The neighborhood has exploded with these flowers lately:







Anyone know what they're called?

Tulip in Brooklyn, NY. April 16, 2006.

Ryan (four) in a subway station. April 16, 2006.

We went to New York this weekend. My first trip since I moved to this state to that eponymous metropolis.

I've been to New York before. On a school trip in 1997 (note hilarious contemporary website; also, the most high-brow travel with which I've ever been associated). Then passing through on my Grand Public Transportation Adventure of 2001. On that trip I came home from school one day and realized it was the beginning of spring break. I called Continental Airlines and left a couple hours later, leaving a few vague voicemails with long-unseen friends alluding to (threatening?) my impending arrival. That was a good trip, my first forray into what I suppose is called "independent travel." The extent of my stay in NYC proper, though, was to walk from Penn Station to Grand Central. I read Catcher In The Rye and visited all my friends in fancy colleges. Another time in transit between Chinatown busses.

This trip was to visit Chris. There were four of us, me and Bree and Lisa and Ryah. We wandered lazy Brooklyn streets. We drank beer at sidewalk cafes, examined free things on sidewalks. Ate delicious Mexican food at a twenty-four hour diner. Bree spoke a lot of Spanish. We slept on the hardwood floor of Chris's little apartment, made cozy by our bundles of blankets and pillows. It was a hot night. Sat on the fire escape. Attended a show in a hipster cave, Cloyne Court co-opers playing at Cakeshop. Walked across the Brooklyn bridge. Chris's apartment is littered with the remnants of our old apartment, lending a strange familiarity to the scene.

On Saturday before Easter it rained cherry blossoms upon us, hand-in-hand, in Central Park (okay, I'm told they are crab apple blossoms, but that's just not quite so poetic) and Bree and I walked a bit of the Met in exchange for our token $1 contribution, but the grandeur of the weekend was the lazy times in Brooklyn.

Springtime arrived this morning, right on schedule at 7:42 am.

Very soon thereafter we received the year's first spring snow.