New York City Nature

Last week I was in New York City visiting my daughters.

Such an overdue trip, but happening at long last. Hannah’s been living in NYC for seven years, since she began college at Columbia University, and embarked on her career. She lives on the upper upper west side, and handles “coming downtown” with a casualness borne of someone intimately interconnected with the necessary infrastructure of Manhattan. And yet her building is on a unique street: one with buildings on only one side, bordered as it is on the other by a long, beautiful park. Chloe is in the upper west side, between two beauties: Riverside Park, and Central Park.  For both girls having “access to green” felt, and feels, like a necessity. Seeing how close they both are to trees, falling leaves, grass, dirt paths, water, soil, bushes, flowers—reassures me even more than I thought it would. Look: they can walk five minutes and see water, I tell myself. Or: You really can feel like you’re in the country in Central Park.

As I flew home on day eight, I asked myself why their adjacency to nature mattered so much to me.

Because, after all, they had both chosen our country’s largest and most populated of cities. Clearly, they were there for a myriad of compelling reasons, and were making their way, having ups and downs but moving forward, carving their path through life.  Why then, did it seem so important to me that they be able to see sky, water, trees, flowers within minutes? Because, the answer quickly came, going too long without them does something to the spirit: a dragging down. A heaviness.

For a long time I thought that might not be the case for everyone. I was, admittedly, on the high far edge on the arc of need for nature. I could feel down to my bones, every second of the day, that if I wasn’t actively engaging regularly with the fauna, sky, water, I would no longer feel like myself. Which meant I would no longer be myself.  But others didn’t feel the need so acutely; I knew this.

But what I’ve also grown to know is that we all do seem to need it more than we think we do. Too much time indoors, out of the weather. Too much time on screens, gazing into a lit rectangle instead of a lit up moon, tipped our souls out of balance. There could be the grumpies. Or strange body pains. Or aggravation. Or a feeling of disconnectedness to place: you could be anywhere, going from indoor place to indoor place. When we get outdoors into nature, it puts us firmly in this place or that place.

A friend of mine who lives in the often-broiling southwest once described summer: “It’s going from air conditioning to air conditioning.” –It was a necessity, to work and live on the day to day under that intense of a boiling sun. But, she had admitted, it was surreal, too. You kind of forgot where you were until fall, when everyone emerged out of the canned cold back out into their yards, the parks, the mountains, feeling the breeze on their skin.

One day during my trip to New York City, I was on my own while my daughters did their lives: dancing and physical therapy and writing and pottery and college and homework.

I had met Chloe at the New York Flower District—a must-do in my book—and had purchased flowers to make a few thank you arrangements before my return to Seattle.

The bundle was wrapped in brown kraft paper, covering every bit of flower and stem—a protection needed in a city where those flowers would likely be schlepped down streets, onto the subway, back up, then down more streets and yet again. Chloe and I parted ways at a park in the financial district, and I, distracted because of my recent foray into my favorite world of flowers, got on the wrong subway and ended up by the east river. Feeling awkward with my large bundle and my bag and my need to dig my reading glasses out every time I tried to bring up a bus schedule, I decided it would be easier just to walk.

So I did: trekking from the east river west through the upper east side, then entering Central Park, skirting along the reservoir, then out at 96th street, before returning “home” to my temporary quarters in the upper west side. I tend to overheat, and I did that in spades in the 79 degree October climate-change heat, wearing a sweater because the early morning air had been cool. As my face changed from pink to red to a curious shade of maroon, I walked, my large crackling flower bundle in my arms like a pageant queen, through the city.

Central Park, even through my heat haze, felt like home.

I watched starlings dip their glossy heads down to puddles to drink, then suddenly take a bath, as if in spontaneous naughtiness, shaking the drops along their feathers like elderly ladies with raindrops on their plastic-bonnet-covered heads. I saw rats and black squirrels, dogs of all sorts, straining on leashes, oak trees and plane trees and maples. Bittersweet grew near the water, as did marsh grass and cattails. Tall, thick stems with flamboyant, feathery grey-brown heads bent in the blessed breeze. Pigeons caterwauled past, headed for building ledges. Hibiscus and Lavatera held on gamely to their last pink blossoms, their stems long and stretched as they reached for greater light.

All around me, nature.

When I reached the apartment and collapsed, dramatically, onto the couch, I noticed my black boots were covered entirely with dust: the yellow-tan dust of the paths in the park.  Something about that made me smile. It was the dirtiness and untidiness of it: the lack of city chic. The fact that I had walked 4.5 miles with dirty boots and a maroon face, carrying a bundle of flowers that had started to leak through the paper at the bottom, so that the brown paper had become mushy, disintegrating as it was.

I really do love New York City. But I loved that messy, overheated, dust-covered, leaking, untidy moment, because I felt connected to the earth again. Never have I gardened tidily: I tend to come inside with black knees even when I use a kneel pad. My fingernails are a near-constant keyboard of brown half-moons and ragged edges in the summer. I ruin pair after pair of jeans. My sweatshirts all have permanent brown-tan circles at their sleeve edges from shoving my sleeves up with hands covered with soil. To me, being near nature means being part of it, and being part of it means being near it. And being near it means being in it, and being in it means being dirty, windblown, unchic, dust-covered. Messy.

I want my daughters to be near nature so they can remember to get messy, too, sometimes. To have dust on their city-chic boots and to have grey rims around the edges of their sweatshirt sleeves. To have broken fingernails from potting up plants and to have to juggle their keys and a handful of gathered fall leaves because they were just so incredibly beautiful to simply be walked past.

I left New York City feeling like living in a massive city is challenging, and also wonderful. But that the wonderful was predicated on being able to leave that hot concrete and rush when needed, to gaze up through the leaves of a tree as a beam of sunlight pierces through so that it looks like a fairyland, or a road to heaven.  The incredible array of culture, thoughts, ideas, people, places, works and work—the energy it produced—was made more so by the juxtaposition of the grand concrete avenues against that massive rectangle of green which is Central Park, and the island-long swath of water-side green which is Riverside Park. Take them out, and the city suffers. Take them out and no one has fallen leaves and dust on their boots anymore.  –I’m so glad “seeing green,” as my daughters put it, is still possible in New York City. I’m so glad my daughters won’t stay too far away, for too long, from the whirling leaves, and sudden downpours on dusty paths turned mud, and patches of sun-dappled grass beneath gracious oaks and tippling sun spots on the water, framed by the branches of trees.  If they stay close to the green in New York City, they’ll do just fine. I’m certain of it.