Life on the Island: an excerpt from a day on Long Island, NY
In the September of 2022, I moved into a small flat, with no living room, at the foot of Arthur's seat in Edinburgh. I found 3 girls on Facebook, and despite having never met before, we decided we would live together. The day I moved, my life changed. not only were my horizons so beautifully broadened by this city, I also met three girls who have become some of my best friends in the entire world. The lack of a living room didn’t stop us from spending every single day in each other’s company. Almost two years later, Vic, Mar and I flew in from different corners of the world to arrive in New York to visit Nic. It was the first time we’d all been together for almost a year since leaving Edinburgh.
Long island. better known to me as the home of the legend Billy Joel, was the first stop on our North American adventure. The landscape is predominantly green out there. You feel totally separate from the city, and yet you are but an hour away. Long Island actually sits on the same stretch of land as Brooklyn to help provide some reference as to just how close you are. We were graciously welcomed by Nic’s mum Janice, who picked us up from the station at Cold Spring Harbour and drove us to her beautiful home in Huntington. The roads wound up and down and around the early American forests. There were few pavements, and so people walked along the sides of the roads in their sandals and shorts. There was a sense that people were making the most of where they were. America was gearing up for its famous 4th July weekend, and as we drove through town and country, you could sense that families were congregating. People hugged, laughed, and patted each other on the back. Old friends reunited in bagel shops, kids ran up and down shorelines whilst aunts and uncles sat and reminisced on the sand.
Each home in Nic’s neighbourhood was unique, and yet so perfectly aligned in aesthetics. White panel wood was shaded by blue rooftops, and outdoor porches housed families playing cards and watching television. Each front yard was ornately decorated with some of the biggest and brightest hydrangeas I’d ever seen, providing purple, pink and blue accents to this already beautiful part of the world. Janice’s house sat halfway up a steep hill, at the bottom of which lay a small private beach for members of the community. If you climbed out of the window of Nic’s room and onto the decking, you could see out to the Atlantic ocean, which from this angle, was sprinkled with sunlight and small white sailboats. The whole experience was like stepping into an American fairytale. As the sun set on our first evening across the pond, and darkness fell, fireflies illuminated and disappeared as though they were slow dancing across front lawns. We ate pizza with pasta on it on the beach, and then we headed home and lay on Janice’s couch, with the two dogs, Tobias and Vlad, and caught up on the last year of all of our lives.
