“When I first moved to the city,†Sara told us as we opened another bottle of wine, “A friend of a friend of my parents hooked me up with a bargain of an apartment on Park Avenue. The only catch was that I had to drop in on the old woman who owned the building, get her a few groceries occasionally, things like that. But the rent was unbelievable, so I jumped at it.
The Upper West Side is a great place to be on Halloween. The houses lining 69th street are decorated as individually themed haunted houses, ranging from the frightening – serial killers in the process of being electrocuted, dangling corpses from nooses, giant spider – to the delightful – people abseiling out of apartment windows having light-saber fights.
My sister was visiting for the weekend, which, happily, coincided with one of my favorite events in New York, the Halloween Dog Parade.
If you are lucky enough to be given the keys to a cottage in upstate New York in the middle of Fall, then this is the drink that you’re going to want to be sipping on the porch.
When you move house, everything is unsettled. You can’t find the scissors. You trip on the edge of the bed. You hear every creak in the floor, every tick of the pipes. Your stuff is in, but it’s nowhere near home.
So here we are in September, contemplating whether or not to wear tights. It’s Fall in the morning, High Summer by lunchtime. Here, at the crossover, dressing, and dining, could go either way. As apples overtake tomatoes in the Union Square Farmers’ Market, it provokes a series of questions: did I eat enough lobster rolls this summer? Was there enough ice-cream? Enough frozen margaritas?
Our good friends Karen and Ronnie had recently returned to Sweden to get married on the edge of a lake in front of family and friends.
There’s a an old joke that I think of whenever I pick thyme leaves off the little plant that’s survived windowsills, balconies and back to a window sill again, hardy as can be. “You want to hear a joke about herbs?†“Yes, is there thyme?†Continue reading
So here we are, staring down the barrel at the end of Summer, and the end of living in this apartment. Â Sunday and Monday were filled with sorting and packing, and sending our belongings off to storage for three weeks, but first there was Saturday, and Pimms.
