Saturday, August 18, 2007

Leafy Brooklyn

For the week I'm housesitting for a friend who lives on an archetypal Park Slope street. With his wife, son and dog M lives in the top half of one of the grand cookie-cutter brownstones in the picture above: you climb the stairs to the building entrance, then go up another staircase, to arrive at their two-storey house among the trees. This picture below can't really convey how the apartment is awash in the subtle greens of the platanus (?) trees out the windows facing the street and the darker greens of trees in the yard in the back. It really is like being in a treehouse, and as the breeze sways the branches you might be floating in Howl's Moving Castle! (The trees have their own quiet...) Not just New York but even Brooklyn might be a thousand miles away. Dreamlike, or is it movies I'm thinking off? Prospect Heights, my soon-to-be neighborhood isn't as swishy. But it also doesn't have the slightly terrifying uniformity of these streets.