indians, and there are Indian restaurants up one side and down the other. I spent a lot of time in Midtown Manhattan, because that's where the museums are, but I would have liked to spend more time in residential areas like Lesley & Brian's Queens neighborhood. We did get out one day to the grocery store. I heard mostly Greek being spoken, and some Spanish. Below is one of several produce markets in Astoria. Look at that hot green tomata between the mangoes and papayas.

New York is museums, and art. This was my first time to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which I did in one day. I am a firm believer in the litest visit possible for large museums like the Louvre and the Met, focusing on a few exhibits in one trip. Besides what you see in the Met images below, I saw the American Woman costume exhibit. I wanted so badly to touch the crepe and beads of flapper dresses, or take close-up photographs of details of 1930s gowns. But the stern guards would have none of that.

At the MoMA, I limited my steps to the Cartier-Bresson exhibit on the 6th floor. Even with just that one area, I spent almost two hours, and I was exhausted at the end, emotionally and physically. You can only take so much in, you know? His portraits are enthralling, showing each celebrity in their own context and mannerisms, such as Jean-Paul Sartre with his pipe, below. His photos of street women are touching. And when I got to the images taken at the end of WWII (like the one in the lower left corner, below, of the woman in black about to strike the other woman, who had falsely accused her) and at the time of Gandhi's sudden death in India, with the crowds flocking to the train where his body swayed in a casket in the clacking train's rhythm, I could only weep. Such, my dears, is the power of photographs of people.

New York is eating out. Twice Lesley and I ate out alone together. The first was at the vegan Caravan of Dreams on 6th Street in Greenwich Village after she got out of work Thursday. (Next visit maybe we'll try one of those Indian places on 6th St.) The "live" (new term for "raw") salad was one of the most delicious I've tasted. It is a Zagat reviewed restaurant, and I give it four stars, vegan or no vegan. The other food spot she and I shared alone was for brunch Saturday at Park, under the High Line park, our delayed Mother's Day together-celebration. That is her dipping a bite of fried chicken steak in maple syrup below. Yep.

Saturday evening Lesley & Brian treated me to a dinner at the Tao that was so good I almost didn't realize I was devouring my tempura soft shell crab until it was gone. Apparently the restaurant name is pronounced with the "T" sound, not the "D" sound for the religion. And I helped myself to the lonely shrimp at the bottom of Lesley's bowl too. All that walking had me ravenous apparently. Tao was not a very religious place, but it was packed and hopping and overflowing with Euro-pop music around the big candle-lit Buddha. I loved hearing Brian tell family stories, since I am still getting to know my son-in-law less than one year after they married here on the farm. I sometimes regretted his witty humor though, because it hurt to laugh since earlier that day I fell hard on the concrete sidewalk near Union Square, bruising my ribs on my Nikon D40 sandwiched between the concrete and me. You'll be happy to know that neither the camera, nor my ribs, broke. But it frightened poor Lesley, and a nice man who waited to see if I was all right.

New York is fashion. I sweated a little before the trip, wondering what I would wear. Wanna be comfortable, but stylish enough to fit in. It's a blast to watch people in NY, of course, but all those gorgeous women on 5th Avenue, now they are really something, my daughter among them.

New York is transportation. Ever present is the question of how you will get around. How many trains does it take to get there? Should we just take a taxi? Lesley & Brian live not far from Laguardia Airport, in Astoria, Queens, so I took one of the black taxi-limos to their apartment. Well almost. The guy got confused and dropped me on the other side of Broadway (not the Manhattan one), and when I crossed I nearly got hit by a speeding turning car, me and my purse, camera, backpack with Apple Blossom and the wheeled carry-on. And there on the corner were Lesley & Brian gasping at my near demise, fresh from the subway after work, having just arrived on separate trains. It was perfect timing, at which point I was glad for the 1.5 hours sitting and waiting on the tarmac in Detroit.

C'est moi, below, waiting for the train.

New York is parks. Thank goodness for Central Park, and other parks around the City. But even with them, Lesley is getting antsy for a back yard. They don't have even a balcony at their beautiful apartment. It is easy for me to take the farm for granted, where I can walk out into Nature whenever I please.

I have been intrigued by the High Line park since it opened a year ago, and I posted about it at my Huffing-Puffing blog. The 10 blocks of elevated train tracks had been out of use for decades. They have turned it into an oasis where wildflowers and grasses grow just as they do along the train tracks of rural Michigan.

The white building below was designed by Frank Gehry. The photo below that shows the Empire State building in the distance. Polka dot lady has a Coke can handbag below that.

New York is shopping. But not for me. I think Lesley wishes I liked shopping, but she was a very good sport. Just about every woman who knew I was going to New York said something about shopping. I really, really, really don't like shopping. Especially in New York, where all the spaces are confined, and carrying bags around just takes up more space. The one thing I did shop for, and do wherever I go, was postcards in the museum shops. Besides sending them to people now and then, I use them as bookmarks. Remember me? I'm the woman who reads a few pages in many books and rarely finishes them. So, I need a lot of bookmarks.

New York is people. I was sad the first morning, acutely aware that I was not in the Midwest where strangers smile at me, and I smile back. Or vice versa. I felt lonely, in a sea of living, human waves. I adjusted by that first afternoon, but I could feel my psyche overwhelmed. I did enjoy watching people. Except when I didn't want to watch them any more. Then I just looked down at the sidewalk, like almost everyone else.

Besides Lesley & Brian, I even know a few other people in New York. It was a special treat to meet my visiting brother's freshest grandchild at his son's apartment by Central Park. This sleepy little big city farmgirl (she's in gingham, right?) is Eva. That's Papa (my brother Jim) holding her, her dad (Nathan) with her brother (Riley), and Lesley & Brian. Mom (Nancy) and Mimi (Jim's wife Wilma) are not in the photo.

You know how I love the small. And so, that is what I will end this big post with. I had such a good time. Thank you for visiting with me.

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