Category Archives: Sense of place

Hot summer night

A hot summer night in Harvard Square. The usual crowd of upscale teens and suburbanites is missing. People have gathered around the window of Cardullo’s gourmet food store — in the store window is a large screen TV, tuned to the Red Sox game, with the sound piped outside on a hidden speaker. This is a real public service, since you can no longer watch the Sox on broadcast TV — it’s cable only.

There’s maybe thirty or forty people, much more of a mix than you usually see nowadays in Harvard Square, sort of like the Square was twenty or thirty years ago with academics and regular working people. Some fans actually brought lawn chairs to sit in. A couple of motorcycle cops sit astride their Harleys nearby, pretending to not look at the game. These Red Sox fans take up the whole sidewalk, and spill out onto the street. We walk around them, in the street — it is not wise to walk between Sox fans and a TV screen at this point in the season.

Something good must be happening in the game, because the fans all cheer and the motorcycle cops look up.

Street scene

Carol and I are looking out of the second-floor window of the place where we’re cat-sitting. A 1970’s-era Mercedes sedan slowly drives up.

“Wow, look at the old Mercedes,” says Carol, “it still looks good, especially in white. Is he stopping to look at the stuff I put on Craigslist?” She just stacked a pile of old junk at curbside.

A man gets out, about 60, longish white hair, aviator sunglasses, khaki pants, shirt in Madras plaid. He walks in front of the Mercedes, seemingly looking intently at the pile of Carol’s junk.

“Yup,” I say, “he’s looking at the blue wading pool.” The wading pool is leaning up against the “Parking Permit Required” sign, and from his point of view, all the other junk must be hidden behind it.

Just then, a slender young woman in her early twenties appears around the corner of the house, walking down the sidewalk past the blue wading pool towards the man. Carol bursts out laughing. “No, he’s looking at the foxy chick!”

The man turns away, but as soon as she passes by him, he turns to stare at her rear end.

“Boy, he’s a little obvious about it!” I say.

“It’s not that bad,” says Carol. “At least she was past him and didn’t see.”

“I guess, but,” I start to say, when Carol interrupts me.

“Shh, he’ll hear us,” she says.

We move away from the window.

Street signs in Cambridge

The heat is making me even crankier than usual, but at least the signs I see when I’m out walking keep me entertained.

Neatly chalked on a sidewalk blackboard in front of a bar at 2046 Mass. Ave.:

FOOD
BEER
RED
SOX

Not all of North Cambridge has succumbed to the onslaught of chi-chi boutiques selling things you don’t really need. A few places still supply the necessities of life.

*****

Spray-painted in neat capital letters, alternating lines painted in red or blue, on the asphalt sidewalk in Cambridge Common parallel to Mass. Ave.:

HAPPY 4th OF JULY
CORPORATE AMERICA
MAY WE CONTINUE TO
BATHE IN YOUR
GLORIOUS CORRUPTION
!!!!!

Yes, Virginia, we are in Cambridge.

*****

On Oxford Street, a few blocks down from Lesley University, the “Oxford Laundry Dry Cleaning Coin-Op” displays the following sign in their window:

This LAUNDROMAT WAS IN THE MOVIE “LOVE STORY”

You probably guessed that the “o”s in “Love Story” are hearts. I’m just surprised that anyone still remembers that movie.

Rail

Yesterday, I arranged to meet my dad at Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge for some birding. While I was waiting for dad to show up, I walked out the trail over the low dike that separates the two impoundments. Because of the late flooding this year, many of the cattails are still quite short, less than four feet tall. I was looking at some of the short cattails when I heard a familiar sound, a loud abrupt “kick-it, kick-it.” It was a Virginia Rail hiding somewhere in the cattails not far from the trail. Then another one started calling on the other side of the trail.

I stopped to listen, when suddenly one of the rails walked right up on the dike about fifty feet away, looked at me, and scuttled back into the cattails. Virginia Rails are small secretive birds and they can be hard to see, but every once in a while one will pop out into the open and let you have a look at it. I was thinking how lucky I was to see a Virginia Rail in the middle of the afternoon, when I realized the other Virginia Rail I had heard calling was coming out into the open practically at my feet.

As it moved closer and closer, I trained my binoculars on it. They’re odd-looking birds: drab brown, strangely thin from side to side so they can slip through the cattails, somewhat elongated, legs placed well back on their bodies, with very long toes. But when you look closely you realize they’re quite beautiful: their reddish-orange down-curved bill contrasts well with their gray cheeks and warm brown bodies. This particular rail got so close I could see individual feathers through the binoculars, and I could make out a neat subtle pattern on its back and wings. It fluffed up its feathers, uttered a loud “kak!”, turned and kept walking towards me.

The rail got so close I could not focus the binoculars on it. I looked down at it, not six feet away, moving across the trail and out in the open now but still moving furtively: a small brown bird, a fellow living thing, looking up at me. It moved quickly across the trail, and lost itself in the weeds and cattails.

“Wow,” I said out loud, to no one in particular, for there were no other human beings in sight. I felt a little light-headed: I had just been amazingly close to an amazing animal. The light-headedness lasted for a good half hour.

Broccoli

On Friday, I pulled the broccoli out of the refrigerator. Abbie had given it to us when we were up visiting in Maine. “Take this home with you,” she said. “I have plenty and I can always go get more.”

We had stopped in to visit the Four Season Farm on Cape Rosier, in Maine, just a few miles from Jack and Abbie’s house. Eliot Coleman had purchased the land from Helen and Scott Nearing for thirty-three dollars an acre in the 1970’s; that’s what the Nearings had paid for it in twenty years earlier. The farmstand wasn’t open yet, but we asked if we could look around anyway. “Sure,” said the pleasant young man with the disheveled hair and beard.

The market gardens were stunningly beautiful. The plants were larger than seem possible, they all looked incredibly healthy. We went inside a greenhouse. It was immaculate. Even the weeds looked like they were supposed to be there. Squash and eggplants and tomatoes were tied to string and grew up to the top of the greenhouse ten feet up. The pepper plants weren’t as tall, but were just as spectacular.

Eliot Coleman walked up as we walked back to Abbie’s car. Abbie and Carol knew who he was because of his pictures in his cookbooks. I knew who he was because he walked around like he owned the place. We said hello, and he responded politely.

A small apple orchard grew outside the greenhouse, perfectly cared-for trees growing in a mix of clover and grass. The farm spread out around us, green, fecund, orderly. They grow perfect vegetables all year round in coastal Maine’s unforgiving climate.

Our mother used to say that the essence of good cooking was “good goods.” If you start with good ingredients, it’s easy to wind up with good food.

I rinsed the broccoli, cut the florets off the main stalk, dropped it in the boiling water. After five minutes, I drained the water off, a light but brilliant emerald green. The broccoli tasted like green, it had a buttery after-taste, it was sweet, it tasted like broccoli but it tasted like more than broccoli. I like to read while I’m eating, but this broccoli was so good I couldn’t. Instead, I said to Carol: “It’s so good!” I looked out the window at the brilliant green trees along Rindge Avenue and thought: That’s what the broccoli tastes like, the green of things growing in the heat of summer. It really was that good.

Storm

This summer, life is punctuated by storms. This happened yesterday.

Early in the afternoon, the sky got darker, the wind picked up, and it started to rain. I went around and closed windows. Carol and I kept working. In half an hour, the rain had stopped and the air had turned heavy and dank.

In the late afternoon, Carol went for a walk.

The sky grew dark. Suddenly it began to rain, but the wind was coming from the other side of the building so I didn’t have to close any windows then. The thunder started. A woman hurried by under an umbrella, pausing behind a tree for a moment, but then hurrying on again. The rain grew heavier, the wind grew stronger. A bicyclist rode by, completely soaked by the rain.

Carol called on her cell phone to say that she was going to sit out the storm over in the Someday Cafe.

Then the rain just poured out of the sky, and the thunder came fast: boom, boom, boom boom, boom. A bolt of lightning out the kitchen window and a huge crack of thunder came simultaneously, and I jumped. I imagined running out of the house in this pouring rain because the lightning had started a fire, but it hadn’t. The street in front of the house was completely covered in water, and the water ran an inch deep down the driveway below the kitchen window. The sirens started. A firetruck came by with red lights flashing and siren going. Another siren in the distance. An ambulance, fluorescent green and white, followed the firetruck. More thunder, more sirens. A red paramedic’s SUV, siren wailing, sped by on the street below, headed in the other direction.

The rain tapered off. A little more thunder, a car alarm went off somewhere. The wind died down. The rain stopped and I opened the windows. The sky is dark gray with brilliant white and pale blue.

A woman in a turquoise blue tank top walks by the house as if the rain had never happened.

The driveway is partly dry. The sky is growing dark again: more rain coming.

The Good Life

Carol and I went up to visit Jack and Abbie — Jack is my dad’s cousin. Abbie gave us a little tour of that stretch of coastal Maine. Carol said she had seen a sign pointing to the “Good Life Center,” and asked if we could go there. Abbie said that was only a few miles from their house, and we drove over there.

We drove down the well-maintained but narrow gravel road until we saw a big mailbox that said “Nearing” on it. Back in 1954, Helen and Scott Nearing published a book called Living the Good Life: How To Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, a book which some credit with being a major impetus for the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The Nearings had first homesteaded in Vermont, but later in life they had moved to Maine. The “Good Life Center” now occupies what was once their house.

We pulled into the driveway. Carol asked a hirsute young man if we could look around, and he said of course. He even gave us a plastic-laminated sheet of paper with a short walking tour, and then peddled off on his bicycle.

We admired the house the Nearings had built from stone, in a sort of Swiss-chalet style. We looked at the garden, enclosed by a wall built of stone and mortar. The vegetables looked healthy but not spectacular. The small greenhouse, also made of stone, was pleasant to walk through. We looked at the stone outhouse (according to the laminated plastic card, it was the very first structure built on the land).

At the back of the clearing in the woods, we found a round yurt-like structure built entirely of wood, with round porthole-windows, and a strange round cupola. It sort of looked like a flying saucer from a 1950’s science fiction film. The laminated plastic card noted that this structure, called “The Gathering Place,” had been built by someone else after Scott Nearing had died. Inside, it was pleasantly cool, and all the unfinished wood was soothing. We sat and talked about this and that for quite a while.

At last we left. We had spent a pleasant half hour there, but the place didn’t carry the magic of the Nearings’s books. The house was just another house, the garden just another garden. Only “The Gathering Place” had held our attention for very long, and that hadn’t even been a project of the Nearings.

Heat

Cambridge, Mass.

Our first summer heat wave of the year settled in late last week. Humid, and hot with temperatures into the nineties yesterday. When heat like this comes, for the first few days my mind just doesn’t function particularly well. I don’t like to go outdoors in the early afternoon, the hottest part of the day. Carol and I tend to stay up late and take long walks at ten o-clock when it feels a little cooler. It’s tempting to stay up all night and try to sleep through the day, but I know I wouldn’t sleep through the heat.

Within a few days, I’ll have made my seasonal adjustment. I’ll be able to think more clearly in the heat — or think less and not worry about it. I’ll get used to walking around in the heat. We’ll sink into our regular schedule. The heat waves will become normal, though we’ll still long for the arctic cold fronts coming down from Canada.

Traffic

I left Ferry Beach Conference Center at quarter past one. By quarter to three, I hit rush hour traffic, just before the junction of Interstate 95 and Interstate 93. Traffic was heavy and slow from there all the way around Boston. By five o’clock, when I was well south of Boston on Route 24, the traffic finally thinned out a little. I made it home just before six; it should have been a three hour drive.

When I started driving today, I was determined to pay attention and remember whatwhat goes through my mind when I’m driving. Within minutes, I had forgotten that determination. When I drive, it almost seems as if there’s nothing to remember but the bare facts: I started at such-and-such a time, traffic was heavy, I arrived at such-and-such a time. It’s almost as if memory and higher awareness shut down for those five hours I was driving today. Not such a pleasant thought, given how many hours I spend driving.