Sukkah City

For the last eight years, I have constructed a sukkah, the fragile tabernacle for which the holiday of Sukkot (the feast of Tabernacles, naturally) is named. For the last eight years, I have had a spacious California backyard in which to construct such a thing. Now, I am sharing a home in Brooklyn with sukkah-less friends, and my sukkah is in a storage facility in West Covina, California. The holiday ended yesterday, and today, on the day of Simchat Torah, the last holiday of this Jewish-holiday-stuffed month, I wandered through an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood just a few blocks away. Space is at a premium--this is New York, after all--but just about every house boasted a sukkah. In each driveway, front lawn, or alley stood a shlumpy little booth representing both the joy of the harvest and the fragility of human existence. When I lived in California, I had the only sukkah in the neighborhood. I would say that I had the only one in Pomona except that the Reform synagogue a mile away from me had one. My neighbors gawked at my sukkah and my gardener shrugged her shoulders in bewilderment and mowed the lawn around it. And here I am now in Sukkah City, and me without one. Oh well, wait till next year.