City living

So, city life is amazing.
Everyday I walk down the street and see something untraditionally beautiful.
a jello tinfoil top discarded and crumpled into the shape of a heart. Then a block down the discarded clear plastic cup that used to belong to that crumpled top, toppled over with remnants of red left.
I love that I gauge distance with blocks.
I see things differently now.
There is no nature here but there is. The ground here is torn up and covered hundreds of times and smoothed over.
There is human and dog shit riddled all over the ground. Smears of it slowly disintegrating under peoples unknown footsteps until it becomes an ambiguous repulsive stain. To walk here is to dodge and pivot.
My parents used to cringe and hastily tell us to get up, get up the ground is disgusting in our country home where the ants crawled along our fingers and the lawn was manicured to our specifications. I used to tell them to stop, it's fine, the ground is comfortable but they first came to america and lived in new york city. In the 70s and 80s when NYC was disgusting and unruly and terrible. Of all the things I think about, I think about how much shit must have been covering the ground. Nobody sits on the ground here except for the homeless and the labor workers. I think about my parents equating sitting on the ground to being dirty and homeless and poor and struggling and i understand now. The world i lived in was safe and clean and altered to our specifications.
So now i live in this world and i wonder if i'll do the same thing, even in a manicured world.