It hit 98 degrees on Thursday and someone on my Harlem block opened the fire hydrant. I have never seen anything more beautiful.
I was walking back from the 2 train, wilting, feeling like a naan left too long in the tandoor, when I turned onto the block and there it was. A geyser. Water arcing halfway across the street and every kid in a three-block radius losing their minds.
There's a specific sound to an open fire hydrant on a Harlem block in July. It's shrieking and splashing and someone's speaker playing music from a stoop and a dozen conversations all happening at once.
One of the older kids had a soda can with both ends cut out, using it to aim the water at his friends like a cannon. Genius. Illegal probably. Iconic.
An auntie in a lawn chair on the sidewalk just watched over all of it, fanning herself, occasionally yelling at someone to be careful. Every block has that auntie. Ahmedabad has her, Harlem has her, she is eternal.
I stood at the edge in my work clothes, telling myself I would not, absolutely would not, walk through the water.
Reader, I walked through the water.
Just once. Quick, along the far edge, but enough that my whole left side got soaked and a little boy pointed at me and laughed and I laughed too.
The open fire hydrant is such an unglamorous, unbought kind of joy. Nobody sold it to us. No ticket, no reservation, no rooftop cover charge. Just the city cooling its own children the only way it knows how.
I dripped my way up four flights of stairs to my apartment and stood in front of my little fan, grinning like an idiot.
This city takes so much from you. The rent, the rush, the loneliness some nights. And then it hands you a free geyser on a Thursday and you forgive it everything.
Get wet when the hydrant is open. You'll dry.
Love,