Today for a change, no pictures of the High Line but from a public garden in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx called Wave Hill. You get there by taking a train at Grand Central Station. It is usually a serene place, even on Saturdays when entrance is free. It has amazing views of the Hudson River and of the New Jersey Palisades across the river. The garden is home to many birds and a few other critters (squirrels, chipmunks, frogs).
This was a hot spring day with lots of flowers in bloom including poppies, 
lavender, cotton lavender (yellow flowers at right), russian sage (petrovska) and clary sage. For the first time, we saw cardamom and galangal. That evening, Vlada and I went to see the latest film by Goran Paskaljevic ("Honeymoons"), which was playing at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and later that evening we went to the Blue Note to listen to a jazz band (Sveti) lead by the fantastic drummer Marko Djordjevic.
We went on Monday afternoon to Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge. During our trip to Monrovia last year at about the same time, we had gone to the LA County Arboretum & Botanic Garden and to the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino. At Descanso we saw California wildflowers including one of my favorites: the bright orange California poppy (right), lilacs and cherry trees in bloom, lavender and olive trees and quite a few lizards. Later that day, before going to our friend Marina's place for dinner, we stopped at Arlington Garden, an amazing community garden in Pasadena which Marina had recommended the day before.
[French version] Lundi après-midi nous sommes allés visiter “Descanso Gardens” situé dans la communauté de La Canada Flintridge. Durant notre visite a Monrovia l’an dernier, à la même période de l’année, nous étions allé visiter le “LA County Arboretum” et le 
“Huntington Gardens” de la ville de San Marino. Au Descanso nous avons vu des fleurs sauvages de Californie, y compris une de mes préférées: le coquelicot de Californie (photo à droite), des lilas et des cerisiers en fleur, des lavandes et des oliviers, et quelques lézards. Plus tard dans la journée, avant d’aller diner chez notre amie Marina, nous nous sommes arrêtés à Arlington Garden, un jardin communautaire à Pasadena assez incroyable dont Marina nous avait parlé la veille.
Vlada and I went to visit Grandma Milica in Monrovia at the end of March. We arrived on a Thursday. On Saturday, we picked up Luka and Tara at the Greyhound bus station in downtown LA. After arriving home, the kids were in charge, among other things, of making fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice and lemonade for the party in the afternoon. All this was done using the fruit picked from the trees in the garden, something one cannot do where I am from. The party was fun. I got to meet a lot of Milica's relatives whom I had heard of from Vlada over the years. Richard made srpski caj ("serbian tea"), also called kuvana rakija, which quickly put everyone in the best of moods.
Vladimir et moi sommes allés render visite à grand-mère Militsa à Monrovia fin Mars. Nous 
sommes arrivés à Los Angeles un jeudi. Le samedi suivant, nous sommes allés chercher Luka et Tara à la gare de bus Greyhound dans le centre ville. De retour à la maison de la grand-mère, les petits jeunes furent rapidement chargés, entre autres, de presser des pamplemousses et des citrons pour la fête d’anniversaire de Militsa prévue pour l’après-midi. Ce travail fut fait avec les citrons du jardin, une impossibilité dans la region d’où je viens. La fête fut très réussie. Je fis la connaissance de nombreuses personnes de la famille de Militsa dont j’avais entendu parler depuis des années. Richard prépara du “thé serbe” (“raki cuit”), qui mis les invités assez rapidement de très bonne humeur.
I am writing this note on the train going to Belmar on a sunny February morning. T and P recently bought a house in Belmar and have put the old one up for sale. Over the years, V and I spent many 
weekends at that house and I happily put in many hours working in the garden: making new flower beds, planting herbs (thyme, sage, lavender), replanting the day lilies and sunflowers I would dig out from empty lots, weeding, trimming, cutting down invasive vines, building a compost bin, raking leaves and planting bulbs in the Fall. Even though this time I know I will find the garden covered under snow, I brought along my camera to record what is perhaps my goodbye to the beautiful garden at the old house.
When I wrote to my friend M in December about being a bit distressed and depressed about the prospect of losing the garden in Belmar, which as I pointed out to her had in any case never been “mine” although I had certainly developed a possessive attachment to it (which, fortunately, T an P did not seem to mind), M wrote back about the “funny nature of our relationship with places.” M also wrote that I should try and remember and cherish all the good times I had working in that garden and that this was what mattered. True.
What would I miss most about New York if V and I were one day to move elsewhere? These places quickly come to mind: the Walter Reade Theater (for films), Housing Works stores (mostly for books), Demel (for tea breaks and those amazing cakes in the Viennese tradition), La Bergamote, the High Line (for walks), the Hudson River (again for walks along it), La Mama Theater (where we recently saw a great play “The garage” by the Zagreb Youth Theater), and a lot more places I cannot now think about. I imagine that we might discover new favorite places that would in time displace some of these, but others might not be so easily replaced.
In the meantime, I am looking forward to finding out what the new house looks like along with the new garden that comes with it, which I am told, and for now at least, is still mostly a large snow-covered patch of lawn.
Last March, Vlada and I borrowed some family pictures from his grandma Milica who lives in Monrovia, CA. I had planned to scan them but only got around to taking pictures of them with my 
digital camera before we return them to Milica this summer.
