A week in the burbs

The suburbs of New York I admit have their charm. It's quiet, peaceful, green. The bunnies hop through the garden, deer wander through the backyard, a mouse scurries across the living room floor - oh wait those things stop being charming when the deer and rabbits have eaten everything you planted last fall. And the mouse well he's just gross especially when you check the trap under the couch and have to pull out his smelly dead body. Have I mentioned the wasps who built an enormous nest under the birdfeeder? A nest which even after having been sprayed with forceful toxins is knocked down and hundreds of larvae are still squirming. Gross. The heat, the humidity, the apocalyptic hazy gray skies, the insect bites, the poison ivy - I don't know how I grew up thinking this was paradise.

New York in summer. I don't often go home in the summer. As I arrived I was amazed by the greenery, everything so lush. They must have gotten a lot of rain this year, all the brooks were babbling everything overgrown. In the relative cool of the evening my parents and I had a drink and dinner out on our deck. Listening to the chorus of frogs and birds and something that made a sort of hrrrrr noise we weren't sure what it was. After dinner a walk down the street where the neighbors occasionally come and go but nothing ever really changes. The fireflys come out in the evening, when the Kayak Guy visited we ran around the yard until dark collecting them in a jar.

Usually when I go home I make a trip to NYC, but this time I stayed close to home. My dad says when driving around Westchester it all looks very rural and isolated even though it's actually quite built up. This time I managed to mostly see that isolation. I went canoeing with my dad, paddling our old boat through the lilly pads to a small pond where we scared up a great blue heron. My mom and I went to the Caramoor estate for a house tour and traditional tea. A place where the art collection and gardens were so spectacular and something I never would have appreciated when young.

The kayak guy and I hiked up Turkey Mountain, one of my favorite places in all the world. We spent a good hour picking blueberries, I mostly eat everything I pick but we managed to save up a good pound of berries for pancakes the following morning. I'm a big blueberry fan and there's something special about being on the side of a hill and eating berries to your heart's content. I could stay all day but we had grand plans of canoeing in the afternoon. The kayak guy, my dad and I took the canoe to the Croton River, paddling up to the falls where we could go no farther. It's a journey I remembered as taking all day but actually only takes about an hour.

That's the funny thing about going home, somehow it's all the same but at the same time it's all different. Even with the mosquito bites which still haven't gone away, the poison ivy which I was never allergic to as a kid, the mouse which freaked me out there's no place like home!