Tonight in New York, the first real snow of the season: dusting the parked cars, blowing in the faces of the tourists getting cheated on Canal.
Just before the storm broke, I walked through Prospect Park. It was full of people who recognize that the best running comes when the air stiffens.
As you know, I've always had a fondness for the duck islands in the center of manmade and natural lakes. They keep parks' and gardens' most charming residents safe from foxes and stray dogs (and possibly roaming visitors?). They don't quite make my top-ten list of Great Civilizational Developments, but they're up there, and they're a feature of old parks and estates from Kew to the Villa Doria Pamphilj to the Carolina Lowcountry, and no doubt beyond. (When I was a college student in the South, my father would visit the gardens on campus and the ducks would quack at him and he would quack back: I've loved ducks for their good humor ever since. That garden, incidentally, had no duck island - a sorry oversight.)
On this early winter late afternoon, mallard ducks and, less romantically, ornery Canadian geese enjoyed the protection of the duck island just offshore.
Just before the storm broke, I walked through Prospect Park. It was full of people who recognize that the best running comes when the air stiffens.
As you know, I've always had a fondness for the duck islands in the center of manmade and natural lakes. They keep parks' and gardens' most charming residents safe from foxes and stray dogs (and possibly roaming visitors?). They don't quite make my top-ten list of Great Civilizational Developments, but they're up there, and they're a feature of old parks and estates from Kew to the Villa Doria Pamphilj to the Carolina Lowcountry, and no doubt beyond. (When I was a college student in the South, my father would visit the gardens on campus and the ducks would quack at him and he would quack back: I've loved ducks for their good humor ever since. That garden, incidentally, had no duck island - a sorry oversight.)
On this early winter late afternoon, mallard ducks and, less romantically, ornery Canadian geese enjoyed the protection of the duck island just offshore.
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