Sunday in New York

The rain that was supposed to come overnight and linger into the morning hours either came and went before dawn or maybe never came at all. It’s been a pretty sunny day that we’ve spent indoors, warm enough to turn on the fan for the first time.

As I have noticed each day, the sounds of the city are many and varied. Yesterday I awoke to the clopping of horses’ hooves. This morning the first sound I heard was the whistle of a train, followed by what might have been a boat horn. I don’t know how close we are to any trains, but know we are only a few blocks from the Hudson River, so perhaps the boat was sailing there.

Our helpful home nursing aides have shared the travails of using the subways. Their work requires frequent subway rides, but though the system operates 24 hours a day, the schedules are not reliable at night and on weekends because that is when work on the tracks occurs. With almost 850 miles of track running throughout the area, it must be a huge undertaking just to keep them working. The frustration for those depending on the trains (almost 5 million riders a day) is that there is not always clear information about service disruption. One can be waiting on the platform for a train that is not coming.

Our aides are representative of the international flavor of this city where more than a third of residents were born outside the United States. We have helpers from Jamaica, Haiti and India, all with stories to tell of both their U.S. experience and the homelands from whence they came. Most bring their lunches, so our little kitchen has become a center for the cuisines of many nations with the aroma of fragrant spices wafting through the air.

It’s interesting what one can learn without stepping outside. Because circumstances have kept me indoors today, I’ve spent little bits of free time researching the city as my friend naps to regain her strength. Only today did I learn that the Hudson River (for which I have a fascination) is actually a fjord, the only fjord in North America. Since Mike and I spent some time cruising the fjords of Norway last summer, I found this particularly interesting.

How does the Hudson come to have this designation? It is so classified because it was formed when a glacier cut a u-shaped valley by abrading the surround bedrock. Apparently the river only becomes a true fjord many miles north of the city as it passes through the Highlands. All I know is that the few encounters I have had with the river, here in New York City and farther north around the Franklin Roosevelt home on the Hudson in Hyde Park. I long to take a Hudson River cruise and have that on my list of places to go and things to do.

As I write this, the sun is beginning to set and I’m watching its last rays move across the courtyard, painting the bricks a luscious pink shade, rather than the deep red they wear during the day. The building is more than 50 years old, built just after World War II.