Window

I can hear the traffic on the street slushing through a foot of snow from our West Village apartment. My bedroom overlooks Bleecker Street, and from my window I can see a row of little shop windows, their displays lighting up the night, filled with shoes and jewels and books and white wire trees with twinkle lights on them. Above the shops I can see into the windows of other apartments like ours. Through one window I see a television playing a black-and-white movie, and through another I see a stove, most likely waiting for a pot of water to boil on this blustery evening. I stretch my neck out as far as it can go to catch a glimpse of the ends of the street, just hoping to find more windows. Windows into art galleries or libraries, schools, restaurants. The windows that confirm the life that is happening here.

There is a peace in the chaos, a soul-clasping comfort that I feel with each honk of a horn on the street below me. The noise and clamor is a stillness that embraces me. Hell, this madness has given me more inspiration than anything in our backyard pasture ever has. I'm consumed with a writer's gumption that I haven't felt in months.

I've had no trouble recalling why I fell in love with this city in the first place.