Jean Zimmerman

Category: Culture

  • Gale Force

    The wind won’t stop. Trash blows through the air, all around the towering projects, skitters along the sidewalk, chasing scraps of paper, cardboard boxes and gust-inflated store bags, black and white. I hide from the cold in my car, awaiting trees to guard. Today excavation goes on in the street, too remote from the London…

  • Queen for a Day

    There is a lot of hurry up and wait for an arborist working on Webster Avenue in the Bronx, catch basins and pipes go into the trenches and the equipment doesn’t brush a tree. In the meantime I people watch. The folks here are diverse. There isn’t money for Park Avenue designers, but some of…

  • I Hate New York

    I hated New York for a minute today. The rain poured down. I got soaked – the orange vest is not weatherproof, it turns out. Detritus from Popeyes and Burger King littered the gutters. The street sweeping machines just pushed the greasy paper all around, making it no less disgusting. I went on a quest…

  • As Beautiful as a Day Can Be

    …when the calendar page flips over and suddenly you’re older by a year. But let’s take stock. Here on West Street there is a tumbling breeze and the sky is robin’s egg blue–what a cliché, let’s just call it cliché blue –with streaky white clouds and sunlight that bakes us all but perfectly. The men…

  • Where the Boys Are

    I possess a special dispensation that allows me to sit down and rest on a concrete block in the narrow bar of shade beneath a warehouse while the laborers dig. It’s called gender. And it does feel good to take a rest at about 10 am, three hours into the contractors’ New York City work day,…

  • Hear Me Roar

    Myriad gnarly lions guard the brick houses of Queens. These are among the gnarliest, even if they are surrounded by pretty posies.   There are chickens running uncooped down the street here, 104 street in Howard Beach. Maybe they’ll eat them.

  • Freshly Pruned

    Renee holds a bouquet of ginkgo branches fresh from pruning in Astoria, Queens. Narcisso told me you can weave a canoe out of these things and float.

  • Honey Wears the Crown 

    In the Bronx, at Throgs Neck, there was the scent of honeysuckle growing up chain link, and the taste of mulberries, both red and white, along with the blue glint of the East River under the soaring Bridge. The ground was yellow sand under our feet as we pruned trees. I saw vintage bungalows, one…

  • The Arborist

    What am I? A writer? An arborist? Sometimes it’s hard to sort out. A year ago I “took a break” from books and publishing (my literary agent’s words) and jumped into the world of trees. Since then, something in my chest seizes up when a person introduces me as a novelist, or when I’m called…

  • Glories Strung Like Beads

    A nondescript work morning on a nondescript street in East Flatbush. 8:00 a.m. 39th Street off Snyder Avenue. I haven’t seen one resident –are they all asleep?–but the backhoe is going gangbusters. The usual. Except…Holy Cross Cemetery across Snyder is getting a haircut and I can smell the cut new grass as the mower motors…

  • All This and a Cow Face Too

    It looks like I will soon be working a new assignment, in a park rather than the mean streets of Brooklyn. Green! Summer! Lofty trees! Even a lake. Yet I already feel nostalgic for this world of impressively staunch street trees, truck exhaust and rough-edged asphalt corners. I’ve spent the last week on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn,…

  • Beauty That Is Chill

    This is real rain, real life. It’s a particularly beautiful deluge. The young cherries have shed their ballet-pink petals in a skirt around their grassy roots. The sassier pink of the dogwood blossoms shines against the low gray sky. Banks of azaleas adorn the sedate  streets of Fresh Meadows, Queens.   I’m hiding from the…

  • When Gertude Stein Came to Brooklyn

    The barricades attach themselves to barricades on West Street on the Brooklyn waterfront. The flagwoman holds her sign she loves the barricades she hates the trucks and she blows on her whistle her whistle her whistle. The laborers work with one another they flirt with one another they work and they flirt. Inspectors inspect one another. The sky shines…

  • The Beautiful Sea Air

    I went to Coney Island to survey trees first thing this morning. At that hour the streets were empty and Luna Park smelled like fresh paint – the season is coming soon enough. The Cyclone was ghostly, silent. You might be surprised how many trees there are at Coney Island. I saw some soaring oaks. Of course concrete predominates.…

  • Budding Out

    Long ago, probably 50 years ago, someone planted a grove of oaks along the Kings Highway in Brooklyn, running from Farragut Road to Clarendon. A greek proverb says, “A society grows great when old people plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.” I surveyed trees there on the two medians that…