Rear Window

Back yards in Brooklyn are a bit of a funny world. It's a not-very-private space, where apartments all around you look down at you, and other plots of land abut right up against yours. It reminds me of the Hitchcock movie Rear Window - that there's someone up there ... watching. Ok, so it's like that, but without the murder.

There's also tons of pets in these tiny little apartments all around us, who experience the same space in a different way and seem to communicate through windows and walls. When we let our dog Lilly outside into the garden, it can result in a kind of cacophonous chain reaction of pet sounds from all the unseen animals around us. Two little yippie poodles yip from some top floor, which causes a couple dogs from down the block to let loose with a few howls, which surely causes some humans some distress somewhere else. And then there's these two kittens that our upstairs neighbors recently acquired, who, upon hearing that Lilly is out and about, climb up to the windowsill and sit there calmly and quietly. Watching. Like it's television. Lilly sometimes manically circles underneath the window and lets out huffs, and sometimes stares back, and sometimes whines, and the cats, they just sit there, staring.

doing a bit of travel for the next week or so, and my access to blip may be limited, we shall see