twenty days

it's good to be home in maine again and back in my little place on the web, my little "blog shop"—as one fine blogger recently put it—adding to the bits and pieces already piled up in here with more thoughts and observations. i am always inspired to do so after fondly inhaling life, picking up the scent the world gives off as it spins 'round and 'round, in one distant, often foreign, location after another.

at the beginning of our twenty days on the road the first delightful scents to be encountered were of taxi cabs, cars, buses, tourists and good old new yorkers in cloudy brooklyn. during our one afternoon spent there, after dropping our daughter, hannah, off for her flight to greece and before flying to denmark and england ourselves, we decided to do something neither of us had ever done before—even though my husband grew up a mere spit away on the other side of the hudson river in new jersey. we decided to walk across the brooklyn bridge.

we admired the structure of that beautiful old bridge, the towering manhattan skyline, the view of lady liberty in the distance on one side of the bridge and the view of the manhattan bridge on the other side up the east river.

but for me the real view to behold was composed of the sights and sounds of the people trudging right along with me across the bridge's expanse of stone, metal and hefty cable: young and old, visitors and residents of every color and nationality; the flowing babble of languages; people on bikes ringing their little bells and shouting watch out to warn pedestrians who constantly, annoyingly, strayed into the bike lane; families with baby strollers; vendors hawking water, ice cream, artwork; people walking dogs, people in filthy clothes and others in thousand-dollar suits, and even a guy on a unicycle.

a cross-section of humanity was represented up there on the bridge's pedestrian walkway. who were all those people? where did they come from? why were they on the brooklyn bridge that day? wouldn't it be interesting to know the answers to those questions?

after we crossed the bridge and came back to the brooklyn side, we laughed as we mulled over the idea that maybe we should walk across all the nyc bridges. perhaps this is no laughing matter because, who knows, maybe we will.