City love

I grew up in rural Alberta where the loudest sounds were the wind combing through the tops of the poplars in the backyard like ocean waves and coyotes yipping at night in the dark. My childhood was shaped by wide open expanses of sunny canola fields, gravel roads as straight as an arrow and the river carving through the sturgeon valley. Although I loved the northern summers that allowed me to read Lad the Dog until the last climactic fight at the very end, and it was magic to wake up at midnight to smoky aurora borealis crackling across the dark sky outside my bedroom window in winter, the wandering dreamer in me craved the bustling noise and color of a city. Maybe I felt it would ease my loneliness. Maybe we always crave what we don’t have. Civilization often felt a long ways away and to my impatient eyes, life was passing me by and I was tasting none of it. But life has a way of carrying you along and life sometimes allows you pieces of your dreams. I don’t take it for granted. I’ve seen a few cities around the world – Antigua, London, Florence, Almaty – and I hope to see many more before I die. I’m hopeful life will grant me that. In the meantime I revel in the fact that I’ll be going to Philadelphia soon and I am still feeling lingering pleasure over my New York City trip, the second time I’ve been. I fell in love with that city. Walking down Bleecker street with a cup of coffee and then strolling through Washington Square Park was a DREAM. I wanted to never leave. It was all magic, the brownstones, the people playing card games in the park, the buildings whose tops were obscured by mist, the steam escaping from the grates, the graffiti, the noise, the happy chaos, the sway of subway trains and the friendly vibe of the neighborhoods and the little bookstores and Central Park and the diner where we ate lunch and the High Line, and the museum with the Georgia O’ Keefe painting and the Brass Monkey where I drank too many Pick Me Girls and running the length of Manhattan and seeing the New Jersey palisades and getting drenched in a downpour the last two miles and the quirky Jane Hotel and wonderful food and friendly people and diversity and so much human joy and angst and pleasure and and and… Sigh. I think I was truly supposed to have grown up there. But my heart has room to encompass it all. The city and the wild, natural places I love. I need them both. They are my yin and yang.