I can’t remember another winter when it has snowed so frequently. In our new apartment, the living room windows stretch nearly 20 feet — the full height of the space — which creates the effect of being in a Colorado or Utah ski lodge. The windows look out onto blocks and blocks of backyards and clothing lines, shirts and socks often frozen in place along the rope. When the neighbors realize their clothes are being buried by little mounds of snow, they hurry outside and pull the lines in, so as the storm progresses, the clothing lines disappear one-by-one.
The neighbors directly to the south often grill with coats and hats on and the smell of hamburgers drift through our open back door. The side of their home–the one facing our bedroom, is a 50 foot wall entirely covered in ivy. The ivy reaches across the windows and envelops the chimney, and in the morning birds fly in and out of the ivy, landing in hidden nests. From certain angles, ivy is all we can see, and it is as though living in a garden and not in the city. It is so uniform in thickness and color up and down the whole side of the brick red home, it is hard to imagine the growth was long, steady, and organic, rather than being there from the very beginning.
The kids in the house two to the right have set up a teepee in their backyard for winter camping. The house one to the right has been struggling to dig up cement planters buried in their yard. The house to the left is bare with scaffolding.
The snow at night dims the sky, so we can sit in the dark and outside seems bright and brown, then purple, then gray, then brown again. The branches and telephone poles and ivy and steps off the balcony are covered in snow and creates the effect of watching a sleeping world. It is very beautiful.
N.B. [Winter edition]
1. Friend Dustin made an incredible 15-foot tall inflatable hand sculpture that was on view at 3rd Ward last Friday.
2. Richard Avedon’s Portraits of Power featuring one Mr. President Obama is on view at Washington D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art until January 25th.
3. Love in the First Person by Matt and Melissa Eich. Fabulous. Might-make-you-cry-warning.
4. Things I’m enjoying looking at: Rinko Kawauchi, LIFE photo archive, Wayne Thiebaud at Crown Point Press.
5. And lastly: Welcome, Barack Obama, our new President.
