An afternoon in the garden

I'm delighted to announce that I've got a poem up at Qarrtsiluni. It's "an experiment in online literary and artistic collaboration", to use their words, and I've been a fan for some time. The theme these days is Transformation, so I submitted a poem inspired by the works of Frida Kahlo, whose diary I read last year. You should pick it up. And don't forget to check out my poem and all the others. You can even listen to my nasally voice reading it.

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So yesterday I engaged in some backyardsitting, enjoying a late summer late afternoon. We're in that post-September summer that everyone forgets to reckon. Labour Day is the ritualistic end of the season in our secular calendar defined by measured by three-day weekends.

But everyone who uses their own senses can heard the cicadas, feel the breeze, see the waning summer light, smell the vegetation. The tomatoes on the porch are still going, the yard is pretty robust.

Looking from the balcony to the garden, don't those two chairs look inviting?

Oh yes, on closer inspection they still do. They're old but have character, and they were salvaged from trash day. It's alarming how quick people are to throw out stuff that definitely has a few good years left in it!

Looking from my afternoon perch to the drive way. I need one of those wooden rakes them zen gardeners use.

Trevor has managed to turn the yard into a garden, with birdbaths and chairs and brickwork. Our neighbour contributed river rock pebbles, and that with the tree trimming really brightened it up. This is the first summer in the almost four years I've lived here that I sat down and enjoyed the back yard.

Tropical Storm Hanna poured and poured on us Saturday night, but by daybreak yesterday it was beautiful. I know because I was awake for it. I can see why people like getting up early. We walked to Cafe Ula and had our breakfast outside, as we've been doing on some Sundays this summer, and realised we still had lots of day left.

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From Thoreau's blog:

Some hours seem not to be occasion for anything, unless for great resolves to draw breath and repose in, so religiously do we postpone all action therein. We do not straight go about to execute our thrilling purpose, but shut our doors behind us, and saunter with prepared mind, as if the half were already done.

Emerald Necklace

Kalends September

A lovely Labour Day spent walking along the so-called Emerald Necklace. One of the pleasures of living in Boston, especially Jamaica Plain, is that I can walk through parks all the way from my house to downtown. So this morning Trevor and I set off with Isaac. Our path took us through the Arboretum, along the Arborway to Jamaica Pond. From there we crossed into Olmsted Park, which does straddle the Boston-Brookline line, though it seems to be much more on the radar of Brookline residents. Every time I've come to Olmsted Park, I feel like I'm wandering in the ruins of some lost civilisation. In some ways I suppose I am.

See? Throughout the park there are the remains of lampposts, benches, walking paths. If you sit at the shore of Ward's Pond, you could be forgiven for thinking you're in the middle of a far-off forest. The sensation of being far away and yet in the middle of the city has always been very intriguing. Beaver Lake in Vancouver's Stanley Park came to mind.

Can you spot the hobbit?

This is a bend in the Middy River, right near the Museum of Fine Arts. It brought back memories, walking this stretch. There are so many colleges in the Fenway area, the streets were swarming with U-Hauls and students burdened with their various new belongings. It's fifteen years that I've been here now. Tempus fugit.

This is a rose garden that I'd no idea existed. I took this picture because it makes it look like the gate leads to a garden that has skyscrapers growing from it. Which it does.

This is one of the many gardens in the Fenway. The Victory Gardens were started during the Second World War to encourage people to grow vegetables since there was extensive food rationing. Now people grow mostly flowers. You can see that some of these gardens have been well attended for years.

After a leisurely picnic on a bench along Commonwealth Avenue, we came upon our destination, the Public Garden. I suppose the necklace would include the Common, but we were meeting Soma, who was fresh from the Boston Harbor Islands to share blackberries that she and a friend had picked.

This is the pond the Swan Boats ply.

Willows are probably my favourite trees in the world.

Waiting for the T. If you thought we were going to walk all the way back to Jamaica Plain after all that, then you crazy.

All in all a perfect day.

Just money

I've been finding money everywhere lately. I have lost track of how many dollars I've picked up off the ground in bits and pieces since January. So I've started either giving the coins I find to people or leaving them in tip jars so I can spread some of this luck around.

I found the penny in the picture the other day by the busses at Forest Hills. It's pretty mangled up and you can even see the zinc beneath the copper layer has been exposed. It's barely a penny any more, and I can't put my finger on what's so strange to me about that. When I picked it up, my first thought was, "Is that all money really is?" A symbol, a set of agreements, a collective hope, a zinc plug with a super thin layer of copper for show.

Sunset from my bedroom window

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Franz Kafka

Ponkapoag

Yesterday T & I decided to take a walk around Ponkapoag Pond in the Blue Hills. The forecasters had been predicting a rainy day, so the sunny blue skies were a welcome surprise for the morning. One of the numerous advantages to living in Jamaica Plain is our ready access to so many great outdoor areas. Then again, metro Boston is brimming with great green spaces.

I was rather taken with this rock right away, when we'd come down the hill closer to the water. I feel like I just need to know the right language and I'd be able to read whatever it's trying to tell me. The grooves do seem to tell of water that flowed along some mud, but why do they also make me think of flames?

This is the reading stone's neighbourhood. We're still in early spring, so the splotches of green are really vivid against the grey. Mind you, in places like the Arboretum, many of the trees are in full flower.

This was basking in the sun right in the middle of the path. Somehow I'd walked right past it without noticing, so I guess it decided to notice Trevor and lunge at him. And yes this picture was taken using the zoom feature. It's not until we got home that we broke out the Audubon Guide and identified the snake as a Nerodia sipedon, a Northern Water Snake. Not poisonous, but who wants to be bitten by a snake?

Here is the attack victim recovering and reflecting on his luck.

And here's some joker who drags himself about the region wearing funny hats and orange, pondering the meaning of the word isolation, which comes from the Latin word for island, which makes said joker wonder what's so bad about islands & what's with the negative connotation?

This was marked on the trail guide as a boardwalk through the bog at the east end of the pond. I had pictured something a little more substantial, that wouldn't soak my new sneakers in Atlantic Cedar tea, but still found myself captivated by this little path. The boards were mostly steady, but occasionally sank under our weight. I'm looking forward to seeing how all this scenery changes over the seasons.

Daffodil morning

I've been watching the new North Point Park in Cambridge emerge over the last several years. It's tucked away behind the Museum of Science Bridge at the very eastern tip of Cambridge - you can see it when you are on the train to Lechmere. Last fall it looked finished, but they hadn't gotten all the rails up along the water.

Well, it's finally open and I'd been meaning to go and today I decided I had a few minutes before work started to make a detour.

So this is what it looks like when you walk under the bridge. I'd walked along the bridge numerous times, countless times, but never under it.

And this is what greeted me as soon as I walked in: daffodils! They have planted daffodils all over the park. It was very quiet and the nicest surprise was all the birds chirping about. I think it would be a good thing to stop at a park and sit in the sun listening to birds before going to work in the morning. It would certainly be a nice antidote to the deadening effect the train sometimes has. And I imagine it would do wonders to ease the agitation of driving.

The rest of the day was coloured and lightened by my morning detour.

Nones of April

So Trevor found this branch on the ground and decided to stick it in some water. I relocated it to this spot by the window on my dresser. It was popping into bloom when I left for Florida last weekend. The flowers were, shall we say, past peak when I got back. Still it was a magical thing to have happen.

Today D, T and I met Sat and event called Evolving Traditions at Wellesley College. It was put together by S's friend, and now my neighbour, who is a professor there. The dancing and music were top-notch, as was the food. I had never been on the campus before, and was quite impressed. I always find it a good sign when an older, established institution is unafraid to bring on some modern architecture.

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I finished the book Three Cups of Tea, after reading it for one of the book clubs I belong to. I strongly recommend it not because it was great literature, but because it is an inspiring story, and a counter to all those who say that one person can't make a difference. Though it did make me wonder why I didn't start schools in Haiti or something. I've gotten to a point where I realise that it's more productive to see what I can do than to beat myself up for what I haven't done. Greg Mortenson, the subject of the book, is doing good work and I only wish that all the money we have poured into the abyss of war had been given to organisations like his instead.

Like any good depiction of a person who does such good work, it steered away from hagiography by illuminating some of Mortenson's flaws, though not as much as Tracy Kidder did Paul Farmer's in Mountains Beyond Mountains. If such people are portrayed as saints, it makes the regular folk think that they are too small to emulate them. Three Cups of Tea doesn't do that. Still, anyone who thinks education is some pie-in-the-sky idea that we can deal with after "security" is established, well, the two need to come together.

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In other book news, I just got a whole bunch of poetry translations from Action Books. One of the editors was at Harvard at the same time I was. They have a focus on Scandinavian poetry, which is a fascination of mine. And luckily most of the books are bilingual.

It's poetry month, but instead of writing a poem every I think I'm just going to read one every day.

Happy New Year!

Well, in the old (really) old days, this would have been the start of the year. What better day than today to start a new year? It's spring, despite the bare trees and gray skies. This morning as I walked up the hill to the cemetery, I noticed that the brambles have gone from being stick brown to having just the faintest ghost of green hovering about them. When you look directly it's hard to see, but there nonetheless.

I came into the office this morning after a long weekend away. It was nice to be back. I like the hubbub and the interactions. Apparently our society has reached the point where most people hate their jobs, or so I read somewhere. Thankfully I am not among those people. I love my job as much as I love a nice crispy apple. Really, there aren't many things lovelier than a crispy apple, especially if you've grown up on St. Thomas, where crispy apples are heartbreakingly rare. I don't know how I came to deserve such good fortune, but I'm going to enjoy it as long as I can. And what do you know? They had crispy green apples at the gym today!

But enough of this giddy exultation. The sky was moving today, rainy but warm. Momentous. I lost my uncle on Easter, one of my dearest friends lost her father on Good Friday. It's sad, too sad. So no resolutions for this new year, just hope.

Boox!

So these are the little beauties sitting on my shelf. I used to have a lot more, but I, unlike many other bibliophiles, found that I was quite able to part with books. Maybe moving every year had something to do with it. Or maybe moving in with L & M back in '99 did it. They were able to move all their belongings in a few trips in a VW bug (an old one!), whereas I needed like three trips with a U-Haul van.

So I pared down. Maybe a little too hastily at times. There are a few books I miss, but I do live in a part of the world where I’m never too far from a library.

This is what’s left. I have read every book I own (except for the four I’ve acquired in the last month). It took years. There are a few I’ve been looking forward to re-reading, but most of them are just kind of sitting there. And it’s become less a matter of them taking up space than a matter of letting someone else have a turn at reading them.

In other news, yesterday was the first day of spring. I decided to stroll along the river at lunchtime the other day, for the first time in a long time. Everything I could see was a watery sort of blue-grey.

Back to school

Tonight it's cool out. The leaves are changing early this year because it's been so dry. Last weekend every moving truck in the city was occupied. It was a good summer. Highlights included the free classical concerts at the Hatch Shell, Shakespeare in the Common, my new job, the Garden in the Woods, among many, many other things.

Always so much left undone, but that only means there's plenty left to do! The Brookline Poetry Series started back up on Friday, and was delightful as always. I'm looking forward to one of dearest friends visiting at the end of the month. I signed up to be a host for two first years at Harvard, so I look forward to showing them around the area. And I am planning to learn Swedish.

Delight of delights, the Thoreau blog seems to be daily again.

The Dirdy Birdy (full version)

Hiatusing

I think I’m spending too much time looking at screens. Instead of trying to update this blog three times a week, I think I shall cut it down to once a week, at least while I’m finishing this project. I’ll keep updating my St. Thomas blog daily, though. Well, until next Friday when I fly back to Boston.

Oh yeah, so it was funny: my Mom had saved all my Harvard papers from back when I was applying. It’s a funny little time capsule. You know what I said my plans for the future were when I was seventeen? I would study social sciences and work at a multinational company. So I guess I haven’t actually gone too far from that.

One last thing – go to wiggle worm and check out my doppelganger.