People keep asking me if I have culture shock since I've gotten back. No, not that I've noticed, but I think I might have something like climate shock. In India it was the middle of summer; here in New York there's not even leaves on the trees yet! Though some of them have flowers, mostly little white ones that might be cherry blossoms, though I'm certain these trees don't produce cherries, so maybe not. Small white flowers that cover the entire tree, so that from a distance the whole thing looks like a child's drawing of a cloud, and that freckle the sidewalks beneath, tiny circular petals marking the gray pavement like drops of milk. And there are my favorites, the magnolias: such big, heavy flowers, one petal the size and weight of an orange peel.

The farmers' markets are small, still, offering only the last dregs of winter vegetables: potatoes, parsnips, turnips. Even ramps- which I think of as the very first sign of spring- aren't here yet. But the sky is blue, bluer than it was in Gujarat, which had a high sky, distant and pale as old denim. New York's sky is a vivid blue, and lower, so that it often seems just a little way above the buildings.

But today it's raining, so there is no blue in the sky of any shade. Instead it's a cloudy gray, so low that it does touch the buildings, overlaps with the tallest ones, in fact, erasing their upper stories. The rain washes the petals from the trees, plasters them to the ground like tissue paper. The branches of the trees without flowers are dark with water, stark black lines against a sky which is somehow bright and colorless at the same time, the light coming from everywhere with no sun for a source. At night the streetlights turn the bare branches to glass or silver, some shining, reflective substance that seems more than wood and water.

And it's cold, of course, much colder than India, though not enough to really bother me. It's the sort of brisk, damp cold that comes with rain, enough to chill your face and turn your breath visible, but not enough to reach under your skin and effect your inner warmth. I walk around and I think New York, New York, a feeling that has no more words than that, just love for this city and so very much joy to be home again.

Yesterday's farmer market goodies: a half-gallon of apple cider, a half-gallon of pear cider (from different orchards, so I can compare!), a jar of fresh tomato sauce, a pint of green zebra tomatoes (I am stocking up on them, buying lots and freezing them, before tomatoes disappear from the market for winter), two quarter-pounds of fresh cheese (an Aged Bloomsbury, which sort of tastes like a sharp, nutty piave, and a Dutch Farmstead, very creamy and rich), and a stalk of brussels sprouts (photographic evidence here).

I also have exciting weird beans to try, as I got an order from Rancho Gordo which arrived last week. So far I have tried the Vaquero Beans, which are absolutely gorgeous, mottled black and white and so shiny and bright. They got gray in the cooking, unfortunately, but were delicious, like black beans but more flavorful. I've also had the Scarlet Runner beans which, I swear to God, tasted exactly like baked potatoes with bacon. It was a little eerie.

Today it is warm for the season, but the light is winter light- hazy, dusty and yet too bright, white and glaring. But as much as I disapprove of winter, it does lend itself to strange effects of light: people climbing the subway stairs up into the open always look like they're vanishing into the sun, into light solid and full of dust motes.

My farmers market haul:

a jar of peach raspberry jam, sugar snap peas, red dandelion greens, Saturn peaches, a quarter pound of an amazing blue cheese, a half-dozen eggs, maple sugar candy (plain and coconut flavored). Om nom nom nom nom.

Summer farmers markets are so exciting! I've never been in New York in the summer before (having been on digs continuously for the last several years) so it's all new and enthralling to me. Fruits! Veggies! Flowers! So many colors! I love my farmers market all year round, but there is something way more exciting about fresh tomatoes and peas and berries than the potatoes and apples which winter reduces the variety down to.

Washington Square, a small park about the size of an average block, is the park I walk through the most, the one most central to my daily routes. It has been closed for about two years, due to construction intended to move the enormous fountain in the middle of it about eight feet to the left. This is because the fountain was not in line with the arch built at one side of the park, or with Fifth Avenue, which runs up to the Square. Of course, the original designer intended for the fountain to be off-center, to encourage people to stroll around, but clearly no one in charge of the construction was concerned about that.

However! Washington Square is finally open again. And the worst of the proposed changes have not happened- there's no gated fence around the park, and the fountain (which has lovely inner rims for people to sit on and for small children to climb down before running screaming through the water) has not been rendered inaccessible. I'm so happy! And the fountain was particularly lovely today; all white foaming water shooting up against the green leaves of trees. There is even (probably temporarily) a blue sky, after weeks and weeks of unending rain. It's still not really warm enough to appreciate all the joys of cool water (despite it being the middle of June, what the hell is up with the East Coast's weather pattern), but it's still wonderfully pleasing.

Photo of Washington Square.

Today is a very lovely day.

I'm back in New York now (I think I've said that already, but maybe not), which I am finally done traveling, at least for a few months. In the last four months, I have been on planes from: New York to Ohio, Ohio to New York, New York to England, England to Athens, Athens to Cyprus, Cyprus to London, London to New York and Ohio to New York. And in all that, not once was my luggage lost, a plane missed, or a flight delayed for more than a few minutes. I even only got called over for extra searching by security once. Clearly I have the best airport luck of anyone ever. Although, come to think of it, I've never had my luggage lost, but perhaps that just proves my point.

I like being back in New York. It's not quite like any other city; London has the skyscrapers and the history, Columbus has my family and a skyline and districts I know by heart, like a mirror image, and Nicosia has character and individuality, a pretty little halved city with ancient Venetian walls and UN guards diving into the capitals of two different countries. But New York has that and still feels like a place where people live, a home and playground and market and setting. Even the parts of the city that are most gentrified, most designed to appeal to a tourist, still feel like that to me. Even Time Square, for all its ads and chain stores and crowds so huge they spill out into the streets, crowds so dense they feel like a mob that hasn't decided which way it wants to go, even Time Square has its people who are there to live in it: the guys selling ten-dollar watches and fake purses shouting and joking with their friends or customers, and the women in heels trying to shove across a sidewalk to make it to a show on time at one of the theaters all around there.

I missed New York while I was away. I 've never been homesick before (if you can call it homesickness when you've only lived someplace for a year); I've missed people, or a certain restaurant or store, but not whole places, just for their feel. I do love something indescribable, intangible about the city, the angle of its roofs against the sky, or the pattern of all those rectangular buildings- some taller, some shorter, white marble or grey stone or red brick- that shouldn't be different than any other city's but somehow is. I love the dusty purple of the night sky and the long, narrow horizons down the avenues and how the subway trains sway and roar and their brakes squeal in the stations, and how people move quick and sure to an exit or a transfer.

Today I went to the Union Square farmers' market, which is bigger this time of year, wrapping around three sides of the park, the south side with people selling paintings and photographs and t-shirts and candle-holders giving way to the west and north sides with vegetables and fruits and honey and flowers and houseplants, everything smelling like green growing things. I bought bread, a fresh loaf with white chewy insides and a crunchy crust. I missed bread in Cyprus; we ate homemade bread, but the only kind available was thick and tasteless, some trick of local wheat or cooking style making everyone's resemble rubber; and cheese, sharp cheddar, smelling strong even wrapped in paper; baby carrots, pale but thick and round, like little fingers; tiny strawberries the size of my littlest fingernail but so sweet, stronger-tasting than a huge berry; and my favorites, the heirloom tomatoes. They have so many of them right now, and in every variety: yellow and orange and red and green and purple, little tart green zebras striped in shades of grass and lemon, and big old germans, mustard colored with ketchup streaks coming up from the bottom, but sweet as sugar and big enough that one tomato easily weighs over a pound.

Then I sat in the sun for a while in the grassy part of the park, to watch the people. A man in his mid-twenties climbed a tree until he got as high as the branches could hold him, perched there for a few minutes, and then came back down; he was wearing a bright yellow t-shirt that was just the color of the underside of the leaves when the sun shone through them. Across the street, a man stood on the roof of a building, far enough away that he was half the size of a dime. He had dark hair and stood with his back to me, wearing only a pair of pale grey sweatpants, so the line of his spine was visible when he leaned back against the railing at the edge of the roof. He stood there for a long time, half an hour or so, taking in the sun and doing nothing, until a man wearing only black shorts came and said something to him, and they went away together.

As I said, a lovely day. Though it would be even nicer if, you know, Racheline was not currently on the other side of the continent.

Yes, yes, so I'm apparently spamming livejournal today. I'll stop soon.

I am so tired today. Possibly because it's that time of the month; I'm lucky enough not to get cramps or mood swings, but massive blood loss wears me out terribly. I should be writing a paper, but I can barely manage to stay out of bed, so I'm not certain if that will happen. I can always write it next week instead, though it would probably be a better decision to do it now.

I think I'm tired because of the rain, and the cold. It's been raining since last night, in a drizzle that occasionally fades to merely a heavy mist and occasionally increases into a real storm. My apartment has an air conditioner in one window, and when it rains hard the water drums on it, echoing in the hollow metal box like someone tapping their fingers on a table except ceaseless and without rhythm. There's the sound of cars on the road too, softer and distant, the shushing they make as they drive through puddles. All of it seems the soundtrack for sleep.

The city looks different in the rain too, of course. Smaller, because the clouds and rain blur anything far away, or hide it completely in faded gray static. And everything is colorless, except for the few trees that have started to flower already: magnolias, all vivid pale pink compared to everything else. I've started to dread the rain because it always lowers the temperature. A few hours of rain mean days of cold weather to follow, even if the sky clears.

It's day for fireplaces, and soft places to sit- the kind you sink into when you flop down- with pillows and blankets. Maybe someone else to share the seat with, to fall asleep with a head on a shoulder. People do make excellent heating pads, after all.

Come and tell me interesting things so I'll stay awake, since I unfortunately don't actually have a fireplace. I do have coffee and an interesting coffeeshop with wood floors and big glass windows, but it's not at all an adequate substitute.

Yesterday, ice cream.
Today, neon slicks on streets;
Wind shivers puddles.

Remix assignments are out! Ah! Other people, come flail with me.

Anyway, my extra icons are expiring soon, and LJ has informed me of this by email, as it does. Which would be fine, except apparently LJ is Really Concerned that I am aware of the status of my icons and has already sent at least ten emails. They're coming nearly every hour. I get the point, dude. Do not worry! I fully intend on renewing my icons (as much as this, and the weird issues you had with posting and comments a few days ago, makes me reluctant to give money to you); I just assumed that since I had two weeks before they expired, that there was no reason to rush.

But I'm in a very good mood. I have fresh sourdough bread and sharp cheddar cheese from a farmer's market, which seemed to have far more vegetables than it has in months. Mostly apples and potatoes, unsurprisingly given that it's February, but it's still hopeful. And there were all sorts of flowers for sale: just the green little tips of tulips and lilies and so on poking up above the dirt in their pots.

Remix! Ah!

The trees are changing color here. It seems ridiculously late to me, to have all these ochre-bright colors a week before Thanksgiving, but perhaps it's just a result of the country-wide lack of winter temperatures we seem to be having, and I'll certainly never complain about that.

I love how the fall leaves, in their parks and gardens, look against the browns and grays of most of the buildings. They seem all the more vivid for it, yellows and oranges and reds like streaks of paint. There's a row of trees a block away from here, and each one is plum-purple on the top, fire-orange in the middle, and banana-yellow underneath. I was going to take a photo of it, but I'm certain I'd never convince anyone that it wasn't just a trick of the light; I have no idea what kind of trees they are, but I never knew they existed, that trees could have such colors in such distinct stripes.

I like the fallen leaves, too, and the crunchy noises they make when you walk through them. I was doing that thing this morning where you're so tired you dream of being tired (and this is why you shouldn't go to bed at 4am, my dears, though I seriously hadn't meant to stay up that long), except it was more like being half-awake and daydreaming of sleeping, and I had turned so I could look up out of the window. Lying on the bed at that angle meant the only thing I could see was gray sky and the black branches of a tree, shaking in the wind, and leaves falling straight down at me in spirals, so I nearly expected them to hit the window.

I like the rain, too. Of course, I hate the rain, because every time it rains my umbrella blows inside out five times and I get soaked, but it's gorgeous, especially at night. I've never known rain to be so lovely. Clouds hang low enough that the top of the Empire State building usually disappears, and a few other tall buildings leave only their lights, smeared to a streak inside the clouds. When the rain catches in the glow from a streetlight, it doesn't look like it's falling, but like there's a texture to the air, something endlessly shifting and changing but motionless; it seems like if I could reach it, I could touch it, like it would feel like fur or silk.

Ah. I must be feeling better; I haven't subjected you all to one of these purple prose posts in months.

Happy first day of summer!

Now if only it would warm up and stop raining...