Fashions
Three months after their October debut, the spring fashions have arrived, as mysterious as ever. A store-window mannequin clutches the hem of her cocktail dress, an expression of frightened vulnerability painted on her bone-white face. Out here, it’s hard to tell women from men in January’s unisex garb: dark parkas, hats covering half their heads. They walk briskly, no time for window-shopping. I pull my fingers out of the finger-holes in my gloves & ball them into fists for warmth. I think of my gardener friends starting their flats of tomato seeds, filling their houses with the smell of baked earth.
the smell of baked earth – Actually, most gardeners these days probably just buy sterilized potting soil, but when I was a kid we always used to get soil from the garden during a thaw and bake it in the oven to kill the weed seeds.