Matthew Gallaway

Every Season Is a Houseguest

1. Today, everything was covered in snow, but it didn't feel like winter anymore thanks to the pale blue sky.

2. The plants understood. They were reaching for something.

3. There was no wind to speak of, but there were signs of restlessness and transition. Small animals left traces of their foraging.

4. The heather was in bloom.

5. The elms hypnotized anyone who cared to look.

6. I had welcomed the snow and enjoyed its stay. I had walked across the frozen landscape filled with awe. What could be more beautiful?

7. The answer was nothing, but it didn't change how happy I was to see it go.

[Programming Note: I'll be off next week for 'spring break' but will return the following :)

Sleep Better Under a Blanket of Snow

1. On Riverside Drive, the snow outlined the arching trees, the curving balustrade, and other things I normally don't pay attention to.

2. I wanted to be happy about the snow, knowing that it would be pointless to start hoping for the spring. The trees and parks were beautiful now, I told myself. It should be enough. And for a few seconds, maybe it was.

3. I had never walked through the cemetery in the snow, and I wasn't sure it was even possible. I admired the iron work and wondered if Trinity Church would ever get around to fixing it. In the past, the thought of its rusting decay bothered me more than it did now. This fencing had already lasted more than a century; it could probably last at least that long again before it fell apart. Somehow, I had lived long enough for my perception of time to change.

4. The first gate was closed, but the second one was not.

5. Soon I was meandering through the ancient crypts. The dead were very quiet, resting under the blanket of snow.

6. I wondered if Richard Sands would be insulted that I didn't know anything about him. Or if he would be grateful that I appreciated how the snow was drifting over the letters of his name like the 'sands of time.' Maybe he was hoping for this effect when he designed his gravesite and now, however many years later, here I was, taking note. As any artist can tell you, sometimes an audience of one is all you need to make your day.

7. Someone else had designed these steps to nowhere, another good representation of life and death. Everything becomes a symbol in the cemetery and, like the trees of Riverside Drive, these symbols change their meaning in the snow.

8. One of the Astors had a very fancy railing, which proves that money can buy nice things (but fortunately not all of them).

9. And someone else insisted on being above everyone else, a monument to the futility of shouting at the wind and a tribute to the same.

My Beautiful Soup (A Portrait)

1. The weather was bad -- the dreaded 'wintry mix' -- but I was determined to go grocery shopping. I planned to try a recipe called 'Beautiful Soup (Vegetable Soup With Beets, Dill and Orange Zest)' that I found in The Times. I picked the recipe because I've been focusing on vegetarian soups, but I also liked the parenthetical, which reminded me of "Widow with Shawl (A Portrait)," one of my favorite Donovan songs.

2. At home, beautiful-soup ingredients purchased, I went to check on the garden. Covered in a thin sheet of ice, the brick path had become a palimpsest of a brick path.

3. But the situation was far from dire. Living up to their name, the snowdrops were not bothered by the cold. I knew that I had planted bulbs last fall, but the memory had faded enough so that the appearance of these flowers in the middle of winter seemed miraculous.

4. Inside, the orchids waited for the snow to end, which it eventually did. The sun was not far behind.

5. As always in New York City, there was line for the coveted position, and not everyone was happy about waiting in it.

6. Clio begged to go outside, where she likes to keep an eye on things. She is young and fearless and filled with ambition.

7. Being older and satisfied to chop and dice, I was filled with small hopes for a beautiful dinner.

In Favor of the Winter Dawn

1. I left the house as the frozen night was beginning to lift. Under the faintly brightening sky, the ugliest parts of the city -- the highways, the parking lots, the storage facilities, even the Orwellian stadium lighting -- emerged with startling clarity but somehow seemed less menacing than usual.

2. I used to associate the dawn with regrettable choices and bad endings, but now I appreciated how the blue light created a buffer against the shrill tedium of the day and the fleeting exuberance of night. Only the dusk seemed to offer the same potential, but the dusk was far away. Like the cats, I was becoming a crepuscular animal.

3. I went down the stairs, where the city waited like an empty museum.

4. I blew on my hands to keep them from going numb. It was still very cold. Minutes passed in what felt less like time than a reflection of time.

5. On the river, the ice marched like a broken army to the sea.

6. The bridge, while imposing, was comforting: at this hour, I could believe in the potential of such things.

7. With the hope of finding something new, I followed some footsteps under the arch of a broken tree.

The Perfect Wall Is Made of Burlap

1. As much as I was looking forward to spring, the browns and grays of the winter park -- made bronze and silver by the sun -- were soothing.

2. The architecture of the trees conveyed motion, even when there was none.

3. Even the most downtrodden parts of the park had pockets of strange, subdued colors I associated with dreams.

4. A temporary burlap fence protected the low plants. Maybe this could be the solution, I thought, envisioning the border between two countries. Or two periods of time.

5. The white flowers of the heather: a sign of what's to come.

6. The white flowers of the hydrangea: a sign of the past.

7. This fence offered shelter to those in need and allowed the light to pass through.

The Hudson River: Winter Edition

1. Not everyone was as excited as I was to see the ice on the river.

2. But I went anyway, armed with four layers and a fully charged phone, having learned from experience that the cold destroys batteries.

3. As it turned out, the air was very cold, just like everyone said it would be. The wind made it worse (ditto). My eyelashes kept freezing together. But I was alone on the shoreline, which is always a miraculous feeling in Manhattan. I admired the ice lilies blooming in the river.

4. I tried to remember the last time I was outside in low single digits. Maybe it was when my band played a show in Green Bay in the middle of January, or maybe in Michigan, where I went to high school. Or in Ithaca, which when I lived there was never not cold. Or when I was a kid playing pond hockey in Pittsburgh. We used to pray for this kind of weather -- frigid cold without snow -- because it would transform the lake into a sheet of glass, which (skating on it) is another miraculous thing to have done, although I could also still remember the pain of taking off my skates with frozen fingers and frozen toes.

5. Today, however, was a shorter trip: as expected, my phone died in approximately twenty seconds. I ran home, where I was thankful to find the heat on.

Welcome to the Pinetum (Seattle)

1. When the rain stopped, the Seattle skyline appeared across the water.

2. In Seattle, I'm like one of those tourists you see in Times Square, mouth agape, except here I'm gawking at the magnificent weeping conifers that can be found on every street corner.

3. Bikes were strewn everywhere, like litter, an ongoing casualty of our failure to regulate cars and the inordinate amount of public space they occupy.

4. A friend unlocked one for me and I took a spin. Going up a steep hill with just a few pedals, I fantasized about having fleets of such bikes (and scooters) in New York City, and safe (car-free) paths and roads on which to ride them.

5. The next morning I went out for an early run. Or was it still night? It was 6:30, but the moon was out and I couldn't see anything.

6. I was in outer space until the mist turned silver and I found the contours of a path marked by a sign that said: 'Welcome to the Pinetum.'

7. I arrived at a moss-covered bridge that apparently had been constructed from my dreams, or maybe -- because it seemed so much older than me -- the (gay) dreams of one of my (gay) ancestors.

8. I followed the light to a path.

9. What were these plants? They looked like heather, but were much bigger than any I had seen.

10. I felt a little guilty as I remembered the Heather Garden in Fort Tryon Park, which in my memories had become small. How would I ever be able to go back?

11. I also felt jealous seeing these twisting, moss-covered trunks.

12. But mostly I didn't think about anything except where I was, and how good it felt to be alone, running through the trees.

13. I found a new section of the forest where the ground was covered by ferns.

14. And acres of moss.

15. After many miles and too few minutes, it was time to go. I felt sorry as I crossed the bridge back to the real world.

16. Where the sun was just beginning to rise.

Snow on the Hudson

1. The snow, like an infrared light, exposed the decrepit, hidden paths leading to the river.

2. The fog had mostly lifted.

3. The skyline of the city -- another world, nothing like this one -- was very close, or very far away, or both.

4. I passed a shrine to gods I didn't recognize, but whose presence I could feel.

5. Up on the hill, their footprints could be seen in the snow.

Fog on the Mississippi (New Orleans)

1. Shortly after the New Year, I went to New Orleans for a work-related conference. The flight down was uneventful but vaguely unsettling: having spent the previous two weeks in seclusion (hiding from Christmas), I had forgotten what it was like to be a modern business traveler, bombarded with corporate branding initiatives.

2. It was a relief to arrive in my favorite weather: fog.

3. Whenever I'm in New York City, I like to tell myself that nothing compares to the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge, but there's something about the snaking grandeur of the Mississippi that likewise can't be matched. Standing on the banks of the river, I felt very small, but I also felt like I belonged to something historic and important and nonbranded. And maybe even American in a nonpolitical way, which is not an easy feeling to find these days.

4. It made me want to move to New Orleans, even if the summers are brutally hot and even if it's going to be underwater in a few years/decades/centuries.

5. A seagull flew past on its way to Algiers, reminding me that anything is possible in 2019.

The Year in Review: 2018

Best day the Hudson was covered in ice and the city looked like a faraway dream: January 9, 2018.

Best political slogan from the 1970s.

The best upper Manhattan park in winter: Fort Tryon Park (Washington Heights).

Best ‘band photo’ of three cats: Elektra, Zephyr, and Clio.

Best Visconti movie about a gay Bavarian king: Ludwig.

Best most underrated birds that symbolize life in the modern era (with proximity to a new gay bar): the circling pigeons of 159th Street and Broadway, just above 'Boxers'.

Best park on November 1, 2018: Fort Tryon Park.

Most curious cat: Zephyr.

Most least curious cat: Elektra.

Most beautiful day for a snowstorm: April 2, 2018 (Monday).

Best day to run 26.2 miles through Boston in a nor’easter: April 16, 2018.

Hottest gay statue: this one by Rodin in Philadelphia :)

Best ‘cat in the campanula’: Clio.

Best reason to ‘double down’ on your dislike of empty superhero movies and instead watch emotionally resonant literary adaptations that may not be ‘perfect’ but are beautifully shot and acted and remind us how boring and utilitarian so much of the English language has become (via commerce): My Brilliant Friend (HBO).

Cutest cat couple: Dante and Zephyr.

Best remnant of a not-too-distant but still pretty far away creative past that Jennifer found in her garage and texted a few weeks ago: this shot of Saturnine circa 1996.

The best cat + succulents in a picture: Elektra and potted succulents, July 6, 2018.

Best path through a heather garden lined with flowering azaleas in 2018: Fort Tryon Park.

Best trees to remind you of hallucinogenic experiences from your youth, and specifically that one time in a field not far from Stonehenge: the elms of Fort Tryon Park.

Best Frank Lloyd Wright reproduction framed by a Japanese maple (Acer Palmatum ‘Elizabeth’) and a cold-hardy camellia.

Best television secretly about the ancient gods and the people who entertain them: Terrace House.

Best bridge: The GW.

Best reason to hope: today the light will last a little longer than yesterday :)

Best reason to keep reading this blog: I’m taking a short break but will be back on January 12th, 2019 to resume regularly scheduled posts about GoT (jk) and cats galloping across the hibernal tundra.