The bunny in the top picture points the way down into the valley of the passerelle at Auzay. Not only was it foggy this morning, but frosty as well, making the countryside seem other-worldly. Even Bell-Vue the house on the hill in Argenton Chateau seemed to be craning out of its perch to catch the first rays of sun burning through the mist.
We three ladies took a walk to the old chateau de l'Ebaupiney the other day - and who should we find? The white ladies - Charolais cows - and the mules who, we have learned thanks to my excellent new friend Julia, have 63 rather than 62 chromosomes.
Those of you who regularly follow this blog (all three of you) know that I am back in France, painting. And this morning, I was also back in Auzay - one of my favorite endroits on this earth. It was early and I was running. But at the river I stopped and walked across the footbridge comme d'habitude. Two reasons for that. One - the bridge is a little rickety. Two - I wanted to linger and gaze at the lovely river, the little valley it is in, and the old pink house which seems to be under a much more graceful renovation than I feared the last time I was here (see blog posts some time in the fall of 2010). I was looking downstream when out from under the hanging tree branches came not one but two gloriously chubby swans. They swam right under where I stood on the footbridge but my camera was doing something peculiar so I couldn't get the shots I wanted, but above are those I managed to take. In general, it was really quite a red letter day in the fauna department. On the way down to the passerelle, I saw dozens of fat jack rabbits - so fat, in fact, that when they crossed the road in front of me, I thought they were small deer. Then, as I walked back home towards AC what should I see but three - count-em- three blue herons lifting off from a pond up on the hill! The only sad piece of news is that Fripon the donkey was not in his pasture. The last time he went missing it turned out that he was off seeing a lady donkey. So let's hope that is where he is right now!
Despite it's lack of outward charm, I have always liked Tenth Avenue. I've liked it's empty sidewalks, it's tunnel entrances, car washes, and pockets of low brownstone tenements. I've liked knowing that in some of the warehouses on the side streets, painters like my friend Mary Beth McKenzie have lived and worked under the radar for years in vast, cheap, and sometimes heatless studios. But mostly what has always drawn me to choose 10th for my walk downtown as opposed to the more bustling streets to the east is that because of the low density of buildings, the vistas have been plentiful and interesting. I know that a lot of people love "the grid" of Manhattan, but I don't, particularly, and the thing about 10th and its ramshackle silhouette is that even though you are walking in a straight line, your eyes meander so you feel like you are in a city with a more idiosyncratic layout. But with the opening of the High Line and the coming of Hudson Yards, 10th is changing rapidly. All up and down the avenue the air reverberates with the sounds of construction and soon there will be high rise apartment buildings blocking the panoramic views. I am afraid that ultimately 10th Ave will become just another canyon. 
We have had an unusually warm winter in NYC and mostly people are pretty happy about it despite the fact that it portends something really scary about the state of the globe. But last week, we actually had snow. Not much and not really very pretty, but snow just the same. On a walk across the park, I took a few pictures - two of them weird, one just nice. The weird ones are the one of the Alice in Wonderland sculpture near the boat basin. If you look close, there is a splash of orange on the left of the statue. . .that was a buddhist or maybe a moonie - wearing an orange schmatta and not much else. Her bare arms looked very cold, but she was somehow understanding of the cold, Alice and the city around her. Then, there was the bagpipe. I heard it before I saw it - a girl, her bagpipes and the heart-breaking sound of Amazing Grace in the deep midwinter. 
The question is, who is doing the wishful thinking? Is it the folks who put up the "thin ice" sign wishfully thinking that winter would actually arrive as usual and then thinking - wishfully - that people would pay attention and stay off the ice? Is it the hellebores and forsythia thinking, wishfully - or wistfully - that spring has already sprung when, in fact, it is only January. Or is it the guys in the trees thinking - as is their wont - that it is during the winter when trees need pruning so when spring arrives - months from now - the branches will be healed and ready to sprout at the proper time and not, as seems possible, right now. So is it wishful to think that our globe is not in big trouble? I think so. I wish I didn't.
It was an absolutely gorgeous afternoon in Central Park today and the crowds were out in number! Apart from the nice days when runners pretty much line the reservoir, I don't think I have ever seen so many people on the track. Most of them were foreign - here for New Year's Eve, no doubt. ( Don't know why I felt the need to capitalize that, but I did.) Among the languages I heard were Japanese, Spanish, French, Russian, German and several dialects of the mother tongue. Something else I noticed was the ubiquity of the puffy coat. Maybe it has even replaced the sneaker or running shoe as the world's most popular garment and I am not exactly sure why. Yes, they are warm and light in weight and though good ones are costly, you can also buy them very cheaply - but by and large, they are anything but flattering. In fact, though I took a bunch of pictures of people wearing various lengths and colors of the jacket, I couldn't bring myself to include them because, apart from the three cute little teens I snapped near the pump house, nobody looked good wearing one of them. I loved the dogs and the beautiful sky, but my prize today goes to the girl in pink. No ski jacket for her, no way!
