you can take the girl out of NY City but not the NY city out of the girl!

I was born in NY city. we stayed there until i was 3. i don't remember any of it. i have spent my whole life in the city where i live. but even here i lived in the decidely urban areas. my grandmother lived in an almost suburb. each house had a patch of grass in the back but that was about it. so i never really acquired a taste for the country. even with the almost yearly visits to my great uncle's farm where we would spend a month or more. it was too much country/nature for me. so i hid--hid from the bugs, hid from the cows, hid from the wild horses, hid from the chickens that would chase me, hid from the site of my uncle killing a pig or chicken for dinner. i did not go out exploring in the tall fields of grass--grass so tall it could obscure your exsistence from the world.

it wasn't until a family reunion a few years ago that i saw the place again and realized what i had missed out on. there was a creek behind the house where my mom remembers playing. it required a bit of climbing thru some brush though and i am not found of nature touching anything but the bottom of my shoe.

so it is weird for me, almost culture shock, in the neighborhood i now live in. it is decidedly more suburban and there is grass--large fields of it. and animals-fox, rabbits, racoons, hummingbirds, hawks, red cardinals, some wild cats, field mice, owl, snakes, slugs, frogs, deer, squirrels, salamanders.

i remember my first night moving in to the apt. something darted across my path as i was carrying boxes and i screamed. a neighbor came out to inquire and i started ranting about the large white suburban rats; turned out to be rabbits.

i am consistently amazed by the things i find in nature around here. i have seen baby pine cones (they are sooooo cute). and there are these funny brown pompom like things that smoosh apart when you step on them. and acorns which crunch when you step on them, and these things that looked like dried up black bananas that have seeds in them--they make a delightful crunch when dry and you step on them. neighbors have had many a laugh at the site of a fat 35 year old black woman whose inner child forces her to weave back and forth across the sidewalk to step on things and then chuckle at the sound they make.

today i noticed worms crawling into holes. for a split second while walking with the dogs thru the field, i thought i was seeing things again. but then i saw one clearly and i was amazed. i spent the next 15 or so minutes walking on the grass and watching worms dart into holes. the only ones who did not dart were mating (i assume that's what they were doing). but if you got too close or stopped hard they too would peel apart and scatter to opposite holes.

so then we are walking back and i notice worms on the sidewalk. and i start to pick them up (with a stick ofcourse) and move them back onto the grass. and then in true child like manner i felt bad because i did not note what directtion they were moving in before i moved them so i may have set them back in their journey. so i was more careflu to check with the next few.

and then i noticed one going diagonally across the pavement. i wondered why he didn't taake the shortest road to the other patch of grass. and then, i wondered if the worm actually knew there was another patch of grass. i mean really, can they see? (apparently some can) . so i wondered how the worm knows that the grass is greener on the other side.

maybe the worm doesn't know there is anything better. maybe though motion in any unexplored direction is better than staying in one spot. maybe they just keep moving. don't like that spot, well choose another direction and set off. and maybe i should adopt that same philosophy in life, not with physical moves but with emotional and spiritual ones.