And yet it is not the same. The light from the living room windows is still plentiful, but it slants differently across the living room rug in the afternoons. Our furniture anchors are still in place:

• the enormous made-in-Vermont buffet (a housewarming gift from my Vermont brother and his wife when we moved into the apartment two before this one), and
• the Heywood-Wakefield mirrored dresser, which, sometime in the early ‘90s, we traveled all the way to Maryland to buy, because my husband, for whom interior design was mostly just a euphemism for “put a coaster under your coffee cup,” had developed an unlikely passion for the aerodynamic curves and rounded corners of Heywood-Wakefield’s peculiar blonde aesthetic.

The same and not the same. We have done what older folks often have to do: we have downsized. Neither buffet nor dresser sits where it did before; neither gazes at the same furnishings from the same vantage it did before. Much of the furniture, including pieces that had travelled with us from place to place for years, had to go. There was no longer a place for them in the compact two rooms we were moving into.

Let me be clear: furniture is good to have, and furniture that is attractive and makes one happy is even better–but furniture is Important only as function—or as metaphor. De-accessioning (a word I never thought I’d use, least of all in Persimmon Tree) was fraught because it symbolized all the losses and fears inherent in having to make a major downward life change in our mid-eighties, a change occasioned solely by the Trump-induced inflationary nightmare that has spiraled the prices of everything, including New York apartment rents, well above the reach of an elderly duo with only a couple of teachers’ pensions and a little Social Security to count on.

We couldn’t sell much of the furniture. There wasn’t a market for a 20-year-old Ethan Allen sectional or an ornately carved, olivewood dining table more suited to Ezio Pinza’s hilltop mansion in South Pacific than to a small apartment in Manhattan. But as the moving date drew nearer, we discovered we could give them away – and have an unexpectedly wonderful time doing it. We met the nicest people: two brothers helping to furnish the apartment of their sister who had at long last been able to come from the Dominican Republic to join the family in Queens; the about-to-retire-to-a-home-in-Syracuse security guard from the Bronx who, unlike us, knew how to safely take apart our coffee table so it would fit in the back of his car; the building handyman who shared an elevator with Steve’s favorite chair (which we were sadly consigning to the sidewalk) and asked very tentatively if he might have it for his wife; the young woman furnishing her first apartment, who sent us a photo of our table lamp’s new home.

I love the new apartment. I love the location on a busy pedestrian corner; I pause on the doorstep, taking in it all in: the dog walkers; the angular, ancient street musician heading to his daily gig outside Magnolia Bakery, carrying his chosen instrument: a battered boom box; the carefully put-together East Side ladies, waiting for the crosstown bus to take them home, across the park, to the side of town where proper people live; the strolling couples, so engrossed in one another that the passing scene could be a marching band and they’d never notice; the pack of teenagers just released from school, jostling, laughing, debating whether to go first to Crumbl, Ven Leuwen, or Blank Street; the weekend runners, sweaty, triumphant, numbers still on their shirts, coming back from a 5k in Central Park.

I feared I’d live in the new apartment in perpetual mourning for our previous fancier, larger spaces. To my surprise and delight, I love it; I am happy in it. I love the old New York view of rooftop water towers from the bedroom window. I am a small person: I do not mind that everything in the apartment is almost within arm’s reach of everything else; indeed, I am discovering that to be a virtue. I love our new furniture: the upside of downsizing is once you’ve gotten rid of the too-big things, you have to find smaller replacements. We now have an ingenious little table that expands from seating 2 to seating 4 – or would, if only there were enough room to do that in the small space allotted to it. And a mustard yellow love seat that we learned, after much trial and error, how to open into a quite comfortable (or so insists our daughter, the only one to try it so far) queen-sized bed.

Steve loves the neighborhood. As I write, he is off on his new Sunday morning routine: a jog around the Central Park reservoir, then across 81st Street to the Sunday farmers market behind the Museum of Natural History, on to Orwasher’s for a loaf of seeded rye and from there to Zabar’s for scallion cream cheese.

But, so far, he only likes the apartment. That is understandable: he loves cooking, and our kitchen is tiny: the only counter space is barely 11 inches across; he is experimenting with preparing one dish at a time. Worse, every time he turns on the woefully under-insulated oven, the kitchen heats to 104 degrees. Even the smoke alarm shrieks in protest. We are contemplating affordable fixes. Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

All the above was a long and roundabout way to introduce what now, I fear, will seem either a non sequitur or an anticlimax, or both: new things are happening with the Persimmon Tree website, too, and, though they are, like our new apartment, small in the larger scheme of things, they require neither moving nor downsizing. And they are mighty in the impact they will have on your ease of browsing.

Next time you open the Persimmon Tree website, you will see, in the capacious righthand margin on every page, an arrow. It looks like this:

 
Wherever you are on a page, a click of the arrow will take you immediately back to the top. I know–such a handy little tool. Why didn’t we think of it before?
 

At the top of every Persimmon Tree page, you’ll see in the upper righthand corner, a new and improved search bar. It now looks like this:

The purpose of the change is primarily to make the search function more visible, since a number of you let us know that, in its old configuration, it was difficult to find. The results one can achieve using the search bar are—thanks to our indexing gurus Ken Mitchell and Molly Tamarkin—almost perfect, especially with the recent upgrade—thanks to our website guru Laura Laytham— to the searchable archive, adding the names of everyone whose visual art we have ever published.  

Have a lovely autumn; enjoy this new issue of Persimmon Tree; and, remember, you aren’t old till you stop reading.

It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat

by Margo Berdeshevsky

    “The magic of this book is that in a time of global suffering, its author ‘walked to the edge of an old and used up world and hummed a tune of invention.’ Brava!” —Dante Micheaux “If the beautiful is what delights us, and the sublime is what leaves us awestruck and wanting to kneel, Margo Berdeshevsky’s poetry is both beautiful and sublime. From the naked hunger of the heart to the cosmic force of ‘that world none can see —’ this poetry rises and rises, falls and rises, on a magnificent music that challenges death, defies our human cruelty, and is faithful.” –Alicia Ostriker/ Chancellor Academy of American Poets, NY State Poet Laureate, and Persimmon Tree advisor “Margo Berdeshevsky’s It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat seems to leap up and declare a rhythmic homage to the world, and one is called to gaze into one’s own eyes and see patterns of the past and future — life and death. And when the speaker says, ‘It was one single arrow of passion, and Eros was good with it’ a unique voice pierces us.”–Yusef Komunyakaa/ Pulitzer Prize recipient

Learn more at margoberdeshevsky.com and https://margoberdeshevsky.simplesite.com/ Available from Amazon or your local independent bookstore.

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