I breakfast on the veranda every morning, surveying the skyline and taking a deep, rich breath before humming to myself. I am instantly invigorated. I am never groggy. I have never been groggy.
From my balcony there is a view of the world trade tower, the east side of Manhattan, and all the important neighborhood dogs. The dogs know I am looking down on them and smiling, which is why they walk so proudly. Their owners have no clue.
My balcony is only wide enough for two to dine so it is very exclusive. Not even the cat can get out here.
My husband and I dine here every evening and have intimate conversations. We have ceased watching TV and picking up our phones. We gaze into each other’s eyes and recite poetry and famous love letters to each other. Letters we have never read but suddenly know from memory, inspired by the colors of the dusk.
I will plant flowers out here that will save the bee population. I will plant basil and tomatoes and there will be no more hunger. I will grill for everyone and all my clothing will spontaneously turn into crisp but soft button downs like Ina Garten’s. There will be a perpetual breeze in my hair, even on the rare occasions I go indoors, but my curls will never be disturbed.
I will never lose these sunglasses.
My upstairs neighbors, the one with the rooftop penthouse, will see how good I am at having outdoor space. They will say to each other that they just do not appreciate their multiple terraces the way I would, and that it would be better for all involved if we switched apartments, even though they have a small child and a large dog. I would invite them up once a month for cocktails and roasted lamb on their former terrace, and they will sigh with relief. “Yes, this was always meant for you.”
I survive now on photosynthesis. The sun has told me it will only rain when it is convenient for me. The sun recognizes me as its sole heir. I am the sun now.
Life becomes a lot simpler and more beautiful when you accept that Ina Garten is your fashion role model.
I had SUCH PLANS for my balcony but my dwarf pear tree died and they were thwarted. WOE.
I came so close to having a balcony of my very own, but my roommate ran away to California with an older man two weeks before we were supposed to move in and I could not afford the rent on my own and subsequently never got to experience its sun-drenched pleasures. How will the important neighborhood dogs recognize me now?
My balcony will someday be a glorious garden paradise.
…whenever I learn to keep things alive.
Your terrace flora will bloom profusely and everyone will think if they, too, get one of those cute wrought-iron plant stands they, too, will have fresh basil 365 days a year. They will never know that your basil springs wildly forth from its humble terra-cotta constraints because you are the sun, and they – they are not.
I have always dreamed of living in a place with a balcony. This may never come to pass, and I’m mostly fine with that, as we have a lovely little house in northern California with a recently redone backyard (A bluestone patio! Native plants!).
But still I am envious of your balcony, and I look forward to living vicariously.
I have a very large balcony that becomes a lovely garden after the fear of frost is over.
But I live in Canada so that’s basically June.
Me tooooo. My cat cannot reconcile going out the balcony door in the morning to sun and dry surfaces then in the evening to cold and snow and is reduced to shooting me looks of confusion and dismay as he scoots inside.
I have a sizable deck that my cat greatly enjoys during the right weather, but the instant it becomes too cool out for her, she starts looking at me with the same looks of dismay whenever I try and open the door for her to go out. Cats.
Sadie prefers to be protected from the cold while still enjoying the sun. She is only slightly put out that I haven’t yet bought her a soft rug to laze on while she does this. https://imgur.com/2fX22r7
I demand that you acquire a rug for her posthaste! Seriously, though, that is an A+ cat.
Saffron sits out on the balcony in the rain and loves it. Then she comes inside and drips everywhere.
I have moved from the U.S. to India, and about half of my living space is terrace, with tropical flowers and vines in pots. It is lovely, except when it is hot as the dickens (approaching rapidly in approximately 30 days).
My cat also enjoys the terrace life, but two days ago he waltzed into my living room and laid a dead mouse at my feet. It was at this moment that I realized the downsides of living alone. There was literally no other being capable of moving that dead mouse from the floor to the trash. Too real. Too real.
And of course the cat was confused about where his quarry had disappeared to for the rest of the day…
When I lived in an otherwise-lovely apartment in a pecan bottom (low-lying area full of pecan trees), I had a Mouse Problem. I hated touching the little guys after they’d been caught in snap traps, so I got a special pair of rubber gloves and kept a store of bags.
The gloves and bags were used for nothing but disposing of little mouse bodies. When the Mouse Problem was solved, I threw the gloves and remaining bags out.
I recommend this solution. Get tongs if rubber gloves aren’t enough.
My cat insists in going out even in the winter, though he doesn’t stay out for long. And I am a good cat mom and I let him.
Except, of course, when there’s enough ice that the balcony door has frozen shut. He gets soooo mad with me then.
Same! But in the summer it is a nice place and my hound appreciates the greenery:
Also I shave my legs out there in that bucket. Highly recommended if one’s shower is prohibitively small.
What a lovely hound!
Ooo! Get the wire chair and the pretty planter from Bargain Bin a couple of weeks ago! Yay for you and your new balcony!
So pretty much this?
I like your Daffy Duck glass.
We are apartment hunting after three years in a building that supposedly had a huge shared terrace but which has been closed “due to construction” the entire time we’ve lived here, and boy does nothing hook me into a listing like the promise of a teeny private balcony.
It will be nine hundred thousand blazing muggy degrees during the summer and then a howling frozen wasteland during the winter, I’m sorry to say. Speaking as someone who barely got to use her own outdoor space in NYC.
No one likes you when you act that way.
This is suck a weird little thing but I **completely connected** with everything you said about having a great balcony/outdoor space/etc. YOU ARE THE SUN NOW
I have no balcony. I experience it vicariously through you. Thank you. Please keep me posted.
I have a pretty decent sized balcony that I rarely use, but last summer there were nights it was so stuffy and hot in my apartment, even with the ceiling fans going, and yet it was relatively cool outside, and I kept thinking, gosh, it would be nice to sleep out on the balcony. But I had nothing to sleep on.
And now I have purchased a hammock w/stand that will fit on the balcony and disassembles into a convenient carry sack when not in use, and I’m actually kind of looking forward to an ungodly hot, climate-changey summer so I can sleep on my balcony in my hammock!
In semi-seriousness, tips for balcony life and feline safety? I would love to at least offer the Mewzes the opportunity to go outside, but I’m terrified they will fall/leap off.
I am curious about this as well! I’m moving in about a month to a place with a gigantic and gorgeous balcony. There’s not really any place for her to jump to, but there’s an awning below for the wine store (yes I am about to move above a wine store! Major selling point.) and I’m afraid she can get on that and cause hijinks.
Can you line the balcony railings with hardware cloth or rabbit wire and maybe string up a length of something that keeps her from hopping over the railings? I’ve seen this solution on balconies in Montreal.
Although, I have to say: the terrier who rambled on the awning of the Italian restaurant in Montreal’s Little Italy was adorable.
My guy only goes out with supervision and receives stern reproaches when he sticks his head out between the railings. He’s pretty mellow and not a big jumper, though.
You could try putting them on a harness? Although fair warning, I found that my goofball was okay with the harness and with the balcony, but not with the two combined.
Sadly, I can barely coax them to let me put on a collar, let alone a harness. They definitely wouldn’t go out alone, though.
I started out just letting them out when I was there. I put a hanging-basket thing (which was there when I moved in) on the one gap that is big enough for them to stick more than heads through and just supervised until I was sure they had peered down enough to realise it was Very High Up.
Is the hanging basket thing that black thing? Hmm.
Such cuties basking out there!
Yes, it is meant to hook over the top of the railing and you can get liners that you then fill with soil and flowers (but I’d kill them). I just repurposed it as I had no use for it and that bit is a bit wider than the other gaps.
That does not look Very High Up! I am on the 5th floor and followed pretty much the same process when I acquired Jazz the cat. I would only let him out when with me and would chastise & remove him if he tried to squeeze his front paws out through the bars, or jump on top of the table to then jump on top of the rail. Eventually I started going in and leaving him alone for short periods of time that got longer until I finally felt comfortable just letting him go out by himself, like when it’s too cold for me to want to be out.
Of course my building also has a contained courtyard, and he’s a mommy’s boy for sure, so if he did jump I’m pretty sure I would find him.
The front garden is a 45 degree slope! So the road outside is at my eye level but I am on the first (second I guess for those not in the UK) floor), there is another flat below me.
We have big plans to put netting from floor to ceiling in our balcony. We are 4 stories up and my cat is a Leap First kind of cat.
Hmm, the times that I have allowed indoor cats of the past to go outside, they have adored being outside and have yearned for it and have not done as well indoors afterwards. One managed to get from a balcony to the roof and go on a giant murder spree of all the local songbirds (I found dozens of bird skeletons much later). And she became hard to contain indoors and picked up fleas. Different cats, different strokes, but I would be a little careful with this.
Hmm. Mostly I feel like I will not enjoy the balcony if I go sit out there and the cats whine and freak out as they inevitably do when a door closes between them and me. On the other hand, neither ever tried to dash out the back door in the old apartment, so maybe they will not be as interested. But I will think about this.
This is what has ruined my porch swing. Who can relax when the cat is screaming murder at you?
I read this and imagined Homer on the phone saying, “You’ll have to speak up; I’m wearing a towel”, except:
“You’ll have to speak up; I’m out on my terrace.”
Amen to everything you said. I got my balcony in May and it’s changed my life. My view is of Henry Hudson Bridge and the Hudson River. It’s different every day.
Here’s a photo: http://whirligig365.tumblr.com/post/140868179889/…
This picture contains basically all my life goals: Book, soup, proximity to large body of water. My friend, you are living the dream.
Yeah…
I have a balcony, but to get to it you have to go through the bathroom.
I have never been a Real Apartment Dweller, so tell me: how the hell does that work?
The place I am subletting this summer has an expansive balcony and I am highly looking forward to getting out of bed (more than 20 minutes before I have to leave for work) and eating cream-top yogurt with berries out there (instead of shoving a bread into my face on the way out the door).
If any balcony dwellers want some pretty plants, morning glories are super duper easy to grow and then they climb all over the place, twining up your railings and stuff. You can grow them in a pot. And they make seeds for the next year.
Not a balcony, but I grew these morning glory vines in four pots (from seeds I collected from where some others were growing wild). Not the red things, they’re geraniums. Just the plants in the background growing up the trellis thing. They had pink, purple and white flowers.
This is where I gathered the seeds the autumn before. They’re just growing wild, effortlessly on the edge of this barn like it’s no big deal.
One of my best adult apartments was on the 48th floor and it had a glorious balcony where you could eat breakfast and look out over Sydney Harbour and the Anzac Bridge and you were so high up that the traffic sounded like waves and it was like living in a tower on top of a sea cliff.
Now we have a deck where you can sit and see the parrots in the red gum but it is not the same.
This is the sort of benign reality warping that would happen If [enviable celebrity] Was Your Boy/Girlfriend.
I did this but Florida Edition when me and the boo and our roommate achieved the enviable dream of renting a house, thrilled with all the possibilities of a back porch. And then my back porch became a crime scene…
DEE-TAILS!!!
YES PLEASE!
There’s a small wooded area behind my house, because the people in the neighborhood next door have much more expensive houses and pay enough money not to be brushing up against us rental plebes. One day beau and I came home to find police tape surrounding the entire woods, and brushing against our back porch with every fluttering breeze. The beau works at a local TV station, so we were able to find out that it was a probable suicide. The next day, the tape was gone, and a few days later, a detective asked if we saw anything. We didn’t, so that was that.
The thing that sticks with me is that we’ve been keeping the screen door on the porch open and the blinds pulled back because blah de blah boring dog reasons. Part of me can’t stop imagining this person, out in the woods to end their life, looking through our open back porch and seeing our empty, wide-open living room. I wonder in their last moments if our home felt like a metaphor.
Also one of my absolute favorite poems, by Constantine Cavafy, involves a balcony, so I feel like it’s totally appropriate to share here?
In the Evening
Anyway, those things would not have lasted long.
The experience of the years shows it to me.
But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them.
The beautiful life was brief.
But how potent were the perfumes,
On how splendid a bed we lay,
To what sensual delight we gave our bodies.
An echo of the days of pleasure,
An echo of the days drew near me,
A little of the fire of the youth of both of us,
Again I took in my hands a letter,
And I read and reread till the light was gone.
And melancholy, I came out on the balcony
Came out to change my thoughts at least by looking at
A little of the city that I loved,
A little movement on the street and in the shops.
Lovely. Thanks.
it is always a good time for Cavafy!
This is what my boyfriend thinks his balcony is going to be like. The guy has never gardened before in his life, but intends to have a flourishing herb garden and fully intends to brake for bees.
Re: “I will plant basil and tomatoes and there will be no more hunger.”: be warned that the balcony biome is not the same as the biome on the ground. That is, balconies are windy, and plants that would do fine in a garden at ground level will die horribly of dry and cold on a balcony.
On top of that, containerized plants are vulnerable to begin with– two USDA Hardiness Zones worth, according to this article.
I gave up.
I kind of really want a tiny balcony to grow things but I am afraid of the grime. Truly my father’s daughter- we were at a benefit thing at a friend’s parent’s apartment which is a penthouse with a beautiful wraparound terrace and my mom was like wouldn’t it be so amazing to have this and my dad was like NO. PIDGEONS. GRIME. DIRT. NO.
This is what has ruined my porch swing. Who can relax when the cat is screaming murder at you?