She Lives in NYC
My daughter lives in New York City, twelve hundred miles from me and claims
the sights in the City bedazzle her eyes and the City’s sounds are in perfect pitch while
tastes of Thai and Greek are grand and greasy spoons serve coffee with their dregs and
banana cream pie that delight her tongue.
She says she thrives on the touch of the sculpture, the statues, the fountains
all nestled in corners and courts. A sensorium, a melange, myriad of treasure,
she claims non-existent at home, although she has simply forgot.
The only sense belittled is New York City’s smell when it’s a hundred degrees in August
and there’s a garbage worker’s strike throughout the boroughs
and there’s no place to harbor the trash, except lining each sidewalk and street
and even if you’re walking at night when it’s cooler you can’t take a breath for the stink
and in cold weather when the garbage doesn’t reek, there’s always taxi exhaust and sewer fumes.
In Wisconsin we smell fresh fruit and barbecues and newly mown grass and remind her how sweet home is.
But she only remembers the smell of manure from the nearby farmers’ fields.
She prefers the stinking garbage of New York.
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I think it is the vastness and diversity of the United States which has always captured my imagination. One day I might smell the mown grass of Wisconsin.
This is fascinating. Two of my brothers and their families went to New York last year and they still rave about it. No garbage that week - I wonder if it would lose its appeal if they were there for a year. What a combination of anger? and poignancy. Wisconsin sounds gorgeous.
Loved your writing Bo,my friend Angela ’s daughter Dianne is coming into Melbourne Australia this Sunday for 2 weeks
She is a teacher in New York at the consulate school
She lives in an art-deco apartment in Brooklyn
So no doubt we will hear much at the weekend.
Lois (muse of the Sea) 6.6.07
I sympathise with the manure smell. There is a pig farm behind us and muck spreading took place a couple of weeks ago - that’s what it’s like living in the country. What strikes me most of all is the birdsong - it’s there in the background all the time and definitely in the foreground when my cat goes out and gets chased by the magpies
Vivid picture, Bo. Personally I would take the smell of manure to that of garbage. What i really like though, is the smell of the earth after the first rain of the season, and right now, when it’s so dry here, the smell of my Texas Sage bushes when I water them.
Vi
Vivid picture, Bo. Personally, I’ll take the country manure smell to that of garbage any day. For sheer joy though, there is nothing like the smell of dry earth after the first rain of the season.
New York is unique, one either loves or hates it. for those of us who love New York the smells of NY are like nectar dawing us in. Even on the hottests days I would not have wante to be anywhere else. I haven’t been back for a quarter of a century, but when I think of NY I can still smell it, and it makes me smile.
My daughter was so determined to escape her small town roots in the American Midwest and get to New York. She did - but mostly to New York state. She loves the city and visits when she can, but she married a boy from Buffalo and has settled there - those small town tentacles are very strong! Fate has a way of saying, “gotcha!”