New York, New York, New York

I’m going to New York City in a couple of days. I’m really looking forward to it. At this point everyone here in Nova Scotia is tired of winter and anything above freezing would be a relief. And it is always good to get away at the end of a long winter. Spring in New York is usually quite nice. Of course I’ll only be there for five days, not enough to experience good weather but probably enough to be glad to go home. Usually after three days I am ready to leave the hectic pace of the city. I guess I have become a country girl.

When I lived in NYC I never thought I would leave. Then one day I was done with my life there. And I moved here. It felt like I was being sucked up by an unknown pull, a vacuum cleaner straightening up and sorting out my life. It wasn’t like I had any great revelation. It just happened. I had bought a loft in Manhattan for very little and sold it for enough to leave easily. So I did.

Before that, New York had always been the center of the universe for me; anything I could every want was there. The excitement of the city, the culture, the people I knew, the pace. Now “it’s a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”

I’m going to New York for my aunt Marcella’s 100th birthday celebration. Marcella is a feisty old lady. She’s my mother’s youngest sister. Although I haven’t seen her in a year (on my last visit to NYC), I hear she is pretty much totally aware with only a little short term memory loss and some physical weaknesses. She came to visit me here when she was 84. We went for a trip to beautiful Cape Breton, stopping at the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck and then visiting the fortress and spending a night in Louisburg. She insisted on doing everything I could do, never admitting fatigue, always curious, enjoying the scenery but mostly the people, chatting with everyone. She has lived in the City in her own apartment all the time that I have known her. So when, on the last night of her visit, we stayed at a B&B in the country near the airport, the silence and lack of proximity to other houses and people made her feel very uncomfortable, even agitated. She is more relaxed in New York where you get run over by people if you don’t move quickly on the sidewalks. (I’ll have to practice walking faster in the next couple of days so I won’t be surprised by the pace when I get there.)

It, no doubt, will be a lot of fun to be in New York again, good to see family, and a wonderful chance to see my friends again, the ones I left behind when I moved here.

Posted by leya at February 28, 2005 06:50 PM