This is the rain barrel in my parents’ back yard. It is partially submerged, a foot or two into the ground, at the northeast corner of their house, and it catches a lot of the rain that runs down the north slope of the roof. It usually contains these two watering cans, which my parents use to carry the rainwater over to their garden to quench their tomatoes’ and string beans’ thirst. I remember my dad digging the rain barrel’s hole when I was too small and distractible to help him much. (I was probably too busy preparing my G.I. Joes for their espionage by burying them in the dirt under the red maple tree.)

My parents’ faucets get their water from a shallow well. Near the end of dry summers the water table plays cat and mouse with the well, and this calls for conservation. Thus the barrel: the garden hose must stay coiled save for extraordinary circumstances. In very dry months, when the barrel has gone weeks without a refill and the cans clank around at the bottom, my parents’ neighbor, a retired Catholic electrician named Jack O’Brien, sneaks over into their yard with his own garden hose, whose supply chain extends its reach much deeper into the aquifers below, to fill the rain barrel by hand. This is one of several at once mundane and very meaningful acts of neighborliness that define my parents’ relationship to the street they live on.

I took the photo last summer, I think while I was in the process of painting the house.

Next is me, sitting in a park outside Pier 94, taken by Margot while we surveyed the site of her Master’s Thesis. She is designing on a floating Natatorium that uses the Hudson River as its foundation, as the content-supplier for its pools, and for temperature control. It sits between two piers, next to the bike route that runs up and down the west side of Manhattan.

We’ve had two excuses to visit the site recently. Pier 94 has been converted into something called The Unconvention Center. Several weeks ago, we went there to see a The Armory Show, which describes itself as “America’s leading fine art fair devoted to the most important art of the 20th and 21st centuries”. All manner of decorative objects, some of which one would apparently be wrong to consider priceless, were on display. The people-watching may have been more interesting that the art-gazing, however. Less fancy was Architectural Digest Home Design Show, where we ran our hands over a wide variety of pricey, trendy furniture.

This last photo is a portrait of a sculpture which was for sale by the Japanese gallery owner who wordlessly gave us free tickets to the art fair. He also had some very nice paintings of Tsunamis and a photo of a topless woman whose nipples had been photoshopped to look like Mount Fuji.