I am staring out over a field of grass. It is two meters in places and I can hardly see over bobbing inflorescence, glinting and golden in the afternoon sun. The sky is huge and blue above me, interrupted occasionally by white, unconcerned clouds. All I can discern of my colleagues is a cowboy hat making its way slowly through the field. It is like a western. I watch the hat's slow progress and can't help but smile because I could be describing Kansas or Missouri or Nebraska, but I am none of these places.
I live in New York City.
Lost in reverie I abandon my stem counting for the moment, and stare at the fabled city. It is like a fairy tale, a gleaming kingdom of white towers. The metropolis is distant, huge, unlike any other place I have lived. I stand on a salt marsh in a bay, but to see the city is to feel the people bustling about, hear the honks and clatter, detect the aroma of a corner restaurant. I am covered in mud and counting stems of Spartina alterniflora, Spartina patens, Distichlis spicata. I smell like marsh - salt water and sulfur and sweat - and I am hoping for a bit of Limonium carolinianum in my plot, it's purple flowers so becoming. But a train ride away is the Met, Central Park, Broadway. Three minutes from my house in one direction is the Atlantic ocean and open beach; a bike ride in the other is an amazing pastry shop, one of the best I've ever been to. What is this place, New York?
Of a sudden the hat disappears and a peal of laughter rings out over the marsh. Someone has accidentally tested their waders, sinking past their knees in mud. The marsh is flooding and we gather our equipment, making for the boat. I am in perfect juxtaposition. I am in urban green space. I am in quiet metropolis. I am questioning everything, unwilling to trust that I am home.
