Foster Avenue in Brooklyn is lined with small detached houses, with postage stamp lawns hard against the sidewalk, and front porches. Many of the porches are used for outside storage. But here’s what I saw. I want to remember it, and to write it is the best way of developing the picture.
we passed a house where the front porch had been fitted with a swing. Not one of those benches hanging from a chain, nor what we used to call a “glider”—this was a single-seat wooden swing hung by ropes attached to the roof of the porch, the kind of swing you might hang from a tree branch.
A girl was swinging on it. Not lazily, not slowly, but energetically, right up to the rafters on every arc.
In this tiny space, such an image of unconfined mobility.
She was a maiden, not a toddler. She was wearing a long grey caftan and a cinnabar-red coloured headscarf. Her face was pale, ivory, and perfectly round like a doll’s framed by the red scarf.It was like seeing an animated Persian miniature. Like peering in to a birdcage at a red-headed finch.
“Why didn’t you take a video?” admonished my brother in law when I described this to him.
Yeah, why? I stopped and looked, she smiled, I said “Looks like fun!” and I walked on.
There.
Thanks, now I will always see it and I hope you can see it, too.
ST UnWoked & UnVaxxed! 
Beautiful, thank you, Hypatia 🙂
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Thank you for such an indelible word-painting, dear Hypatia!
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I have no idea why this came out without a title. What should it’ ve been? “Vignette”? “A Tree Swing in Brooklyn”?
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“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is a favorite childhood book so had to mention. 🙂
Brooklyn has become wonderfully gentrified since I lived in NYC- Heights, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens have some fabulous early 20th century brownstones, families, restaurants run by 3 generations and a colorful (but safe) group of characters.
Hope B has survived all the mess upstate and I am not to referring to Covid FYI.
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Yes it’s funny—my BMD is from there, and spent his youth trying never to mention it! But now it’s trendy, and very expensive. Still the particular area where I saw this tiny tableau is very ethnic: Turks, Pakistanis. We ate an extensive, inexpensive lunch at an Indian restaurant. Very good! Although my BMD remarked later that he was pretty sure we’d be a little sick. THEN WHY DID WE EAT THERE?!? Said I….but he was right, the reaction was minimal, so…worth it!
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“Although my BMD remarked later that he was pretty sure we’d be a little sick.”
What is is with Indian food? I loves me some Indian food and it loves me back by trying to kill me more often than not.
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