April 19: It’s chilly today, but spring was at its most seductive last week, when Joe and I headed down to the Chelsea Garden Center in Red Hook to get some flowers for our newly sunny garden. (The only positive result of taking down a venerable but ailing red maple in our backyard last fall.) We took advantage of the car he had to rent for a business trip, since it wouldn’t have been easy to carry all those pots on the 61 bus. Though goodness knows, now that its final stop is Ikea, you see plenty of people lugging enormous amounts of merchandise aboard! Having recently seen A View from the Bridge, which takes place in Red Hook in the 1950s, when it was a blue-collar neighborhood inhabited by the families of longshoremen who worked on the Brooklyn waterfront, I was struck by the relentless way New York City sweeps aside its history. The old warehouses are now filled with trendy shops and restaurants serving the area’s new residents–artists and bohemian young families–as well as the hordes of shoppers drawn to Ikea and the equally humongous Fairway. Lots of people head to Fairway for the piles of gleaming produce and food products, but lots of others come just to buy take-out meals and sit at tables in the spectacular area outside the store, with views over the East River and the Statue of Liberty seeming so close you might reach out and grab her torch. We settled for loading up the car with azaleas, rhododendrons, dahlias, begonias and lots of ground cover (in an attempt to get something to grow in the back plot still laden with huge maple tree roots) and heading back to Boerum Hill.
Planting our new acquisitions on Thursday morning was sweaty but satisfying, with our dog and cats circling around to curiously investigate our labors. Our neighbor’s cherry tree was in full bloom, with its gorgeous pink blossoms hanging down over our garden and brushing our heads as we dug holes and inserted plants–reminding us why we were doing all this work: to add some more color and flowers to our already blooming backyard landscape. Whenever my son, a budding urban chauvinist, proclaims that he can’t imagine why anyone would want to live anywhere except in New York, I remind him that we are very lucky to live in a house with a garden in a great neighborhood. Still, when I walk down our block, greeting by name neighbors who range from the movie actor who owns a lovingly restored brownstone at the corner to the guys who live in the rather rundown boarding house mid-block, I can be romantic about the diversity and democratic friendliness of urban life at its best.
