Re-entry...

Changing realities is a little bit like changing gears the first time you drive a standard: grind... clunk... lurch... and then things are reasonably smooth again. For me, it's easier to up-shift than to down-shift.

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View from the Taconic Parkway west toward the Catskills

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The excitement of a trip to New York builds along with the frenzy of packing and getting the home front in order before blast-off, and it continues to increase along with the traffic after we cross one range of mountains, skirt the edge of a second, and see the first "Sprain Brook Expressway" and "George Washington Bridge" signs in Westchester County. By the time we've sped along with the taxis, cars and delivery trucks on the FDR Drive down the western length of Manhattan, our pulses and attitudes are beginning to fit right in with the natives. Coyote howls and stillness are already unimaginable.

After delivering my husband's mother to the W Hotel downtown, we headed up 3rd Ave. (past the site of the previous day's steam pipe explosion) and found our son's new office. He gave us his apartment key and directions to a great nearby cafe, and after a fabulous salad, we choked on the cost of leaving our car underground for a little more than an hour and headed for the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brooklyn is a borough in transition. It's also huge and comprised of many neighborhoods, some gentrified and some still affordable to those blue-collar workers who keep Manhattan functioning. Our son's place is a co-op apartment in an 1850s church, this in an area of brownstones with small front gardens surrounded by wrought-iron fencing. Lovely trees line the streets and shade the homes; cafes and shops are within easy walking distance, and this weekend there were stoop sales and a nearby Saturday block party. A few blocks south, Spanish is the predominant language.

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Part of a magnificent garden in front of an old graffiti-covered building
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Our trip's purpose was to attend the wedding of a nephew, and that we did on Friday night. It was black-tie in an elegant hotel. It was swank, the food was fabulous, and it was FUN. We danced to a great band (you should have heard them belt out "Respect"), women gradually shedding shoes and men shedding jackets until the early morning hours when even the young among us were flagging.
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The next day we walked around Brooklyn, starting with breakfast on the roof of a Mexican restaurant.

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View of Lower Manhattan from the Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn

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From there we walked to an amazing new grocery market on the waterfront,

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Looking west from the market

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bought some fruit, and then hopped a bus back up toward Prospect Park. More walking, and then onto the grass and pathways winding past one group after another repeating the hundred-year-old summer ritual of a family picnic or barbeque in the wilds of a city park.

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Two of several kites above Prospect Park

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My feet were worn down to nubs by the time we walked back down toward the apartment, and although we had planned to eat at one of the many new restaurants in Brooklyn, we were still so sated from the previous evening's feast that we called a fabulous frozen yogurt (with fresh fruit) "dinner" and went to bed early.

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A small rock beside a trail in Prospect Park
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On Sunday morning, Starbucks and Whole Foods supplied breakfast before we piled into the Prius and headed north. The trip is a pretty one with little traffic after the first thirty miles or so, and we broke it up with a dinner stop in an old Adirondack hotel on Long Lake.

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After dinner beside Long Lake

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For several miles, puffy clouds reflected amazing shades of orange and pink, and then we drove in darkness. It was around 10:30 when my husband dropped me off at the end of our road and then continued on to return his mother to her home-away-from-home in the town about twelve miles north. (She, by the way, was absolutely mortified as I stepped out of the car into the darkness in what she thought to be the absolute middle of nowhere, a place lurking with sharp-fanged wild beasts).

I walked the mile up the road through the woods by the light of a half-moon low in the sky, here and there listening to the scuttling of an animal or the breaking of a twig in the darkness, buttoning my sweater up against the cool of the night air. I do have to admit that about a quarter of a mile from home the nearby and unexpected shrill snort of a deer scared the bejeezus out of me! A note just inside the door greeted me with news that Heidi's eye seems to be healing nicely, and both horses had been fed.

And so today I look at the garden with its new crop of weeds, the barn with its fresh supply of manure, what passes for our lawn at a new high, a house with an empty refrigerator and a pile of dirty laundry; I do as little as possible and plunk myself down here at my keyboard.

(Down-shift! Toe-heel the brake and accelerator! Down-shift! Now, put it in low gear and begin slowly... ) It was a great trip and fun to be a city person for a short time, but very soon I will be back in the happy swing of my peace and quiet and dirt and work. Right now, though, I need just a little while to idle my engine.