Fourth Floor Veranda

 

My friend came to visit last weekend. She’s not just any friend. If this were the 1800s I’d call her my bosom friend. No word in modern vernacular approximates what kind of friend she is, but let’s just say BFF is not enough. We have done a lot of living together, have gotten into trouble together and we could have done a lot of dying together (bridges in the Amazon rain forest are not always the best). She is unfazed when Boo Boo poops on her bed, and understanding when being a mother means summer Saturday nights see me homebound. 

On many nights that she visits, she and I will steal away after Boo Boo is asleep. Jer-bear will stay home and we can sample reds at a local bar. But this time around Jer-Bear had a work dinner. But we still wanted to go out. 

In Kansas City anyone with a house and a yard can go out without going out. My mom’s house has a veranda. It is glorious. Spring and early summer nights in Missouri are glorious. The background music comes from the bugs. Cicadas provide a pulsating, humming bass and the crickets are the treble. Some people don’t like the nights in the dog days of summer. The air is so moist you could swim in it. But I like it. Especially with a nice beer or rose. Time gets stuck in the sweat and the humidity. There is no past or present. It’s just the bugs, the night, you and your drink. And your company. 

Anyway. 

We do not have a veranda. But we do have a fire escape. It is accessible through the guest/laundry/Jer-bear’s office/JuJu’s-future-bedroom room, which used to be where our roommate lived. He left before Boo Boo was born. I think accessibility to the fire escape is one of the reasons we have not graduated Boo Boo to his own bedroom yet. Also, where would guests stay? 

I suggested to my friend that we could still get wine and go out–on our fire escape!

My friend was even more excited about the fire escape than she was about our bar nights out–or at least did a really good job pretending. We used to be roommates before she left NYC for the greener, but apparently fire escape-less pastures of DC years ago. We lived in Inwood on Riverside Drive, right across the street from Fort Tryon Park, near the Henry Hudson Parkway. The sunsets were spectacular, and best viewed from the fire escape, which was only accessible from our roommates bedroom window. Our roommate was crazy, not in a charming eccentric way, but rather in the way that some people try to blackmail other people for things they did not do type of crazy, so we did not enjoy the fire escape as much as we would have liked. 

My friend found a rose and a nice Shiraz from Australia. Called 19 Crimes, this wine was named after the 19 offenses that landed people in the former British penal colony that we now know as the Land Down Under. We crawled out the window, maneuvering through the window with both wine and water in our hands. 

Our fire escape on the fourth floor hovers over lush and tidy yards of the brownstones behind our building. Rising up like a steel and concrete curtain in the distance were the towers of the Financial District across the river. There was no buggy chanting, but the trees whispered to us. Boo Boo slept soundly in the next room and I hope their leaves and branches danced in his dreams.

It was not a seat at the bar, but in many ways it was much better.