morning lattes . afternoon lattes . lit candles . red brick . Fall . Fall in New York . men on bikes . men with rolled jeans . beards . a little gray in those beards . stripes . cobblestone streets . front stoops and corner stores . high pony tails . pine nuts . corduroy pants . gray corduroy pants . and black ones too . Sunday markets . brunch . the peel of church bells . the Avett Brothers . the dance of water on a horizon . the blessing of Home . a pile of clean laundry . Saturday nights just before . a cupped hand . reminders (the big kind, the life kind) . that quiet sense that it'll all be alright . the promise of Paris . when the man leaning against the wrought iron fence just outside my home declares that the street feels nothing like New York. he could be somewhere in the South. and i laugh and tease, what do you know about the South . that the street feels somehow other . that I am somehow other . from another place--if not the South, a bit deeper down and in .