It’s a Thursday morning. I reach into my backpack, past the parsley and basil I picked in the garden this morning, find my metro card, and pull it out, redolent with fresh herbs. I’m ready to commute into the city, smelling still of the garden – and, by extension, the country.
It makes me think of Clara, who spent a month in the mountains of southwestern Virginia over summer, quiet days near a pond, picking blackberries and catching salamanders in the pond with the two children she nannied. She ate eggs from hens clucking to one another on a farm just down the highway, and learned to two-step with the old timers dancing to bluegrass music at the country store.
Last week, I dropped her off in New York City, where we navigated the crowded sidewalks of Soho to discover the best health food café and art galleries and clothing boutiques and, well, the usual teeming and over-stimulating activity of the city. She’s working at the uber-hip American Apparel on the Lower East Side, making art with friends at the School of Visual Arts and interning at a ballet company, helping with administrative tasks in a loft above Broadway. (the photo was taken just outside the loft)
My own days have handed me a series of these country life/city life moments as well. One afternoon I’m standing on the dock of the pond, my clothes hanging in the branches of a white pine, with the dogs swimming among the reeds. The next I’m standing in line with a bunch of office workers to choose between lamb gyros and bahn mi from the food truck outside a 10-story highrise in D.C.
What do you get when you cross a country mouse with a city mouse? A chameleon.
It makes me think of Clara, who spent a month in the mountains of southwestern Virginia over summer, quiet days near a pond, picking blackberries and catching salamanders in the pond with the two children she nannied. She ate eggs from hens clucking to one another on a farm just down the highway, and learned to two-step with the old timers dancing to bluegrass music at the country store.
Last week, I dropped her off in New York City, where we navigated the crowded sidewalks of Soho to discover the best health food café and art galleries and clothing boutiques and, well, the usual teeming and over-stimulating activity of the city. She’s working at the uber-hip American Apparel on the Lower East Side, making art with friends at the School of Visual Arts and interning at a ballet company, helping with administrative tasks in a loft above Broadway. (the photo was taken just outside the loft)
My own days have handed me a series of these country life/city life moments as well. One afternoon I’m standing on the dock of the pond, my clothes hanging in the branches of a white pine, with the dogs swimming among the reeds. The next I’m standing in line with a bunch of office workers to choose between lamb gyros and bahn mi from the food truck outside a 10-story highrise in D.C.
What do you get when you cross a country mouse with a city mouse? A chameleon.
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