No photos today because my sister needed to borrow the digital camera for work.
Strange coincidence #1: My sister and I both wear cowboy boots when it’s raining (like it is today). The difference being that she got hers for $10 at Good Will, and I paid much much more for mine.
It does the biblical-flood-weather often in New York, and yet I still have not invested in a pair of galoshes. I don’t know what I’m waiting for since this is only place I’ve ever lived where the wearing of galoshes is an accepted practice, and not something to be mocked.
I have a friend (from Long Island) traveling to Seattle for the first time in April, and she asked me if she needed to buy a pair of bright yellow galoshes to go with her bright yellow rain slicker for the trip. In New York, no one would bat an eye at such an outfit and she’d fit right in. In Seattle, however, such an outfit would earn her outright scorn and derision. The mark of a tourist–or at least not a local–in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest is the use of an umbrella, much less galoshes and a raincoat.
When it rains in Seattle, the native merely shrugs and pulls up the hood of her ubiquitous North Face jacket and slips on her Dansko clogs like normal.
And even though I’m from the Southwest–where precipitation of any sort is always an event–after five years of living in Tacoma and Seattle the cultural norms were deeply ingrained in me. So ingrained, in fact, that when I packed my bags for New York, it didn’t even occur to me to pack an umbrella.
My first winter and spring in New York were particularly wet, and I got several good drenchings before throwing an umbrella in my bag became second nature. And I almost did buy a pair of galoshes that first spring. Walking to brunch one Sunday morning I spied a pair of black and white, toile-print galoshes with pink trim and soles in the window of a shoe store. But I was an unemployed, broke, graduate student who had just moved to New York. So I told myself to just suck it up and ignore the wet socks–toile-print galoshes were not in my budget.
Of course, now that I have a bit of financial breathing room I’ve never seen anything like them since. But knowing that they’re out there, somewhere, makes it hard to settle for the bright green, red, or yellow garden-variety galoshes.
Although I do use an umbrella now, I can’t bring myself to invest in the cute, stylish kind. As a person who often becomes emotionally attached to accouterments (ridiculously so), it’s more than a little disturbing to witness the deaths of so many umbrellas–blown inside-out and abandoned in trashcans on street corners–after New York’s violent rainstorms. I am reluctant to risk the emotional commitment to a cute little umbrella that will–in all likelihood–shortly end up broken and battered, and leave me wet and cold. And instead of being prosaic about the loss of yet another generic, cheap, black umbrella from a sidewalk vendor, I will instead be bereft by the loss of a beloved accessory.
I was sorely tempted by a black and white toile-print umbrella this fall at H&M, but didn’t make the purchase because of the reasons explained above.
Although, if I’d had the galoshes to match, I would have been a goner.
Strange coincidence #2: There was birdseed scattered all over the sidewalk at the northwest corner of 2nd Ave and Houston, and also at the southwest corner of Houston and Elizabeth St.
