Falling in love again is a slow, steady, effortful process. After you lose a piece of yourself, it takes a constant sort of energy to unravel the tangled web that you call your personhood. To hold the frayed and tattered threads up to the light and examine each of them one by one, inch by inch, carefully imagining their place in the completed tapestry. In who you’ve become, and who you’re going to be. After leaving my twenties behind in Baltimore, it feels like I’ve lost a piece of myself, and I’m still recovering from it.
It’s no fault of the place I now find myself. Boston is as lovely as a new home can be. It’s been a dry summer; from my new hospital’s oncology ward solarium, the hills to the west are dense and verdant, and endless, bluebird skies have been shining down on us all August. I’m beginning to appreciate the terroir. The earthy, green smell of the Necklace as I cross over Longwood Avenue on my brief walk to work. The ever-changing light - each sunset now falling substantially earlier than the one before. The incredible character of my new Bostonian neighbors and colleagues, virtually all of whom are masked and distanced as the pandemic stretches into another season - a deep, stoic spirit of collective pride and mutual support that could have only been engendered by decades’ memories of the New England winter. Sure enough, and lucky for me, this place feels like a place. Which is more than one can say for… certain places in this country.
And yet, when I wake up in the morning, and hear the bubbling courtyard fountain in place of East Baltimore’s ambulance sirens, helicopters, and ice cream trucks, I can’t help but feel - weird as it sounds - that a thread of me is missing. I’m taking new photographs now (beautiful ones, too) but they don’t yet strum at my heartstrings or evoke an entire life dreamt, built, and lived to completion - the way my images from eight years in Maryland do.
But I’m learning. I’m going to fall in love again. It’s going to take intentionality, and the passage of time. During the week, my new job takes me away from thoughts of the past. I throw myself willingly into the work of supporting seriously ill patients and their families - and am stunned, gratified, grateful, to discover that the full-time stuff is just as meaningful as I always hoped it would be. It makes sense - sitting or kneeling by the hospital bed is the place in my life that has changed the least. Here is one thread that remains, that I hope will become woven more tightly, intricately, and beautifully over time. And during the weekend, when there is time and space to reflect, I’m choosing to do it where I always have: outdoors, at sunrise, beside a lake, within the eternal, forgiving woods.
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To wit, photographs from our weekend walks in August:
August 15, 2020: A early morning jaunt in the Fells, around Quarter Mile Pond and to Pickerell Point. Horrid light - a heavy bank of clouds rolls in just before sunrise. Still, I can imagine some lovely golden hours in the future from the south shore of Spot Pond, looking out toward Great Island. I use my polarizer to photograph the lily pads on Quarter Mile Pond before we quit the lakeside, visiting our local Wegman’s for the first time.
August 22, 2020: A spontaneous evening visit to the south bank of the Charles River in Allston for sunset. Lovely colors and lovely clouds. Birch trees. Boaters. Beer garden. A birthday party with rowdy children. A Canada goose with a broken wing.
August 23, 2020: A ramble, shortly after sunrise, at the Breakheart Reservation. I can tell, rather quickly, that this is going to be one of my new favorite places. We circumambulate the forest path around Silver Lake (Upper Pond), photographing the pine-clad island at its center as the morning light shifts and changes. The compositional opportunities here are endless.
August 30, 2020: Another morning walk around the Lynn Woods, along the south shore of (the less famous, non-Thoreau) Walden Pond and through the Great Woods, and to the top of Mount Gilead.
