New York, New York

A friend who grew up in Southern Colorado told me he was surprised by my stories of growing up in Vermont. He said he thought the whole East Coast was one long never ending city. It doesn't feel that way when you live there, but when you come from the Southwest it does, and I couldn't resist taking advantage of it. This brought me to Philly's neighbor, my favorite of all, the fabulous New York City.

I moved to Manhattan just after college, it's sort of what you did after art school, and I had a boyfriend there. I also remember the fear of leaving it a few years later, but I couldn't shake the feeling that there was a world to see.

After college, I found work dyeing, painting and screen-printing fabric for Broadway shows, movies, rock stars, and fashion designers. It didn't pay much, and I often couldn't afford to take the subway home, but those long walks were my favorite part of all. On this journey I wanted to return, not to the city of my old every day reality, but to the one I had seen through windows and fantasized about on that long walk home from work.

This part of the trip was a gift to the 22 year old me, the one who had longed to stroll through Central Park in the middle of a work day, to be the one on the other side of the window writing in a cafe, to experience the city like it looked on the cover of the New Yorker.

A lifetime in a week, small but real.