We woke Sunday to chilly temperatures and strong winds: awesome weather for a ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty. We bundled up (though not warmly enough) and rode the subway to the southern tip of Manhattan to catch the first ferry of the day. Our tickets were for 9AM, but we were through security by 8:20 and were underway on a boat that wasn’t even half full by 8:30. Cold wind whipped hair into my eyes on the upper deck of the ferry, but it was worth shivering to have an unobstructed view of the statue as we approached.
Statue of Liberty and Manhattan skylineWe were the first to the island, and therefore had it mostly to ourselves. As the later ferries began arriving, filled to capacity with tour groups, school groups, family groups, church groups, and large groups of all sorts, we were glad we had that first half hour or so alone with only 10 or 12 other folks to enjoy the quiet and open spaces of Liberty Island before the masses arrived.
Lady LibertyFrom Liberty Island we rode the ferry to Ellis Island and witnessed the Great Hall where immigrants were processed upon entry to the U.S., along with the 750-bed hospital complex — the United States’ first public health hospital — for quarantine and infectious diseases.
Great Hall at Ellis IslandBy this time I was quite cold, and the sky darkened with spitting clouds. We made our way from the southern tip of Manhattan up to the 9/11 memorial, which was a sobering sight: two city-block-sized holes in the ground, the footprints of the twin towers, now pools with water that falls forever into unknowable, unseeable depths. From the memorial pools, I looked up to see the new, One World Trade Center
9/11 Memorial Pool One World Trade CenterThese were heavy to behold, and we spent time in quiet to absorb them before moving on. We were cold and hungry after a morning on the windy water and under clouded skies, and we both wanted a hot lunch. We had no real agenda after the Statue of Liberty and the 9/11 Memorial, except that we both wanted to visit Little Italy, so we started walking away from Ground Zero towards where we thought we could find the subway that would take us near Little Italy. It was these wanderings that were often my favorite parts of our trip because we happened upon unexpected wonders, like the intricate, decadent Woolworth Building, when we did so.
Woolworth BuildingWe arrived in Little Italy and sought refuge in one of the first restaurants we came to, where it was snug and warm. I ate a plate of lasagna, and my mom had eggplant parmesan, and I was toasty and content. The small, cozy restaurant, the hot food, the warm Italian staff were exactly what I wanted. We stopped next in a pastry shop where I ordered a cappuccino and ate amaretti cookies while we waited out the rain that started as soon as we dipped into the cafe. Finally, we were exhausted after our big and somber morning, and after our full first day on Saturday, so we walked back to our hotel, stopping off in a couple of Italian cheese shops, and accidentally happening into Chinatown on our journey.
Cheese, meats, breads in Little ItalyI snuggled under the blankets to get warm, and we both napped in the quiet of our room. We had nothing else planned, and once we were rested, we both thought it would be fun to close out our trip with Times Square.
Immediately on exiting the platform, we knew were in the liveliest of all the subway stations we had been to. We heard music — trumpet and trombone and drums — and it was toe-tapping and good. These guys blew beat up brass and played plastic bucket drums, and the lack of fancy instruments did not stop them from producing fine boogie woogie music. They played with heart, with fun, and with passion.
Buskers in Times Square subway stationThese street performers were the perfect introduction to Times Square: vibrant and high-stimulous. When we exited the station onto the street, we were assaulted with the visual loudness of it all.
Snapchat ad, Times Square Crumbs Bake Shop, Times Square
Times Square Ball DropTimes Square, and a walk over to the Empire State Building, were the perfect way to close out our NYC touristing. We headed back to Soho for a taco dinner, and went to bed early, exhausted from our two big days. This morning, we said goodbye with a great delight of the city: there’s always an excellent coffee shop nearby. One block away from our hotel, I enjoyed a final cup of coffee, and a surprise doughnut (the shop looked too small to have treats, but they had an amazing, if tiny, selection of doughnuts and pastries — my mom selected a delicious ham and brie croissant).
That’s my favorite thing about New York City: the happy little surprises.
My mom and I are spending the weekend in New York, one of the places on her bucket list to visit. She’s never been, and I’d only been briefly for work, so we are here as full-on tourists these two days. I didn’t bring my laptop, but here’s a quick photo tour of our first day from my phone.
We started our Saturday with a walk east from our hotel in Soho to Katz’s deli near East Village. Mom wanted a NY bagel with lox; I wanted blintzes like my friend’s mom used to make when we had sleepovers at their house.
Katz’s deliCheese and blueberry blintzesMom sent home a salami from Katz’sWe walked north through East Village before embarking on my Mom’s first NYC subway ride. We both love all the fire escapes in this part of the city, though I didn’t get a great picture of them.
From the subway, we crossed Park Avenue, then Madison Avenue, then Fifth Avenue to arrive at the Museum of Modern Art. Once inside, I found a docent and said, “I’d like to see the Warhols and any Rothkos you might have. Do you have a Rothko?”
He tapped some things into his computer and smiled up at me. “We’ve got two Andy Warhols on the fourth floor, and Rothko is on the fifth. We’ve only got one Rothko, though.”
I was giddy. “One is enough.”
Rothko at MoMA Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans at MoMA Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol
We stopped at the fourth floor first, then the fifth floor for the Rothko. I had no idea the treats that awaited us there. At the top of the escalator was Wyeth’s Christina’s World. Then the Jackson Pollock painting everyone knows. Then Dalí’s melting clocks, Monet’s three-wall wide Water Lilies, Mondrian’s New York inspired Broadway Boogie Woogie, Picasso’s Three Musicians. Whole rooms of Picasso. And then, to my great surprise, van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Starry Night. I had no idea it was here.
From MoMA, which I adored, we walked north up Fifth Avenue towards South Central Park and our next stop for the day: afternoon tea at The Plaza hotel.
Roses in The Plaza; their scent filled the entry Tea menu, The Palm Court
The ceiling in The Palm Court The New Yorker tea
Tea at The Plaza was our great splurge, our Mother’s Day gift to each other. Mom drank champagne and I sipped the best Gin Sling I’ve ever tasted. Crystal chandeliers glittered above us, and we took our time savoring the sandwiches, scones, clotted cream and lemon curd, hot tea, tiny desserts, the clinking of porcelain tea cups, and the atmosphere of luxury.
After filling our stomachs to bursting, we walked and metroed again (accidentally taking the express towards the Bronx, and having to hop out far beyond our destination so we could get on the right train to go back), this time to Central Park West and W. 72nd Street for another item on my mom’s bucket list: the John Lennon memorial.
“There are three things I remember exactly where I was when they happened: JFK’s assassination, September 11th, and when John Lennon was shot,” she told me.
We came up onto the street from the subway and there was The Dakota, where John Lennon lived and where he was killed. We wandered around Central Park trying to find Strawberry Fields. In its center we would find the memorial. We walked and walked, having turned the wrong way when we first entered the park, but we knew we were close when we heard a guitar strumming and a voice singing Beatles songs.
John Lennon memorial, Strawberry Fields, Central Park West
We sat for some time there, watching the pilgrims and listening to the man on the bench singing John Lennon.
Still full after our tea, we rested in our room for a while. We skipped dinner and drank cocktails and ate sweet potato fries back in Soho instead.
“I really want to go back to that book store in Greenwich Village and see if they have the book I want,” I said.
It’s a John Cheever book, The Wapshot Chronicle, for my Massachusetts reading project. Our library doesn’t have it, and I can’t find it for my Nook either. I didn’t have high hopes that this little book store would have it either, but neither of us was ready to go back to the room, so we walked over to bookbook after drinks, just for fun.
My book from Greenwich Village
They had it! I’m pretty excited about my single take-home purchase, my souvenir from New York.
Once back in our room, we set our alarms for another big day in the city, and then we slept the deep sleep of the weary.
It just wouldn’t be April without a photo essay of the status of the garden. Here’s where everything stands right now, after last week’s drenching rains: herb blossoms, shrubs in bloom, and perennials building up their flowers.
Creeping thymeDwarf lilacIndigo salviaYarrowSedumSome kind of asterEchinacea budThymeFlower box with petunias, alyssum, vinca, and marjoram
I did it. I set out to fill a 100 sheet/200 page composition book in April, and today, three days before the month’s end I filled the final page.
A friend asked me recently if I’d ever considered writing a book. “I have not,” I told him. “What would I write about?!”
“That is the worst excuse,” he said.
I think not having a topic is the best excuse for not writing a book. When I told another friend I filled 80 pages of my notebook on vacation, he asked what I wrote about. “Whatever was in my brain,” I told him. In other words, random thoughts. I’m not writing a novel, I’m not working on a project.
I daydream about writing a book, but I know I couldn’t make a living from it, especially if I don’t even have a topic. Maybe in retirement, when my husband and I are living on a sailboat. I can write about what we eat when we live aboard. I’m sure there’s a huge market for that.
I’m reading Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction — and Get It Published by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato, and as I progress through their advice, I stand by my conviction that not having a topic is an excellent excuse for not writing a book. As they explain in their chapter on proposals, and what an editor is looking for in a book proposal, there are five critical questions an editor wants the answers to:
What is the book about?
What is the book’s thesis (many in publishing refer to it as the book’s argument), and what’s new about it?
Why are you the person to write this book?
Why is now the time to publish the book?
Who makes up the core audience for the proposed book, and why will they find it appealing?
If my blog is any indication of the answers to these questions:
What is the book about? Everything. Nothing.
What is it’s thesis? I dunno. That trees have souls? That it’s okay to be ordinary? That you can write about everything and nothing and someone might read it?
Why are you the person to write this book? Good question. No idea.
Why is now the time to publish the book? It’s not. It would be a terrible book.
Who makes up the core audience? Goodness, these are hard questions!
As you can see, I do not have a book here. These questions are compelling, though, especially the thesis question. What would the argument of a book I wrote be? What is the argument of my blog? Surely there is a mindset that ties everything together.
Natalie Goldberg, poet and author of Writing Down the Bones, suggests that writers have obsessions — “things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released” — that they return to again and again. I recently published a post called I remember St. Simons, and what didn’t make it into the post, the words that are in my notebook but not on my blog are:
I remember writing all this before, or is it just that I’ve turned these memories over so many times in my life and my mind that it seems like I’ve written them before?
After I published the post, I searched my blog. I was certain I had written something similar, it couldn’t just be memories in my mind. And then I found it: a piece called Writer’s Block, which was published in the online journal Southern Women’s Review. In I Remember St. Simons I used some of the exact same phrasings I wrote more than four years ago in a piece I haven’t looked at in years.
So there are obsessions running throughout my blog, but as Rabiner and Fortunato clarify in Thinking Like Your Editor, an obsession or a topic is not a thesis. What is the thesis of my blog? What is the thesis of my life? That’s the more important question, but not one I have an answer to.
I still don’t have plans to write a book. I have no topic, no thesis, no audience in mind. But these questions have invoked a curiosity about what — if I had to sum my argument about life and living in one sentence – would my life’s thesis be?
The time of year has finally come: time to change the blankets. We replaced our thick down comforter this weekend with a lighter weight one. It is spring.
Already the days lengthen. A week ago, when I sat by the window at 6:20AM writing, the world outside glowed moon blue. This morning at that same time, the world shone peach: orange sherbet clouds, pink dogwood blossoms, apricot sunlight warming the white siding of houses.
We can grill as late as 7:30 pm and still have daylight. My husband sat on the white-railed porch in the evening sun last night, relaxing in a cobalt canvas chair, sipping a gin sling. Goldfinches and woodpeckers flitted at the bird feeder hanging from the oak out back, and smoke from the charcoal grill filled the air with the scent of campfire.
When we lived in Florida, I hated summer. It blazed eternal, an inferno. The searing rays of the sun and the scorching heat were relentless. My skin burned. My eyes burned. I’d start sweating the moment I stepped out of the shower.
Here in the Appalachians, where we have all four seasons, I love summer. Summer is the season of butterflies and gardens in bloom. It is the season of family vacations — a trip to New York City with my mom, a trip to Goergia with the kids, and a beach vacation for all four of us on the Gulf of Mexico. It is the season without school during the week, without soccer tournaments or swim meets on the weekends, the season when we can finally take our canoe on a camping trip, and sail on the lake on the weekends.
Yes, I like this time of year, when winter changes to spring, when summer is on the horizon. A time of warmth and sunlight. I like this time of year, when we change our blankets.
This is my entry for The Daily Post blanket prompt.
The drenching has finally subsided. For three days it rained. Maybe four. The kids’ school was cancelled Monday due to flooding. Yesterday our grass was shin high and thick. It looked too dense to push a mower through.
During the rains, I watched the garden from the window. So much green against the darkness! The knee-high yarrow is a silver mound that looks like it could pick up its skirt and walk away. The catnip domes to mid-thigh. The Echinacea is lush and dense with long, dark, blue-green leaves that don’t yet have age spots or brown edges from the blazing summer sun.
One evening I couldn’t stand it anymore. I yanked my raincoat off its hanger in the hall closet, pulled on my green rubber boots, opened my polka-dotted umbrella, and I walked the garden in the rain. Drops pattered on the taut nylon of my umbrella, and my boots squished in soft, wet earth.
It had been 10 days since we sowed our wildflower seeds, and I wanted to find sprouts. And boy did I ever find sprouts. In the area we scattered zinnia seeds, several pairs of cotyledons had emerged. In the wildflower bed, dozens of tiny stems pushed up through the mulch. Beneath the ground their seeds have split open, sending a shoot towards the light and roots into the earth. Germination. “The process of something coming into existence.” What a beautiful word.
The seedlings are fragile at this stage, as they anchor themselves, brand new and vulnerable in the big, new world. They will need to grow leaves to gather sunshine and make food; they will need to spread roots to gather water and make a foundation. And they will need space for both: above ground to collect light, and below ground to absorb their drink.
This means I need to weed.
I’ve not yet figured out how to do that, especially since I’m not sure which of the seedlings are the weeds and which ones are the wanted. I can dig out the established weeds, though: the grass that’s creeping into the flower beds, the dandelions and spiny thistles that will never die. Up on the hill there are other weeds I’ve not dealt with before, broad-leaved and fast-growing: wild rhubarb and others I haven’t identified. Like the dandelions, these hillside weeds will be my nemesis throughout the growing season. I will have to be relentless with the spade, digging them out at their roots, refusing to let them take hold and dominate the hill and its new inhabitants.
The fog was thick this morning, and the grass and garden shone neon green as the sun rose and finally cast light on the quenched earth. On Friday I have a flex day. It will be warm and sunny, and I can’t wait to get out there and make space for our seedlings. To give them the chance to put down some roots.
This is my response to The Daily Post’s one-word prompt, roots.
Butterfly Mind 
