This is definitely the summer of the green metal table and the green plastic chairs. Given to us last year by neighbors who moved back to Manhattan, they’ve been in constant use this summer.

And they’ve added a very festive dimension to summer on Third Street. This weekend, we ate dinner on Saturday and Sunday out there. On Saturday, a friend who is moving from 2nd Street to 16th Street, brought over the contents of her refrigerator and made quesadillas, which were utterly delicious. We drank bright red Rose, the drink of the summer, and talked until after ten, when weariness set in and the kids were too tired for fun.

On Sunday, my downstair’s neighbor called: "Are we gonna be hillbillies again tonight?" I loved the image: lawn chairs in front of a trailer, six-packs of beer, bags of chips and sour cream dip. We are a version of that sitting on our green plastic chairs with our bottles of Rose, our attempts at gourmet potluck.

But we’re hillbillies just the same. Park Slope style. I wonder if people think: There’s that building where everyone sits outside all the time. What’s with that?

They can think what they want. This is where we want to be, what we want to do.

My husband made a batch of his now-famous chicken curry with almonds and dried cranberries. Everyone had more than one helping. They couldn’t help it. It was that good. Sunday was a three bottles of Rose kind of night and some Czech beer, too. The children stayed inside for the most part, watching Madagascar in the first floor apartment. Steering clear of their parents, they were having their own kind of fun. 

Sitting on a green plastic chair is a great way to watch the world go by. I saw a family we know walking to Fifth Avenue for dinner, more than one couple sans children out for a  date night, crowds of teenagers lumbering from one end of the block to the other, dog walkers, twenty-somethings ambling to The Gate, the beer pub on the corner of Third Street and Fifth Avenue.  

We provide scenery for them (Look at those people eating dinner in their yard). And they’re our constant movie, the on-going flow of strangers and friends walking from Seventh to Sixth, Sixth to Seventh Avenues. They keep us entertained, are somewhere to put our eyes. 

The table is chained to the fence. But we leave the chairs out, unchained, every night and no one has walked off with them. Yet. We’d be lost without them. It’s the summer of the green metal table and plastic chairs. The only place to be. On Third Street.