Windswept Streets

Photo by Tony Napoli 2011

Since shortly after Thanksgiving, the encampment on Willoughby and Bridge Streets stood, right outside of St. Joseph's High School. A line of fragrant pine trees for sale for the holiday. A funky little van with a table out front, a wire and a row of trees, and at the corner, a hand painted poster advertising Windswept Farms, Fresh Trees, Vermont.  When I passed in the morning the trees were out there but the van was shut up tight. In the evening, the vendor, a middle-aged guy with longish grey hair would sit out at a small table, sometimes strumming a guitar, sometimes hawking jugs of natural maple syrup garnered from his farm. At first I wondered, would he really sell trees here on the edge of Metrotech? But I guess I was wrong. Little by little, the trees disappeared. Until today, there was one tree out there at 7:30 AM and when I passed it on my evening stroll to the train home, the tree, the van, the plastic sheeting he used to wrap the trees for his customers -- all and everything was gone. That is except for the hand painted poster advertising Windswept Farms that had been chained to a light pole at the corner. That remained, perhaps forgotten, perhaps an after thought, perhaps a version of  some home-spun marketing for this organic tree business, to be redone with new colors and new vision next year, in commemoration of the annual pilgrimage to the streets of New York in the short window of time before Christmas arrives.

--Anthony Napoli, Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn