heart maps

I've been thinking a lot lately about my slippery sense of place. For instance, I've walked the long block of Fifty-first street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues with Mike on our way to and from the Columbia midtown office in every season: tuning into the unfamiliar languages of scantily clad tourists from Europe and Asia in the summer, shouldering past midtown office workers in a biting winter wind, jumping over muddy spring puddles at intersections, always looking up to see the moving clouds and sun reflected and flashing on the sides of skyscrapers. It can be intoxicating or assaultive, tragic or joyful, all depending on Mike's state and whatever the latest bit of news we are digesting happens to be.

That walk is a gauntlet when I know Mike is summoning every scrap of available energy he has to keep moving, when he's short of breath and cold with an oncoming fever. I hold my breath, I will the people and traffic to cooperate. When he is sick on the streets of midtown, the landscape becomes hard and flinty, and everyone around us is The Enemy. They are so brusque, so aggressive with their quick steps. Or sometimes they are The Spoiled Rotten Healthy, walking to work with vigor and urgency, gym bags slung over shoulders and enormous iced coffees in hand, completely clueless as to the riches they are plundering, the insult they indirectly face us with, we who flinch in the wind and are often afraid of the future.

I walked those same blocks when I went to see Broadway plays on visits to New York with my family growing up. The TKTS stand was a happy wait, full of anticipation, wondering what show we'd land at. Now sometimes I walk past those throngs of tourists thinking, what is the damn point? Why squeeze together like that in a little concrete sardine can in the middle of Times Square? Did you really come to New York for this? 

Of course they did. They aren't walking Cancer Row, like me. They're walking an entirely different city.

Then there have been times, like last week, when we walked back from the office in the late afternoon sunshine feeling dazed and strange, trying to digest the surprising news that the current clinical trial is having a decidedly positive effect. My eyes sought out fellow vulnerable travelers: impatient children in strollers, old women walking at a regal glacial pace in heels, immigrant workers heading home from their shifts in delis and threading salons and cleaning crews, the Chinese vendors with placid expressions selling cut paper cards on folding tables at every corner. The October sun and shade felt equally gentle on my face.

I love you, I thought. I love all of you. Cancer hasn't ruined you after all. I love the blocks between the parking garage and the medical office. I love the little polished concrete park where men and women in office attire stare at their phones and eat their salads; I love the ubiquitous construction workers toiling amidst the scaffolding; I love the Dominican guys barking behind the deli counter when your order is ready. I love you, Times Square.

I love this city that projects vigorous strength and competition, yet whose every crack is filled with vulnerability, strangeness, unrecognizable languages, endless stories.

Back when Mike and I were baby grown ups living in New York, much was hard and unknown in my life, but being head-over-heels in love with the place I lived was always an uncomplicated pleasure. I turned up my nose at Times Square in those days, but in my heart of hearts I knew my old New York - Broadway, the Macy's parade, the tourists, Fifth Avenue, deli bagels - was still special, surviving alongside my new New York, full of things like film series and restaurants and friends and my job. I walked new maps of Brooklyn neighborhoods and downtown Manhattan into my heart. It became a different city from the New York of my childhood, the New York of my mother's acting school memories, and the New York of college visits to my boyfriend's family on the Upper East Side. Sometimes I'd walk an old familiar block, a place I had frequented during a different chapter of my life, and marvel - how could this be the very same street? The stone steps, the iron railings, the fruit stand are all the same. Yet it is transformed. The map has shifted.

It's as if God continually shakes out and lifts up a billowing, diaphonous sheet that floats above the towers and streets and spires of the city, then settles into place, just so, shifting the color and feel of every brick, every face. Time, experience, memory, expectation, the peace or lack thereof in your heart - the light shines through things at a new angle. A different translucent fabric could have settled onto the city at any moment, inviting endless responses to the world that shines through it. You might encounter the same place every day, every moment, and find it endlessly peculiar and new.

I think about this too in leafy Lancaster, in poignant, heartbreakingly beautiful late October. It's our third consecutive cancer fall here. We thought Mike's treatment would be one hard season - a grueling semester - in fall 2015. Then we'd return to our 'real' life. But his disease has defied every expectation, every assault, and our unplanned tenure here keeps unfolding before us, becoming as real a life as any we've lived.

And every fall I fall in love with the corner of town where we live. Every fall I marvel at how I can find the same streets and houses and telephone poles so damn compelling. You don't need the drama and novelty of a cosmopolis. You just need a place to which you can return, again and again. I'm pretty sure I didn't feel this way at fourteen. I hadn't accumulated enough seasons here; not yet.

For me now, in this place and season, it all has to do with the slanting yellow light, the way it makes everything and everyone more beautiful than they already are.

Autumn sunlight does something extraordinary to trees in particular, most especially in the morning and early evening - say at 8:15, when I hustle the children into the car on our way to school and a bit of stillness finds me while sitting at a light, watching the world through the windshield, or a little before 5, when I open the heavy door of the Student Wellness Center after many back-to-back sessions and walk out into the cool air and see the bright blue sky. It reveals a tree's tree-ness, it's botanical soul, by which I mean its miraculous there-ness, its solidity and fragility, its constancy and beauty and dance-like gentle stirring in the cooling air.

I'm a total broken record in October. Look at that tree, you guys! Can you believe how beautiful it is? No really, just look! I simply can't help myself. Any day now my kids will be ready to kill me. We know, Mama. The trees are nice.

But maybe you'll indulge me: today I saw an illuminated maple tree glowing red, each jewel-leaf hanging by a thread, each ready and willing to be severed forever by a strong gust of wind. I don't know what that tree looks like during the other seasons of the year, but I remember it from last fall. The tree doesn't care about me - but it shares itself graciously, completely, all the same. Talk about nobility.

And then there is the brick of Lancaster city's row homes, a similar glowing red in the sun, a brilliance against the green and yellow and orange trees lining the streets. There's the drama of scudding clouds in the sky above the soccer field on Tuesday and Thursday nights, casting shadows that move strangely on the green grass. There's the new clean, sharp chill in the night air that enlivens even as I perform the dreaded trash-and-recycling-taking-out task on Monday nights. There's the sun rising behind the dark trees on the eastern side of the street, their forms limned with pink and yellow, on the rare morning when we get it together in time to walk to school. There's the squirrels. The squirrels! And there's my beloved's face in the passenger seat, moving through light and shadow as we sail through space.

Why is it that the more I see the very same things, the more interesting and the more new they become? Why does repetition make familiar things more precious to me?

I could stay here for a thousand years, a thousand autumns, watching the sky move, light and shadow dappling these singular people in this singular place, and never grow tired of it. A thousand years! I would love the world more dearly still.