» spring in New York

I keep my word

Spring in New York will not ever cease to amaze me. Each year I’m struck by the insane beauty of the flowers that bloom out of nowhere and the tiny buds that sprout and the lush calls of the birds in the trees. Laid out at the feet of this steel and concrete metropolis, the saturated colors are all the more breathtaking.

This year I’ve noticed that the flowers have an entire life cycle of their own. First bloomed the tender daffodils and tulips, then the irises in all their midnight blue, now lillies on stalks as tall as me, or perched on top of pointed green crowns…

Then there are — are these daisies? I think they’re wild flowers. Michael says they’re just weeds, in which case I say, grow me a garden of these beautiful weeds!

Inside the apartment we have all sorts of green thumb experiments going on as well, and also our CSA starts up again tomorrow! Expect some very green posts in the near future. Happy Monday!

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Frost, June 7th 2010 | Tags: flowers, lillies, lily, new york city parks, NYC, spring in New York, wild flowers
Posted in Daily Life

The Season of Dirty Feet

I love spring in New York City. As a child growing up in the San Fernando Valley I never had the opportunity to witness the absolute stunning beauty of the first yellow tulip after six months of freezing gray. But now? For the rest of my life, when I see yellow tulips I will remember the City in spring. But there is something else that comes with the creep of spring, there is a darker side. Something sticky and grisly and black as oil. That something is Dirty Feet.

Our first spring in the City I documented the phenomenon on my Flickr site. Over the next two-plus-years a photo of my dirty feet received 4,312 unique views.

That is ridiculous. My dirty little feet have gotten more clicks than any post I’ve ever written ever. Apparently there are a lot more of you interested in how dirty my feet are then how cute my dogs are.

The thing is, I do not like being dirty. There is a funny family story that my sister likes to tell about the first time she took me to the beach when I was eight months old. I’d been lathered in sun block and made to wear a hat and sit under an umbrella and I’d taken it all like a champ. I giggled and cooed and waved my shiny red shovel and then the wind blew and five or six grains of sand were swept up onto the blanket six inches from my knee. And I began to scream. And scream. My sister leapt up, shook the blanket, put it back down, and still I screamed. She offered me water, a new toy, something to eat, was my hat too tight? Was there sand in my eye? No, no, I was fine, perfectly fine, but there was sand on the towel and I do not like to be dirty.

Perhaps you can understand how horrifying it was when I took off my shoes last night and found their outlines traced along my foot in grisly black grime. It was so horrible, so awfully terribly horrible, I almost cried.

This is a first-world problem, I know. I realize that if having dirty feet is the worst thing that happens to me in a day, I’ve had a pretty damn good day. But it’s that time of the month when socks on the floor and a glass on the table make me froth at the mouth, so you can imagine my reaction when I realized that even the pumice wasn’t scraping the black grit out from underneath my skin cells.

But then, there’s this …