Urban Habitat

A bedraggled scrap of maroon fabric whooshes through the air, carried on a summer breeze.

It lands on a young woman in a gown of the same color, posed against a fountain as her family shoots photographs. She rolls the fabric between two fingers, smiling, and releases it on the wind.

The piece slips between the craggy bricks of an old home where it sticks on a burr, waving to passersby. An elderly man, walker-stooped, spots the bright color and pinches it out from the wall. He ties it, gingerly and shakily, to his walker as decoration.

The walker arrives fifty floors up, to a busy apartment with half-dry paintings hung on walls; the meows of cats; the smells of baking cookies and hot coffee. A young woman and her young man sit at a creaky wooden table and ask their grandfather where his new decoration has come from. He unties it from the walker and hands it to the woman – “For your next piece,” he says.

A quilt of paint and fabric hangs on a white wall down a lit alley in a repurposed warehouse. A young woman in smart shoes and a stained apron stands beside it proudly. Across the aisle, someone stands beside a wall of 8×10 pictures of a beautiful woman in a deep red dress, smiling at a pilled piece of fabric in her hands.