The sidewalk... and then some!

Commonly, New York is associated with neck-cramping skyscrapers, gridlock traffic and a stampede of people, not necessarily going anywhere but for some reason always in a rush and completely disconnected from the hundreds of other people they encounter just by walking down a city block. It is all too easy to forget that this city isn't just the hectic, yet glamour-filled concrete mayhem portrayed on TV. So you can understand my surprise when I moved in to the house where I currently live. While the house itself does not yell out for attention, the area it is located in certainly does bring into question all the common concepts that one has about living in this city.
My house is one of a block's worth of houses completely surrounded by trees, parks and even more trees. Right in front of my house there is a particularly dense lot of trees that currently, through the yearly scorn of the harsh winter weather, have forfeited their leaves and their vibrant allure. This being said, on those bitter evening after the rain has stopped, frozen and glazed the bareness of these trees, it is practically indescribable the sight produced by the street lights reflecting on the crystallized branches. During the rest of the year however, the foliage changes this grim, deaden, yellow portrait into a dense green that makes it almost impossible to visualize the main road it conceals. The impenetrable shade offered by these trees satiates the longing for relief from the scorching sun of the midday traveler or the prancing children.

As I was coming home one morning around early sunrise on a somewhat chilly, yet not entirely unbearable mid-spring morning, I noticed something I had never seen before. Across the road, due to the morning dew and the vast green lands that make up Kissena Park, along with the warming of the temperatures produced by the creeping sun, a solid fog, as those seen only in movies spread rampant across the park. The thing that was most striking was that as soon as the roads that surround the borders of the park began, the fog ceased, as if the fence surrounding the park were also containing the spread of the fog. I couldn’t help but just stand there and observe spellbound. It was interesting to discover something so strange yet mesmerizing so close to home, that had I been asleep like I should’ve been, I would’ve never seen it. And thus, as a good New Yorker, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the camera phone.
Very pleasantly I commute these sidewalks; whether running late for that morning class or simply catching the bus to the nearest subway at the end of the street, there is just something about being surrounded by nature that simply soothes the daily battering that is the New York lifestyle.