The Burrow

From Facebook, an update from a high school friend : Fun day with my nephew and 4 year old great-nephew ..... a ride on the original Nunley's Carousel. In a flash, I was a kid and I was there, waiting not that patiently for the previous ride to stop spinning so that I could get onto the black horse, the best horse, the one with the hot pink rose and the flaring nostrils.  The one reared on her hind legs, fierce and proud and gorgeous.  The one on the outside, in front of the bench on which I used to sit, paralyzed with fear, until the black horse spoke to me. C'mon, denizens..... I was 8 and tiny for my age.  Those stirrups were at my eye level for a very long time.  Imagine how high up the saddle seemed.  It took some courage for me to mount the steed. I can feel the concrete of the pavilion beneath my feet and hear the bells clanging on the skeeball games because that was always where I stood to wait for the previous ride to end.  It was quieter b...

Scope and scale mean different things in different parts of the country.  Growing up on Long Island, the ocean was grand and went on forever, flat for as far as I could see.  Yet it was curiously intimate as well, with gentle sloshing waves covering my toes at sunset or giant breakers pushing me ahead of themselves rushing headlong toward shore.  (In yet another Who Knew ? moment, it wasn't until I moved to California that I discovered that my childhood pastime had a name and a culture all its own..... bodysurfing).  The skyscrapers  in Manhattan did touch the sky, and Daddooooo made sure I knew the history (real or imagined; he talked and I believed) and the height and the controversy behind each one.  A New Yorker's New Yorker, he never tired of standing at a street corner, head flung back, hat held on with one hand while the other gesticulated, directing my embarrassed but willing eye toward an outcropping or an antenna or a tree-lined b...

There's a bunny in my courtyard. He's nibbling the leaves of the moorea lily. He's kind of scruffy looking; his ears have notches in them. Has someone been nibbling on them? The monsoon has arrived. We don't say "monsoon season" because it's redundant - the monsoon is the season in which most of our rain falls. The monsoon start date is determined when the average daily dewpoint is 54 degrees or greater, according to NOAA. That is, it was up until 2008 when The National Weather Service decided that it would start, every year, despite the weather or the rainfall or the dewpoint, on June 15th. These people must be related to the fools who decided that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were both born on the 3rd Monday in February, thus depriving generations of school children the pleasure of having two 4-day weeks happening two weeks apart. A bobcat just strolled by. Happily, he was outside the gate to the courtyard. Anyhow, back to the monsoon. ...