Risk / Reward

18 cyclists have been killed in NYC this year, 3 in the last week, but my friends, the sheer joy of moving lickety split through the night in the part of Maspeth that's carless at 9p.m., bike lit up like a Christmas tree of self-preservation, and the weird community you build briefly on encountering a bridge blocked by barriers for no apparent reason, asking another cyclist to hand your bike over an obstacle after you crawl gracelessly under, doing the same for him, laughing inside a bit when he calls your precious baby "really heavy," and saying goodnight as you go separate ways -- again, lickety split.

Richard Siken

Richard Siken's second book of poems was always long-awaited. My friend Matthew always compared it to waiting for the next album from your reclusive favorite new indie band. His first book was so much raw grief. His second, ten years later, is...a quieter thing.

Excerpt from "The Worm King's Lullaby":

3.
Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story.
There is no other version of this story.

5.
He was pointing at the moon but I was looking at his
hand. He was dead anyway, a ghost. I'm surprised I
saw his hand at all. All this was prepared for me. All
this was set in motion long ago. I live in someone else's
future. I stayed as long as I could, he said. Now look at
the moon.

Things you learn fast when your leg is broken

1. Breaking your leg doesn't necessarily hurt as much as you think it might. I still can't tell if I saw my ankle twist with my eyes or just watched it with my nerve endings. There's a clear picture in my head that is outlined bright red with sensation. A popping. A wrenching. A numbness. A yelp. An inability to feel my toes, followed by the relief that I could feel my toes. My insistence on narrating all of this aloud to whoever first came to see what was wrong. The pain when they took my skate off. The moments of hilarity in the whole process. The moments when the hilarity was almost too much and I nearly lapsed into hysterical laughter. The calm when the pain subsided and it felt like being in the ER was a waste of time when clearly I just had a bad sprain. I kept saying to my friends -- "This will probably be less annoying if I can go to urgent care when they open tomorrow. I'm sure it's nothing they'll be able to help with." Thankfully, they kept me there.

1.5. The fact that I've seen this happen to at least half a dozen friends and teammates is SUPREMELY comforting. I kind of know the routine. I have a ton of people to ask for advice. I have a sense of what will be mentally and emotionally difficult as I grapple with how much time and work it's going to take to get back to feeling strong and capable in my body and, eventually, on the track.

1.75. Going from identifying as an athlete who measures herself in strength and capability to move really fast and lift really heavy things and ride her bike all over NYC and play a fast-moving aggressive sport to someone who measures herself in how many things she can do before she has to sit down and elevate her leg again is...as eye-opening as I suspected it might be. I've grappled with my own ableism over the years, and still am, but my biggest points of empathy have been with mental disabilities (via depression and anxiety) until now. And I recognize my privilege in being able to know I'll be walking again in XYZ weeks.

2. Putting a cast on hurts more than you think it might. That's all I want to say about that.

2.5. Putting lists in rational chronological order is for suckers.

3. You can't use crutches on stairs. I've been sternly told not to try to crutch on stairs. I've been going up and down on my butt, using my arms to propel me, dragging my crutches down with me every four or five stairs. It feels ridiculous.

3.5. It takes exactly one day to stop caring if you're ridiculous.

4. I am learning so many creative ways to carry things. Sports bras are the best pocket in the world. Draping things on my shoulders also works. So do my teeth. I am the Christmas tree of hobbling humans.

5. In theory I can get places. I took a taxi to the doctor yesterday with exactly 30 minute's notice that they could see me for a referral I really need. In retrospect, that was crazy, but now I have the assurance that I'll be seeing a specialist before it's too late to get surgery. And I got back home without incident, even after having to crutch a block in the cold to meet my ride home. But I'm still learning how to open doors on crutches, and get into cars on crutches, and the entire world has become a giant problem-solving exercise that I, medically speaking, should not be taking too fast. My world is mostly my apartment and I'm learning to be okay with that. Like Rear Window, but for the moon out my bedroom window. Like Rear Window, but for the slow crawl of morning sun up the side of the building next door. Like Rear Window, but for the last few brown leaves clinging to their trees, daring December to strip them down.

6. Asking for help is hard, even when it's offered with great enthusiasm.

6.5. Counting your achievements helps. Yesterday I made myself coffee and washed my breakfast dishes. Today I will feel good if I successfully take a bath. Maybe some day I can get a friend to give me a fresh haircut!

7. I observed this when I first moved, from the hypothetical perspective of a person who could walk, run, skip, bike, etc, wherever she wanted, but: NYC is a terrible place to have any kind of mobility impairment.

8. I have good friends.

2016

John Glenn is dead.

I feel like every death this year is going to ring out like a giant tree, falling, and the name of the year. That's what happens on Facebook now. People say, '2016' and then there's a link to the latest terrible thing. We all know it's a garbage fire. The sun itself is probably a giant trash can, burning.

I know we'll lose people every year. Time doesn't pass without some loss or another. And really,  '2016' is a construct and not a discrete, cursed piece of time. The good and the bad of it extends well before and well after the space on the calendar. And fucking yet.

December

"Let me tell you a story about war. A fisherman's son and his dead brother sat on the shore. 'That is my country and this is your country and the line in the sand is the threshold between them,' said the dead brother. 'Yes,' said the fisherman's son.'

You cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes.

Bird 1: This is the wrong story.
Bird 2: All stories are the wrong story when you are impatient."

Richard Siken - War of the Foxes

Postcards: Traffic

1. Sometimes when a train (not my train, this is always something I see while I'm waiting for a different train, a train that sometimes feels like it's never going to get there) is pulling away from the stop, it squeals along the tracks like the first three notes of Leonard Bernstein's "Somewhere," where the lovers sing, "There's a place..." but we never hear the next note or the next word and then the train, the one that isn't my train, is gone. I swear, one out of every five trains plays these notes, in a squeal, but at the true pitches. I'll catch it on video some day.

2. You can't deny that you live in a dystopian landscape. Giant tubes emerge from manholes, smoking like construction-orange cigarettes. The city in the distance (from Brooklyn, from Queens) is almost always under a haze. On my ride to work this morning, a block sealed off due to a smoking construction site. I walk my bike past the fumes and the fire trucks, wondering what I'm inhaling.

3. New York drivers honk at everything. If you don't move fast enough when the light turns green. If you are a pedestrian, jaywalking up to 100 yards in front of them and in danger of slowing their progress. If you are a biker, weaving too erratically between lanes. It's prophylactic, the aural grease on the wheels of a river that no one wants to clog, but especially not for them.

4. It's heady to look down at the road in some parts of Midtown and realize you have four lanes of frantic traffic managing with no markers at all, with bare black asphalt and the best that fluid dynamics can manage. It's never more apparent than here that we are making this system work by sheer force of will.

4a. One fire truck barrels the wrong way up 2nd Avenue, which is a one-way street pointed at downtown Manhattan. This fire truck is going uptown. Somehow, the traffic parts.

5. The subway is always full of musicians. But today, the bridge I bike first over, then under each morning (making a shape like a backwards 4) has a saxophonist stationed under it, playing for the pedestrians and cyclists who stream up and down and past the bridge. Somehow, he's still there, or there again, when I head home for the day.

New York: first postcards

1. Sometimes you will be walking down the street in Queens, or the Village, or Brooklyn (never Midtown, rarely the upper east side) and ahead of you, just at the edge of your understanding, there will be a man's torso seemingly buried in the sidewalk, his head at hip level. It's always on the second glance that you realize he's emerging from a basement, often a grocery store basement, and on either side of him the heavy cellar doors have been flung open to admit a new shipment of something, or to allow this disconcerting halfway-here man to restock an empty shelf. Later the same day, you walk across these same basements, now closed, and the clanging of your shoes on the metal reminds you that there's no truly solid ground to be found here.

2. More than once I've gotten off the subway at a new-to-me stop, and a woman near me with a New York or neutral-to-me accent (not identifiable as a tourist, in other words) has asked me for directions. "Sorry, this is my first time at this stop," I admit. "Oh," she says, "mine too."  

3. This city smells. It is a rippling wonderland of smells. The open doors of a laundromat. Piss. Cherry trees. Sewage. The damp humidity of two dozen sweating bodies in your subway car. Perfume. Garbage. Car exhaust at every bridge and intersection. Piss again. On a good day, rain (petrichor), and the pretzel stand on the corner, and the ice cream truck on the other corner, and dumplings, and garlic, and hot dogs and curry and bike grease. And whatever the cosmic background radiation of the city was before you went nose blind weeks ago -- whatever smell the city has when it doesn't smell like these other things. Surely the buildings themselves have a smell. To be honest, I'd prefer the stink of piss to someone's too-heavy perfume on any day of the week.

4. Small kindnesses. A bus driver lets me get away without paying full fare, my second day here, because I haven't figured out the system yet. A woman in the locker room at the gym offers to help me zip the back of my dress because it's awkward and we all know that struggle. 

5. Bicycling to work. Where the steepest hill in this flatland is the Queensboro Bridge, and the worst you'll find anywhere else is potholes. At best, the bikers have their own lane protected by concrete. At worst, they flit and flow with traffic, not even paint on the road to tell them where to be. The most beautiful sight, in this land of lovely glass towers and dazzling reflections, is the morning commute in Manhattan, when by chance or by physics a dozen or so cyclists synch up and flow together up 2nd Avenue -- flitting past turning cabs, weaving horribly around anything that holds still too long, which is most cars because this is rush hour in Manhattan, dinging our bells at pedestrians who aren't aware we're coming and it's our turn to be here. There is a horrible chaos here on every street: everyone wears headphones even at peak traffic, someone will always be coming at you from the wrong direction, and no one cares whose turn it is or isn't to turn left. No one is ready for you to follow the rules or stop moving when the light turns yellow. But in these moments of synchronicity, the bicycles have an ordered beauty, like a school of small fish darting their collective mass toward safe harbor around seals, sharks, and the lumbering whales of buses.   

6. Why does anyone wear heels here why.

Change feels like death because it is

On Saturday morning I'm driving outta the state I've lived nearly 30 years with a truck full of stuff and one orange cat. People keep asking me how I'm feeling. I have days where I have a lot of feelings, and days where I'm too drained from Taking Care Of Things to access my feelings. Then I feel bad for not having access to my feelings at moments when I am sitting across from someone I will miss very much, who I know I will miss very much, but who I can't feel the imminent absence of because it's still not happening Yet.

At other times, I just feel insane with greed for more time. For all that I'm inflicting this on myself, for the best possible reasons, I am greedy.

Yesterday, one of my closest friends tattooed the outlined of the Great Lakes on my back, moving from west to east. From Wisconsin to New York. Wisconsin sits behind my heart, and together with an older piece, I have Wisconsin shapes cradling two sides of my left lung.

And then there's the spot where the Mackinac Bridge, three different lakes, a hoard of intersections all converge at my spine, which hurt the most of the whole process. It also happened to be the boundary between Superior/Michigan and everything else. Those first two lakes I know. Intimately. Summers on Lake Michigan at my grandfather's house, perched on the flat shore rocks reading or watching the sunset. The bay where I cut my foot and needed stitches and my mother carried me dripping down the beach. The first picture of an endless vastness I would later understand was just child's play compared to the ocean.

And Superior, my second great love, iceburged in April and desolate. Flooded with tourists in July. The place I have been most myself, that lone woman driving her red Honda, stopping when she feels like it, camera in hand at every thunderstorm and overlook.

And ahead, there's Huron, Erie, Ontario. Places I know, but more vaguely. Shores I have stared from, but only once, years ago. Places that don't - yet - feel part of my world.

Pain is at the boundaries. Between land and water. Between skin and air. Known and unknown. The moment when you put the truck into gear and tilt down the hill toward the highway, slowly at first and then with gathering speed.

C.T. Phone Home

I created this blog in 2008 because I was moving to Cape Town for 6 months and wanted to write about it for my friends and family.

It's easier to blog than to answer the same thrilled question--"How is the place where you are?"--fifteen times.

Also, my mom liked it.

Since then, this blog has been a dusty spot, mostly, with some small postcards about Wisconsin for the people I love who are not in Wisconsin.

Now I am moving to New York. This time, not for 6 months (hopefully) and instead for the forseeable future, until the part of the future that trails off into a question mark.

I have lived all but 19 months in Madison, Wisconsin. 13 of those months were in Baraboo, Wisconsin, just a small sigh away, still fully in Wisconsin, still spending weekends in my hometown.

I think I am going to be blogging more, now. Already I am fielding the same question dozens of times.

Do you know where you are living yet? No.
Will you be skating in New York? I have begun talks, but my body and life may not accommodate it immediately. 
Are you excited? I keep waiting to be told this is a joke or a dream.
Will you miss Wisconsin? My lungs collapse at the thought.

Christmas On The Good Earth

I stumbled across the Apollo 8 Christmas broadcast on, you guessed correctly, Christmas Eve. I just got back from a trip that included the Air & Space Museum in D.C. I haven't been excited like that in a long time. Which is funny, because the first time I ever went there (8th grade, school trip) I was bored out of my mind.

Here's something I put on Facebook. I'm resisting the temptation to rewrite in more "bloggy" language: 

An astronomer friend once asked me why I love space crap so much. Some of it is how small the scale of the galaxies makes me feel, in the good way where I know it's up to me to make meaning in my life, because the universe is expanding / everything is pulling slowly apart and nothing will last long enough for the time I wasted picking my nose to matter. 

& a lot of it is how much the history of space exploration represents some of the highest levels of hope and optimism in humanity. The Voyager I & 2 missions were some of the craziest things we've ever done. Hey, hypothetical intelligent life, here is a GOLDEN record containing some classical music, a baby crying, and scientific diagrams that can be decoded based on the time it takes for hydrogen to transition between its two lowest-energy states. We'll toss it out of the solar system and maybe some day someone will see it. Come find us if we're still around / maybe don't kill us! 

That's beautiful to me. And so friends, happy holidays, happy solstice, merry Christmas, & may your life be full of far more joy than sadness.

Voyager record replica at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum

Why radio towers matter

The Washington Post ran this piece recently about the aging demographics of NPR and the fretting this is creating for those who want to keep public radio going.

A lot of the talk about adaptation has involved growing podcasts, like Serial and other listen-at-your-convenience products.

And then there's this:

"...NPR has to strike a sometimes awkward balance with its digital forays. By sending its programs directly to listeners via digital means, it risks bypassing and even competing with the stations that broadcast those shows — and supply the dollars that enable NPR to produce them in the first place... 

...The bad news, however, is that the radio part of public radio may be in slow and irreversible decline, a fate faced by newspapers, TV stations and other kinds of “legacy” media in the digital age."

This is the stuff that makes me most fretful. 

Why does broadcast radio (as opposed to digital) matter? It's cheap to access, and almost anyone in the state can get a signal. At its most basic, you just need a $15 Walkman and some batteries. Meanwhile, tons of rural areas don't have broadband internet or a good signal for those smartphone data plans. 

And unlike newspapers, there is no literacy requirement for radio. Radio is the only thing you can access while driving or doing other work, so it's time-neutral. Until we have an infrastructure that eliminates the digital divide entirely, the analog is a vital and uniquely accessible source of news, information, and even community connection.

I'm not saying NPR doesn't need to do some real work to figure out how to stay relevant to younger listeners. But it would be terrible to lose the radio waves part of radio, or see it cheapened and hollowed out and emblazoned with advertising to the point that many newspapers have been--because if people don't want to access a service, it's as good as removing it entirely.

The stars and the wars

Madison, WI, 11/13/2015

The night after the attacks in Paris, before the arguments started in earnest about What Should Be Done, I went to a play. I went alone, because that is what you do when you want to see something but don't have a lot of room to coordinate with other people, and are relatively secure in being a person alone in public.

I had a front row seat. The play made me cry. I dabbed at my eyes with my sleeve for the entire second act. An actor mentions Paris in a context unrelated to current events; the audience sighs and murmurs.

A conversation, paraphrased:
A: "Doesn't the war make the stars irrelevant?"
B: "Don't the stars make the war irrelevant?"

The curtain call was awkwardly close, I'm sure half the actors could see my smeary eyelashes.

The play made me cry because it was about space, and science, and people working against a society that doesn't welcome their work, and the things people can achieve, individually and collectively, when they are bent on doing great things. The set was full of stars. Everything was very beautiful. Both the stars and the wars are relevant.

Paris

It is a beautiful day. The world is a troubling (terrifying, horrifying) place. It is difficult to feel these two things so strongly at exactly the same time.

Lake Superior, July 2015

The words to the writer

It's November again, I am writing a poem a day. Or rather, I am purposefully typing words every day. So far, I have some promising beginnings. It's not elation, but I feel satisfaction that I am trying a thing that is hard for me. I regret that it's hard for me. I am dismayed when I forget the word for internal rhymes. Assonance.

I'm re-reading Richard Hugo's, "The Triggering Town," because I remember it being a book that warped my mind where poetry was concerned.

He writes in chapter 2:

"In the news article the relation of the words to the subject (triggering subject since there is no other unless you can provide it) is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is so weak that for our purposes it isn't worth consideration.

Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way. When you write a poem, these relations must reverse themselves. That is, the relation of the words to the subject must weaken and the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength.

This is probably the hardest thing about writing poems."

I have essentially lived inside news articles for so many years. It explains a lot that this would be my problem. Unearthing 'I' is a bewildering business. 'I' feels forbidden to put to print. I have no trouble finding myself in ordinary life. But writing it down is another swamp entirely.

Stillness

Something that caught my hand today in my endless internet reading:

a synonym for living:

"say there is a way to be with your stillness and to be a little sad and to still keep moving through the day. it is important to keep the stillness, wherever you find it. write down little words like mica and chisel and tune and crown and pool and stakeand cardamom. it is okay to be lonely and to speak to a plant that seems to keep on dying no matter what you do and say to the plant, what’s wrong with you?"

Chidings, tidings

You say you'll write / you don't write. You get tired of Facebook / you keep posting on Facebook. You take endless photos of Wisconsin / no one sees them. You miss other people in other cities / you send no postcards. You turn 30 in a fit of striding-forth who-cares, then develop an apologetic mumble in certain hallways of time.

So. Hello? Who knows.

Assorted dark mornings

1. At my new apartment, to get to work I must first walk down a hill right into Orion's arms. Then I turn right and wait in the glare of passing headlights for a bus that is eerily full for this early. Winter is on its way. There is only one small crack of morning light floating behind me. I am walking away from it.

2. The bus keeps its lights dim, so I can't read. Our faces all blue and quiet.

3. At my last apartment, the bus came to a corner where only joggers and dogs broke the morning stillness. I was often the only one on it.

3. But everywhere, crickets.

4. I have a roommate for the first time in 5 years. A sleeping roommate means you cannot play the Smiths at full volume while you decide what to wear at 4:30 a.m. Reheating coffee, I open the microwave before it can beep. I practice walking softly and hope the neighbors downstairs are not glaring up at me. One of the cats follows me into the bathroom. I forget to brush my teeth.

Mulligatawny Stew - So Goddamn Good

Winter is coming, so I'm in soup mode. I want to learn how to make every (warm) soup. This "amazeballs" (my friend Kat said so) oddball is from the Cook's Illustrated "best 30-minute recipes" book. That said, I think it took a bit more than 30 minutes.

(I get annoyed by internet recipes that require me to scroll through 45 million cutesy photos before I can get to the actual information, so you get none of that. Just make this soup and put it in your belly.)

Ingredients:

6 C low-sodium chicken broth (I used Better Than Boullion)

1/2 C shredded unsweetened coconut

1 lb boneless, skinless chicken breasts (I used more like 1.5)

salt and ground black pepper

1 T vegetable oil (I used old drippings from some chicken...they'd also been seasoned with thyme and some other things, so not an entirely neutral flavor)

1 onion, minced

1 T grated fresh ginger

4 garlic cloves, minced

1 T curry powder

2 carrots, grated

1 very ripe banana, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces (I actually did a banana and a plantain, because the banana I bought wasn't "very ripe" and the plantains were.)

3/4 C plain yogurt

2 T minced fresh cilantro

Method:

1. Bring broth and coconut just to boil, covered, in large saucepan and set aside.

2. Season chicken with salt and pepper. Heat oil in large Dutch oven over medium-high heat until just smoking. Add chicken and cook until lightly browned on both sides, about 5 minutes. Transfer chicken to plate.

3. Add onion and 2/3 t salt to fat left in Dutch oven. Cook over medium-high heat until lightly browned, 3-5 minutes. Stir in ginger, garlic and curry powder, cook until fragrant (about 1 min).

4. Turn heat to low and stir in hot broth mixture, scraping up any browned bits. Add carrots, banana, and browned chicken. Cook, covered, until chicken is cooked through and no longer pink in center--about 10 minutes. (I found this to take longer)

5. Remove chicken from pot. Increase heat to medium-high and cook until carrots are tender, about 5 minutes.

6. While soup is simmering, shred chicken into bite-sized pieces. Puree soup in batches in blender until smooth. Return pureed soup to pot, stir in chicken, and return to brief simmer to heat through. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Dollop yogurt over individual bowls of soup, sprinkle with cilantro, and serve.

Two Stories About My Grandmother

Anna's gone. My very first chosen family.

She died at 92 surrounded by people bound to her by love alone. Yesterday she ogled a cute phlebotomist's butt. I don't think anyone there would deny that it was time.

Jan, her daughter ("just adopted," she told the funeral home over the phone, as if it meant less that they had chosen each other) told these stories while we watched and listened to the steadiness of her breathing and waited for a change.

1. Anna's Quilt

Anna and her sister Sophie were members of the Polish resistance forces during World War II. They were in Warsaw during the uprising (eventually the resistance would be crushed). Bombs were falling and buildings raining down. They needed to get somewhere else in the city, but they needed protection. In an empty apartment, they found heavy down comforters, which they wrapped around themselves. Then they ran.

They made it out alive. Anna kept the quilt, and slept with it on her bed every winter. It was the last thing we covered her body with tonight. There were stains here and there, but the body of it was sound. She wanted it to be cremated with her, so the ashes are "half feathers, half me."

2. Anna and Hal

Anna was married when she left Poland. When she and her husband came to San Francisco, she bought 25 pairs of stiletto heels. One day she was running after a bus to get to work. Stiletto heels, tight skirt. The bus had passed the closest stop -- but it stopped for her. Later she'd learn that Hal, on the bus, had made the driver stop. Later she'd choose between two lovers -- Hal, and George -- and her husband. Later she'd divorce her husband, and marry Hal the very next day. They traveled all over the world, teachers. (I never remember what subject).

Hal died 20 years later, six weeks after an X-ray found lung cancer. There had been another X-ray months before, but someone had interpreted it wrong, or somehow botched it. Hal said, "My knees hurt." Anna and Hal slept in their VW van outside the Baltimore clinic where he got his radiation therapy every day. He'd come back to the van warm all over. "Scorched," Jan recounts. Anna rubbed petroleum jelly on the burns. He wasted away before her eyes.

When he died, Anna left him lying in his hospital bed, got into the van, and drove toward California. When she couldn't drive anymore she walked. When she couldn't walk anymore she screamed, Jan said. Four years later, she moved to Wisconsin to marry a computer science professor who had loved her from a distance with long, awkward letters, but only told her once with his actual throat. Why Wisconsin, why Bob? "To punish myself," she often said.

But if not Bob, she'd never have met my dad, Bob's student, who lived with them, who she would  add to her chosen family, who would be at her side when she died.

Six weeks ago, Jan said, Anna said her knees hurt. And she knew she must have lung cancer (proven right only yesterday when a CAT scan found a huge tumor) because Hal's knees had hurt.

After Bob died, her last name was still Hal's last name. The wedding ring I took off her finger was Hal's wedding ring. When we filled out the death certificate tonight, when they asked about the name of her deceased husband, we gave Hal's name.

Summer in the city

I moved to Willy Street. I moved east to a neighborhood where people make a habit of talking to their neighbors, of growing sunflowers in illogical places, of leaving free bottles of Miller Lite on the sidewalk. I moved to an apartment where the rooms are not just one after another like they've been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube. I took a bunch of photos, but only to document what repairs are needed, what flaws my landlords might try to charge me for when I eventually move out. They have a reputation.

But rather than pictures of flaws in my apartment (I mostly can live with them), here is a list of thoroughly domestic perks:
* Two sinks in the kitchen, so I can dry dishes without taking up counter space. It occurs to me now that I had two sinks before, but the need for counter space was less urgent, and my drying rack, I believe, did not actually fit in the sink anyway.
* Laundry in the basement, rather than a place I have to drive to and read a book at. The dryer is broken, but we have a drying line and plenty of warm days left before fixing it becomes a matter of urgency. I can put a load in and resume cooking dinner or whatever other chore I like. Or read a book, but with a cat in my lap.
* I can walk for groceries, hardware, or liquor or several types of dinner and breakfast. I can walk to my friend's house. The bus system loves my neighborhood, so getting to work in the winter will be easy.

Neighborhood is important to me. Where I lived before, though I liked the quiet and the nearby arboretum and the owl hoots in winter and the occasional coyote eyes across the street at 2 a.m., my building felt like a refrigerator, and aside from garage sales, we didn't voluntarily talk to each other. My downstairs neighbor was the exception, and I'm sending her a postcard so she has my new address. We'd chat in the mornings as she gardened and I got my bike ready for the work day.

So far, I am optimistic about the Willy Street neighbors. There are hippies in the back apartment (they have names, but it's easy shorthand) and a slew of cohabitating bike mechanics upstairs. The hippies sell produce on the lawn on weekends--whatever's leftover from the CSA they help grow. They are ambivalent about being paid. The basement is full of home-canned vegetables and large bottles of dark liquids.

It's all so cliched and so iconically Madison. I should point out there are downsides, like the street is heavily trafficked, and someone nearby plays bongos when I'm trying to sleep, and the downside of people who talk to each other is that they also throw parties when you might plan to get up early on weekends, and I have weird feelings about probably being someone who is buying in to the gentrification and rising cost-of-living of a formerly working-class neighborhood (but then again, my income is really not gentry at all). And still, it's a time where my city feels just a bit magical.

Amelia came to visit and she took a picture of me. I think you can see her reflection.