NYC

I love wandering around cities! I love public transportation! Everything, including the rain today, makes me so happy I'm smiling at everyone on the street.
I'm staying in Brooklyn, a block or 2 from the Brooklyn Bridge, with my cousin Camilla and her husband Kurt. They're totally fascinating people. He's a writer, librarian, and amateur research linguist. She's a costume & fashion designer. Over a couple of intensely good bottles of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, we talked about the sexy-alive and creepy-dead aesthetic of Cuba, the zombie they met there, Kurt's son's emergence from autism and how his work understanding the jump from spoken to written English helped him understand a little about what that must be like, adventures in city living, lots of stuff.
Camilla lived in Louisiana until she was 6 or so, in the early 1960's. Cuba, she says, is like traveling to an impossible place - the same aesthetic of Louisiana of her childhood, uncorrupted by restoration, development, advertising, modernity. It has an extra layer of mystery with the Santeria and the music and all, so Camilla acts after spending 2 weeks there like she's gotten an injection of her 5-year-old self. She's brimming with refreshed joie de vivre, creativity, passion.
That of course is something I think about (everyone does) whenever I visit home, where I've just been - it's never the same as during your childhood. The things I miss about living in Vermont are impossible to have again anywhere because the landscape includes the awe and wonder of discovering the world for the first time. I'm pretty sure I'd still be enthralled by the sweet lonely freedom of stealing through the woods on a warm summer night, surrounded by emptiness and fullness at once.

Comments

[jane]

oh! how lovely! i have never been to vermont - you make me want to discover it for myself.

and i wish i was in NYC with you!!!