Fire Escape Garden

There is a song to summer in Park Slope, Brooklyn. There's music everywhere; an old man playing a Japanese 2-stringed violin on the subway platform at Atlantic Avenue, Opera in Central Park, Latin dance beats coming from open car cars along Sackett Steet which rattle the glass sitting next to my bed. Today I'm drawn out the window of my kitchen by the sound of a woodwind quartet practicing. The sounds float upward for four stories, from a yard 48 feet down and exactly three postage stamp lawns to the West.

I love such an excuse to climb out the window and visit my Fire Escape. My haven - A.K.A. "my "deck." It's my little corner of paradise in rent stabilized Brooklyn where I can escape it all. As the ceiling to the bathroom literally implodes from an unabated flood in the building, and we try to blow up tiny inches of space inside the apartment as if they were some kind of balloon by re-organizing and micro-organizing each desktop, each closet, each cubical foot below the bed, the space OUTdoors gains and gains in importance. Thus, so does summer.

I know the fact I have ten- no, look! Eleven - tomatoes ripening on two vines on my little iron playground in the sky has nothing to do with the spate of 90 degree weather we had at the end of May; their performance must be solely because they know they are loved.

In the midafternoons I pull a rug out to soften metal rungs, place a pillow against the brick wall at my back, spread my legs out where my toes can touch the opposite rail and watch my tomatoes grow in the sun. All mine. (And yes I've been reading books on managing chronic illness and I'm learning about what to do after a stressful day.) I count them, I touch them, water them, dig around in their soil to make sure it is just loose enough, and most of all watch them for any nuance of change, however subtle, since yesterday or the day before, in their little fruits. These have to be the best loved tomatoes in New York City.

There are a few days each year, magical days, when trips out to bask in my green, mid-tree view are not accompanied by the low hum of air conditioners all around. It is not too hot, and not too cold. Someone practices singing in a building across the courtyard. A bluejay alights on the edge of my pea plants and pecks, and I fix the damage done by yesterday's hungry squirrels. In contrast to the competition for space, money and success in the whole of the city, two tiny tomatoes rising from even tinier yellow flowers which I planted in the dirt seems a small miracle.

Of course, I'm not supposed to have this. Any sort of obstruction on the fire escape is strictly vorboten by fire code and a million other laws of common sense, I suppose. But I'm careful to keep things arranged against the outer edge, or hanging; there is plenty room for passing foot traffic (which will surely be necessary in my life time, I'm not altogether naive.) And I figure my landlord will get around to officially forbidding my garden as soon as he fixes the doorknob which has fallen off once a week for three years, the fogged up windows, the broken heat registers, the dark, dangling hallway light and the imploded ceiling, which is about the same time hell will freeze over or thereabouts, so I'm not over worried about losing my little fragment of green just yet.

And the naughtiness of my fire escape garden is half of what is so appealing. I sink into it like a sensual dream. Eve probably felt similarly for her apple. So delicious. So tempting, to pick a tomato a little bit early or over-harvest the herbs. So unlike the rest of my world, where the financial realities of being an artist in NYC bite at my ankles with regularity and the noise of traffic and subways insult embarrassingly delicate ears. Where restless legs disturb sleep, only to become a true nightmare when one discovers a thumb-sized cochroach on one's side in the night. The crushing forces of the Big City have sharpened me, like a pencil, and now I am free to draw the outline of my destiny.

I took my first Indian singing class last Wednesday. Friday I watched a skilled chorus perform a piece written by a friend from Chicago. Last night I walked three blocks to hear an African fusion band. A friend played cello. Two weeks ago Reverie chose its annual playwriting competition winners. The winner is a favorite of mine, about a group of Vietnam Vets who reunion in a Northwestern Cabin and wind up talking about today's military engagements. A friend is premiering a short version her new company's manifestation of Orpheo et Euridice last week and next.

The woodwind players down on the ground are not very good - they squeak and squack with the telltale signs of adult beginners. But there is almost a scent to the air which carries such tones, and it gentles the aura of ineptitude to one of a private, happy, and lofty nostalgia. Here in my Escape in the trees, a reminder of all the good reasons I've come to live in this place of unrelenting fire - distinct challenges, unique opportunities and fine artists who make good music.