"If we find it, do we know to stay? Is it right for a lifetime? I can't be sure. I thought I'd found my place once; now I'm wondering if I can find it here, touched as I am by this area's poignancy and abiding beauty. Maybe we need different places for different phases of our lives. Maybe cherished places remain alive inside us even if we have to move on - our attachment to the earth not thinned, but widened. Still, I worry over the pile of fragments in my past, the running of one place into another. Wherever I am is cluttered with the memory of dozens of other landscapes."
— Deborah Tall (1951-2006)
From Where We Stand
All good things have to start somewhere, I guess. Jane and I arrived at our new digs in Brookline, MA, on June 27th, 2020. We’ve spent the past few weeks gradually getting the apartment unpacked, set up, and furnished, which has been a bit more intensive of a process than our move to Baltimore was eight years ago - in large part because we have greater than zero disposable income, and in smaller part because we’ve developed a (slightly?) more mature sensibility of what makes home feel like home. Eight years ago, it was merely enough that we had each other, especially after four years of long distance in college. We went with the cheapest possible everythings at Ikea, stocked our kitchen to cook like college students, and called it a day. Fast forward nearly a decade, and we’re ordering fine-art prints of my photographs for the walls, matching ottomans to area rugs, and generally attempting to make our world feel more cozy. Charlotte, for her part, seems quite happy with the apartment now that she’s overcome her fear of the ice machine in the freezer. She’s been sunning herself every afternoon in our west-facing windows, watching the turkey families trot like flightless mafiosi around the courtyard fountain outside.
As we waited for our boxed-up life possessions and furniture orders to arrive, Jane and I had plenty of time to explore our surroundings. In some ways, Boston hasn’t changed much from my college memories of it - same classy skyline, same curving roads, same red-bricked, historically famous façades. And in other ways, it has changed a lot - or rather, Jane and I have changed a lot in the intermission. We’ve been ranging the city on foot, walking for miles on end, everywhere from the Seaport to Cambridge to Jamaica Plain. It seems laughable now how insulated and insular we were a decade ago, rarely wandering more than a few minutes outside the ivy-clad bubble of Harvard’s campus (the single trip I made with Jane in 2010 to buy mouse supplies at the Petco in Allston, barely a mile off-campus, felt like a true expedition). So, I guess, the city has become smaller. Or we’ve grown bigger. We have definitely grown bigger.
I’m trying very consciously - trying too hard, perhaps - to familiarize myself with my surroundings visually, in an attempt to replace what I miss (and will be missing for awhile) about Baltimore. Summer is my least favorite time to photograph (harsh light, high contrast, hot weather, bugs), but Boston has proven to be quite beautiful even in the pulsing heat of July, with all of its open spaces, abundant colors, and thoughtfully cultivated urban greenery.
I’m not in love with it yet. It certainly doesn’t feel like home, quite yet. In fact, it feels like we’re on one long vacation (we technically are; both of us start our new jobs in August), and will be re-packing everything and moving back to Baltimore any second now. Or, maybe, like I’ll wake up back in the old apartment overlooking Hopkins, and this whole seismic shift of a move will have been a dream. But I know it’s going to take longer than a few weeks for me to really love a place - it took a few years, and the passage of seasons, and the changing and re-appearing of familiar places, for Maryland to earn that special corner in my heart. So here’s to Massachusetts, a lovely place in its own right: you have my full attention.
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These photographs were taken on our first series of rambling walks in and around Boston during the month of July. Our first recordings of a new home:
July 2, 2020: A meandering walk eastward, from our home in Brookline through the Back Bay Fens, down Newbury Street, and to the Public Garden and Boston Common. Jane and I discover Brattle Book Shop and pick up a collection of Everett Ruess’s journal writings.
July 4, 2020: A walk southward along the Emerald Necklace parks, from our apartment on the Riverway down to Jamaica Pond, and back up through Brookline Village. We see a great blue heron catch, of all things, a mouse.
July 5, 2020: A walk northward to visit Cambridge, Jane’s old home. We visit her old dorm building, the little library where I attempted to propose to her many years ago, and much of Harvard’s campus, stopping at Rodney’s Bookstore before returning via Central Square and getting udon for lunch in Brookline.
July 6, 2020: An early morning drive north out of the city, to walk the Skyline Trail at the Middlesex Fells Reservation. A misty, drizzly morning with little going for it in terms of sunrise - but it felt good to lace up the hiking boots for the first time in our new home.
July 10, 2020: A short walk through Downtown Boston and the North End before standing in line at the RMV for our new driver’s licenses. The first lobster roll.
July 11, 2020: A morning stroll through the Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, which we first visited in the autumn of 2010 (when Jane was working on a paper about the cemetery’s animal burials). It looks much greener in the summer, with a rich landscape of wild and cultivated flowers.
