Focus, focus, focus

Boston is such a lovely city. I remember walking down streets with a sense of being constantly charmed. I would bike along the bike paths that line the Charles river, looking at the city spread out before me. My 19 year old sister came to visit us once and we took her walking along those paths. "Holy cow!" she said. "This city is kicking my butt!" Which is one way of putting it.

I loved the little parks, the store windows that were lit up in the winter evenings as I rode the C-line home, the old houses that lined the street to the reservoir. Everything from the gigantic old trees with their brilliant colored autumn leaves, to the architecture, to the landscaping, brought pleasure to my eyes.

It was a shock when I moved to Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is famous for it's Bauhaus architecture, so much so that it was declared a World Heritage site. Sadly, it was designed to be "The White City," but there isn't enough white paint to go around and it has become the gray city. And unfortunately for me, it turns out that I am not such a big fan of Bauhaus. Of course there were pockets of loveliness in the city, the newly rebuilt port, the park that stretched all along the river that ran two blocks from my apartment and that served as a migratory corridor for birds flying north from Africa. It took about a year, but I learned to stop scanning rooftops for the ornamentation that I had loved in Boston. Instead, I learned to focus on the plants and trees that flower all year round. My favorite tree had flattened out foliage, so it looked as if it belonged in Africa. In early summer, brilliant red flowers sprouted out from the flattened tree top.

Salt Lake, like anywhere, is a mixture of the breathtakingly lovely, and the depressingly mundane and ugly. I ordered an ice coffee and sat outside of the cafe to drink it. In Tel Aviv, my eyes would have been captivated by the gorgeous, sharply dressed young people around me. Here, I was all alone, staring into a parking lot. But the trick with Salt Lake, is to lift your eyes, up past the cars in the parking lot, up past the roof tops, and the tree tops, to the massive wall of mountains that can be seen from any point in the valley. I sipped my coffee and feasted my eyes on the dark green pine forests and the ocher colored rocks. The mountains never fail to be lovely, but the last couple of days, as they received the first light dusting of snow along the peaks, and the gigantic, full, cream-colored moon rose over them while the eastern sky still reflected the pink and orange of the sun setting to the west, they have been breathtaking.