On our Wednesday evening Walk committee call, everyone was wondering about whether we should be postponing the Manhattan walk this Sunday given the weather report citing a Nor’easter on its way to us. For those who are not located in the northeast of the U.S., a “nor’easter” is a large-scale extratropical cyclone in the western North Atlantic Ocean. The name comes from the direction of the winds that blow from the northeast. Usually, storms like this go for over a hundred miles and can result in flight delays/cancellations, as well as large wind and flooding advisories. Every time you hear about this in the news, it’s probably a good idea to stay indoors and not be walking along a waterfront in lower Manhattan. On that evening, we said we would still have the event, rain or shine… until the city came to us and strongly advised us to postpone the walk until November 9 due to wind and flooding advisories. Since the Walk would be on the waterfront at Pier 16/17 at the Seaport, it was just too risky to put all of our volunteers and walkers in a potentially messy weather situation. It was likely a good call; I wasn’t sure how many people would come with the nor’easter in the weather report. Plus, this is actually Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day weekend, so many people who would have attended the walk were already planning to be out of town. We’ll be in town November 9, so when our co-chair called to let me know, I told him we’d still be at the postponed event next month.

All I could think when I saw the weather reports about the impending nor’easter was: how ridiculous is it that I’ve been participating in this same walk for the last 12 years, and this is the first year that weather is a problem. There were only two years when I was not physically there: the first was 2020 when the walk was completely virtual due to COVID-19 precautions. The second time was in 2022 when Chris and I had a communication snafu, and he booked an autumn Delaware road trip the same weekend as the Manhattan walk. So the one year I finally join the Walk committee and am officially volunteering at the event, it gets postponed due to weather. Oh well – c’est la vie.

Either way, we still had our usual Saturday outing. We spent the grey, drizzly day in Park Slope indulging in handmade campanelle pasta, a number of Chinese-French fusion pastries at our beloved Breadivore, and then admiring all the Halloween decorations already up at many of the neighborhood brownstones. Once the weather cleared up a bit later in the afternoon, Kaia spent time running and climbing at the huge Washington Park Playground in the ‘hood while I explored the tents at the fiber (yarn!) festival surrounding it. I’m still happy the walk is postponed as opposed to cancelled. I’m proud of the two TV segments I got to be on to represent AFSP and share why I walk. So regardless, this year’s participation is definitely a win for me personally — and the walk hasn’t even happened yet!