Cilantro, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme

Living in the world of whatever I am writing is my favorite place to be, but sometimes it's helpful to step outside--literally.  The terrace is tiny, and high over a Chelsea crosstown street, but it is just outside my office door, and there is room for an herb garden.  I grow cilantro, sage, rosemary, and thyme, and this year I have tomato plants.  We'll see what they do. Looking east at sunset, Manhattan is painted brick red.  Looking west at the Hudson River and Hoboken I feel so lucky to have a glimpse of water.  The boats go by, and my dreams seem to follow them.  The weather changes can be subtle or dramatic, but they transform the landscape constantly.  Every minute the view could be of a different city.  This is true wherever we are.  Clouds, clear sky, shadows, darkness change the outward details, take our imaginations in different directions.  I take photos of the same scene, over and over, because I'm in awe the play of light, the drift of shadows, the way it never stays the same.  Claude Monet, I get the haystacks.

Last week a family knows as the Chelsea Ravens fledged.  They were nesting on a building just east of here, up on the roof amid gargoyles and water towers.  They play in the sky, and I watch them dive-bomb each other.  I'm not the only one who watches.  And the ravens aren't the only ones who play.

new york, blue sky

blue sky.   the morning of september 11, 2001 i met my editor tracy devine and bantam deputy publisher nita taublib for breakfast at charlotte, just across the street from the random house offices.  it was one of our many wonderful meetings, talking about books and life--a colleague of ours had just gotten married, and we were catching up on that when we heard a plane had hit one of the world trade towers.

a small plane i thought, it had to be, but how terrible no matter the size, how shocking.  but it wasn't a small plane, and then the second jet hit, and nita and tracy and i hugged goodbye and hurried away into our lives to plan and make sense or no-sense and be in new york city--all three of us lived there--that had already changed forever, only we just didn't know it yet.

impressions: the blue sky everyone still talks about; plume of smoke visible from midtown, constant sirens, walking downtown and seeing people on cell phones--i didn't have one yet.  an hour later, after the towers fell, seeing people in business suits covered with ash.  the next nights: below 14th street, a dust cloud that glowed red after dark, as thick as the foggiest london night. the posters hung by families, their missing loved ones, on the wall by famous ray's pizza across from st. vincent's hospital.  going to the cathedral of st. john the divine, didn't matter what religion you were or were not, just a place to gather and pray and mourn.

the city smelled of smoke and ghosts.  people were kind to each other but also lost it on a frequent basis.  i remember those early days, tuning into local tv news, pre-theme music.  do you know what i mean?  the moment when a tragedy acquires a combination of familiarity and production values, and the tv producers give it solemn theme music and a name.  it takes away the raw.  i hated when that happened a day or two after 9/11.

heading to the west side highway many nights--closed to traffic, it was kept open for search and rescue workers.  people lined the streets, watching pickup trucks, fire trucks, many with out of state plates, drive south toward the world trade center.  i was in the midst of leaving a worse than bad marriage, but the tragedy bound us together for a few more months, and those first nights after the towers collapsed we'd go to the west side highway, watch those rescue trucks in the surreal riverside light.  i couldn't bear for anything else to collapse.

during the early days after the attack, friends helped at the site.  the poet-nun sister leslie went to st. paul's with other sisters from her community, to offer spiritual comfort to the rescue workers.  poet-naturalist e.j. mcadams, then an urban park ranger, spent days in and around the rubble, going into apartments to rescue animals abandoned in the evacuation.   interesting that my two closest poet friends had reason to be there--the city needed poets more than ever.

the week after the towers fell i stood on park avenue south and watched a woman in a yellow dress commit suicide, jumping from a ledge and landing at my feet.  the grief in the city was unimaginable.  had she lost someone in the towers?  or was the city's collective sorrow just too much to bear?

in december my friend, poet, writer, and radio personality colin mcenroe came to the city from hartford and he is a sensitive soul as we all know so we went downtown but mostly we went to the cathedral to watch paul winter prepare for his solstice concert and a few days later there was a fire in the cathedral and everything seemed touched by sorrow, mystical beauty, blue stained glass, and the unpredictability of life.

ten years have passed.  the anniversary unbearable at first, but time dulls, if not heals, the shock and pain.  for years the cats and i have looked out my south-facing chelsea windows to see the towers of light rising up from where the twin towers once stood.  they appear beautiful, mystical, but i love nature, and i couldn't and can't deny that they're magnets to birds that fly by night, fall migrants heading south for the winter--the birds get trapped in the light columns, and at dawn fall to the ground.  after a while i couldn't stand seeing those light towers--they reminded me of death, not hope.  so i stopped looking out my window the last years of this decade of september 11's.

i'm not in ny this year.  i want to be far away, and i am.  the sky is blue, the way it was that day.  there are no speeches or memorials or flags.  there are no columns of light.  but there is peace and prayer and memory, and there are poems, and there is love.  nita and tracy, we were together that morning.  i'm holding your hands, wherever you are.

watching the hawk

my friend in new hampshire has a field of lupines. my friend in vermont feels like wilted petunias and invited me to have lemonade on her porch.

my sister in mystic is doing yard work, and i want to bring her herbs from mim's garden--rosemary, sage, and mint with roots that go down deep and go back forever.  oh wait, she already has herbs from mim's garden.

in chelsea my little terrace has weeds between the stones and a hawk who perches on the rail eyeing pigeons.

maggie sits inside and watches the hawk.

City at night

At the end of West 23rd Street, sunset over Hoboken; the sky turns topaz, the Hudson River deep violet.  Horns blast, and boats leave Chelsea Piers, their lights twinkling.  It's Thursday night, and people are out.  The Half King's sidewalk cafe is packed.   Tenth Avenue is a combination of restaurants and shadows.  Taxi garages ("flats fixed!") and shuttered storefronts.  A "checks cashed here" place closed for the night, streetlight reflected in bulletproof glass, next door to a brightly lit bodega.

Clement Clark Moore Park, small and square, is dark; tall trees sway in the summer breeze, leaves whispering when the traffic light is red, the street momentarily quiet.  1840s Brownstones line the side streets.  The High Line, a park by day, goes back to being a ghostly abandoned elevated railway bed by night.  I remember being young, a different Luanne Rice.

It's August, no gallery openings.  Usually Thursday nights are party time in Chelsea, but there's a sense that all the art people have gone to Montauk, Martha's Vineyard, or an olive orchard in Tuscany.

The cafes are lively, the temperature lovely.  A constant breeze blows off the river, up from the harbor and the ocean beyond.  Manhattan is surrounded by water.  I could walk to Battery Park and back, loving the city and feeling my place in it.