1998 november 12

leavesfall

i am on the neverending quest to find the best place to park.

for seven years i didn't have a car and therefore didn't have to worry about parking at the office; i just hopped off the bus and skipped to my loo -- oh, how obviously freudian -- my office. last year, i figured i had done my transportation penance, had spent quite enough time on brutal transportation devices and therefore deserved to have a personal vehicle. it is all well and good to ride the high horse and flaunt your ecofriendly ways by riding the bus, but when you want ice cream at 11pm or desperately need a pain killer at 4am, you can't beat having your own car.

i can't completely shake the eco thing, nor my hatred for the traffic in the city, so i have been frequenting park-n-rides on its periphery. technically, i am park-n-walking but i think i am using the lot in the correct spirit so i don't feel too guilty.

my office sits atop a hill. the whole city is rather hilly, but of course my building sits atop the granddaddy of them all, so it has been my mission of late to find the park-n-ride that offers the easiest walk both to and from the office. the first was 1.5 miles, uphill the whole way there, downhill the whole way back -- not too bad. then i found one that was 1.5 miles away but relatively flat for part of the way there before the uphill and subsequent afternoon downhill part started. again, not too bad and i would have settled for this one if it hadn't involved walking past a high school in the afternoon when the sidewalks and bus stops are flooded with teens in packs who refuse to make it an easy chore to get around them without stepping into the road and the path of a maniacal driver.

yesterday, i think i found the winner, less than a mile away, atop another small hill, on the same road as my building. so i walk down a hill and then up a hill, both in the morning and the afternoon, and the walks go right past both of my banks and a grocery store, not to mention a variety of other little stores, so i can run errands in the afternoon on the way back to the car.

this morning, i parked in the dark and started walking before i noticed how windy it was. i love wind. let me repeat that for emphasis, i LOVE wind. i stood on the sidewalk, the wind whipping my hair and stinging my cheeks, listening as it blew little fallen leaves down the street. there were so many it sounded like water, as though a small waterfall were streaming down 11th avenue. the musty smell of them surrounded me, reminding me how much i like those sort of nature smells, the ones right at the end of a season: overripe blackberries, fallen leaves, old ice, new grass.

i suppose that is rather perverse, liking the smell of things the moment before their death, the last burst of sweetness before the putrefaction, the final bloom before the rot, but i do.

i walked in the wind, often with my eyes closed thereby defying death at the hands of a halfawake motorist, listening to the leaves fly by and grinning like an idiot. a lovely way to start a thursday.

i usually hate thursdays, they are just in the way of fridays.

skittering across your screen, claire