The trees are blooming on Columbus avenue. Sprouting green sprigs surrounded by white blossoms. Spouting the promise of new things to come. But it’s so cold, I think and then of how it seems the young have migrated to the Upper West Side. Members of my generation stride by with brown satchels slung over bony shoulders and cameras in their hands.

But then there’s that old woman with TEVA sandals strapped over her violet painted toes. She holds a pink lunchbox like a purse. Wears a puffy Baby Phat jacket.

And I watch her walk by from my window, reminding me first of those steadfast facets of a city in constant evolution and then of my own feet at six years old. My own unpainted toes held up beside my mother’s. Both of us bare, both of us sporting the same purple patterned TEVAs.

We wore them rafting. In Idaho. In large inflatable rafts that seemed indestructible at the time.
But now seem so fragile when in my darker moods, I look back on the photographs that froze us, open mouthed and dodging waves of white water, holding up plastic paddles against the rising rapids.

The flimsy albums of red and blue my parents fought for custody of hold us frozen in time alongside a series of shots I took in secret from a hidden place. A window into an adult world my parents forgot to shut before they let go the angry words my photos mime.

The words are lost. And for once I think them unimportant. I see everything spoken in the silent shells, the air-filled gestures. My father’s palm held up, my mother’s head bowed. Her back turned. The two of them walking away and how something that seemed so indestructible was, in reality, ready to burst.