upstate, downstate, downtown, uptown (and kitten)

Since closing the store, I've been spending weekends catching up on neglected friends and favorite places. The weekend after Thanksgiving, we went to Vermont to see dear friends who live near Bennington, a small town that has THREE independent book stores, and a fourth until a recent fire.

Then breakfast in Amherst, where I planned to visit Emily Dickinson's house, but the timing didn't work out. I did, however get to have an excellent college town breakfast--such fun to overhear ernest conversation about Kierkegaard and Fellini while eating French toast.

Last weekend to the Catskills, where many businesses have the Closed sign up for the winter, but lunch at Two Old Tarts--Senegalese peanut soup, sour cream apple coffee cake, and hot cider, was sublime. I visited friends, holiday shopped and found an antique desk for my son, so....

 Sunday morning I drove to Brooklyn to deliver the desk, then uptown to spend a couple of hours in the Metropolitan Museum, then midtown where I met my son and his girlfriend at a holiday fair. That night, walking the streets of Manhattan into a neighborhood of stately townhouses I had such a feeling of familiarity, and realized that for an instant I felt like I was walking within a book I just finished--Mark Helprin's In Sunlight and In Shadow. He writes with such love and intensity about New York City (and does so even more in one of my favorite books, Winter's Tale).

Monday morning I walked through Chinatown into the Lower East Side

where I loaded up on pickles and bialys, neither of which are properly made in Boston (and don't get me started on Massachusetts pizzas which, for some reason are all made by Greeks).

I'll be home this weekend, hanging wreaths and trying out cat names. This may be my last long post for a while, since I now have to share the computer.

What? You want more kitten pictures?

Enjoy your weekend!

Jen