Ms Baroque is still in America

The weather has turned: back-to-school has deepened into autumn. Yesterday's rain was torrential enough to make you wonder how the pilgrims survived - it lashed down so hard on skylights and cars and wet roads that you imagine a small wooden structure would be flattened. If the humidity of the past few weeks has been a thought, the rain was its corollary action, and realisation. Now there's a delightful crispness - my favourite season. It'll be hot in a few hours. Even the wind sounds different: the leaves are dried out, and turning - many are already red - so they give the wind a sort of rattly sound. (Sounds: the crickets are quieter now, only a few hardy ones left. There is a cardinal flying around - I saw him - perching on the railings and branches, cheeping his harsh little cheep. The cars sound louder and more whishy than last week.)

But last night, driving home from Shady Glen - the ice cream and cheeseburger place that sounds like a cemetery in a John Cheever book - everything was still damp and wet, and creepy North American mists wrapped themselves around the tops of the trees, the streetlights, the little houses set back along Route 6 - even the air. Every air particle was wrapped in a creepy mist particle and visibility, other than of ghosts, was low.

There's so much contrast here! A week ago in the sun there was so much contrast present in every minute that light and full shadow were the only two settings. You could barely see. And people talk slowly up here. They don't want fast remarks that go off at a tangent and blur the contrast between what's being said and what cannot be arrived at. They rehearse the facts, are very clear and careful, declarative. Then I went to New York City! Hundreds of different modes of being, telling, dressing, suddenly suggest themselves & I become a different person. I even look different there. People all want to talk to you, they want to hear your answer and they want to tell a story. They can't resist asking questions.

I was staying at the corner of LaGuardia Place and Bleecker Street, a conjunction of street names almost calculated to bring a lump to the baroque throat. And look! Lunch in the White Horse Tavern, laughing with my friend about the cheesiness of it, beneath an enormous painting of Dylan Thomas (my friend points to the table next to us: "I think that might be where he did it"); dinner at John's Pizza in Bleecker St, my other friend and I talking non-stop about everything for three and a half hours and walkign back to his subway stop in the balmy evening; dinner the next night at a pleasant little place also on Bleecker Street with another friend, talking about Harriet the Spy! Fun! The best cheeseburger of my life, too, I think. In short, very restorative, but sad to be saying - as one always does - "see you soon," and then hastily adding: "Sooner next time, I hope!" - in the full knowledge that I always say that and it is always two years.

In between engagements I went up to Union Square twice (first time missed Barnes & Noble by five minutes; but I did get my Junot Diaz book in the end. I was annoyed in a what-can-you-do way to discover later that the Strand also had signed copies, at a $7 discount. However, the Strand did come through for me. Unlike the weather, which was so muggy and hot and moist and hideous that my feet swelled up, giving me an unprecedented number of blisters, and I now don't know if I even have any shoes I can wear to go home in!

I walked at least a hundred blocks in two days. Up Broadway and down 7th Ave. Up Avenue of the Americas and down Broadway and over Houston Street and around and around the West Village. There's a Barnes & Noble at something like 12th St & 6th Ave. I came back to CT with three bags of books - and a brand-new pair of ugly black-&-pink North Face flip flops, which I'm leaving at my mother's house. I never got further north than Union Square (not very far north - 17th Street). I never got on a bus, let alone the subway. I missed out on midtown and the towers of Gotham. And practically the most fun I had was on the bus coming home, which drove straight up 10th Ave, through midtown and the Upper West Side until it becomes Amsterdam Avenue, and continued up it through Morningside Heights and Harlem, all the way to 155th St, where it turned and crossed the bridge and continued north along the edge of the Bronx. Every one of these neighbourhoods is poignantly evocative, saturated with its own flavour and feel. There are a hundred Manhattans and I want them all.

Oh, speaking of poignant, I had to stop myself from crying when I got out of the cab at Port authority, stood there gazing up 8th Avenue into the receding distances of uptown, breathing in the smells, soaking up the feeling of the familiar canyons of buildings - which for my first 19 years was my only template for a city - and reluctantly, through an act of will, took myself in the doors (automatically and happily cursing the people who crossed my path with my heavy bags) and went down the escalator. Crying. "Oh, come on Kate." I said to myself. You'll be back. And sooner this time."

Straight from the bus depot to the Hebrew Home, where the rain lashed garden and gazebo and picnic spot; the lobby was packed full of convalescents, elderly people and their visitors. It gets very noisy, because everybody is talking very loud, and slow, and making jokes. Le duc de Baroque and I had to sit in the corridor, he in his flashy new wheelchair, I damp and tired. He insisted on staying with me till my sister arrived, no matter how his head nodded (he has a head rest now); he said to my offers of taking him upstairs for a nap, "It'll only make it harder to wake up when we get there;" when I talked of putting his sweater on, because there was chilly air from the door, he said, "no, no, I'll get them to do it once I'm already on the plane." So we waited, & I had hot chocolate in a styrofoam cup from Thelma in the coffee shop. It's Rosh Hoshanah now, so the coffee shop is closed for three days; Thelma's going down to Florida till next week.

While I was in there I ran into the rabbi, and he was once again very interested to hear the details of my flight. It turns out he is an ex-flying instructor! He still loves it and goes and does flight-simulator sessions, setting himself particular precision tasks like tight take-offs to perform. He says, "Lots of people love flying for the thrills. I don't like thrills, I don't like the roller coaster; I like precision! It's the precision of flying that I love."

Then sis, and Mama Baroque, and Shady Glen, and packing materials, and packing. Right now Mama B is taking Truman to his puppy play centre for the day so we can all do our things. He has gone running off with one of his favourite stuffed toys clutched in his mouth like a bunny. (We did see a bunny on the hillside yesterday, too.)

Now it's chilly and the leaves are turning. The deck furniture is inside the house. Today, the book-shipping saga. My nephew will arrive and drive me to the airport shuttle, and I'll go to the airport (how, with these bags, I literally have no idea, there are too many of them and all heavy and I only have two arms, & I know that at some stage before I get home I will experience despair and maybe cry on a concourse) and onto the plane, and home, where Mlle B is taking the morning off school tomorrow so she can be there when I arrive.

Mama B has her presentation tonight, and tomorrow sets off for North Carolina for the winter, and the house here will be shut up.