blossoms of snow

Spring has finally awoken, moody rain and sunshine and all. Springtime, especially April here (god help us we don't get some freak Seattle-esque interminable rainy, 50-degree spring), is like a schizophrenic, or an adolescent: all sunshine and seventy degrees one afternoon and black clouds and rainstorm the next morning. We had upper sixties and glaring sunshine Sunday, lightening and thunder the next day, sunshine again, then black clouds spewing snow today. Go figure.

I will clearly state that any weather beats the winter here. The trees think so, too; they are starting to relax their defenses and bud. The ones in front of my building are flowering beautifully, dripping with tiny white pear-like flowers (it's killing me that this is another east coast plant I can't identify) before they leaf out. I walked out one morning late last night, and it was like waking up without remembering it was christmas day; sunny glistening with a recent rain, the little white flowers seemed to say, "surprise, erika! here we are! we all made it through winter!"

I absolutely adore my street. With the eighteenth-century St. Marks-in-the-Bowery at one end, and beautifully iron-worked brick townhomes along East Tenth, the block is really unique in that the homes are slightly upscale-seeming compared to its neighboring ones, and it also lacks the characteristic ground and first-floor commercial that the East Village is known for, making it quiet and homey. It's like a scene out of Brooklyn, or the West Village. Film crews are even drawn here; I've seen three so far.

But this is definitely still the East Village; at the border of NYU and as the mecca for young people looking to live it up; it's loud and eclectic. The building across the street has some scruffy characters lingering around that makes me think there's some sort of subsidy or rent-freeze; the neighboring building is clearly abandoned minus two-thirds of the top floor, which is occupied by an artist working odd hours and on looming, grim works. His and another few apartments on the block, as we all have very high ceilings, have decaying ceilings with exposed lath, peeling paint, and brickwork at the top of the wall where it's difficult to maintain. Then a few doors down from mine, a huge, beautiful old building with ornate ironwork has only four buzzers and beautiful stone and wood detailing inside- clearly these people are not so poorly off. Homeless people smelling and looking scary sleep on the benches down the block in front of St Mark's, but across the street and to the east of me is a really unique building, thin, with one giant bay of factory-like, small-paneled giant windows that must house someone successful as it appears to be one fabulous home. The pointy Flatiron-like brownstone that sits at the end of the triangular block looks fancy at first glance but is housing people who keep leggy plants in front of dusty windows and push the backs of their televisions and refrigerators up to the windows.

There is a lot of traffic through this block, as it sits between Cooper Union, NYU, and the School of Visual Arts (among others), and most of their watering holes and socializing locales and is on the path between anyone coming from the subway to the bars. I see and more hear a lot of drunken activity from my big picture window: loud groups having conversations outside the art school dormitory a few doors down; crazy people yelling at the corner near third; there was the large drunk woman that fell, in heels, into the stairwell of my super's basement apartment, directly below my window on a weeknight, and had to be strategically squeezed out of the space by paramedics and her date; there tend to be homeless-seeming lingerers across the street in front of a particular stoop; oftentimes, it's actually my cats that are causing a lot of stir.

When I come home, if I've left the blinds open in my first-floor apartment (even sometimes if I haven't I can see eyes peeking through the crack above the sill), one of my two black cats is always there, sitting next to the garden gnome I use as a bookend on my long, deep, windowsill. They have achieved superstar status with neighbors and passersby. More than once have I had the lights low in my apartment and witnessed flashes of light on the walls that turned out to be coming from people's cameras outside. Many more times have I heard strangely-toned voices, usually high and quiet (creepy!), that I was too weirded out to investigate, while my cat was calmly posing. The funny thing is that though they can be leery of strangers, there is enough distance with the iron railing in front of the gap before the sidewalk, that they are never made nervous enough to jump down. They just sit there, luxuriating in the attention like the attention-hungry beasts that they are.

It's like we're a zoo, here. We have the railing, the little trench, the large window, and the small cage that we live in... protecting us from the hordes of poorly-behaved people passing by daily. I could think of worse situations. I think this might be the kind of zoo where they design it so well that the captives believe they're in some endless paradise.