Lizkdc Dislocation

East of Boston: Great Brewster Island

Sandspit at Great Brewster Island

Yesterday I travelled with the Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands to one of their islandy flock, a  worn, ancient nubbin called Great Brewster Island, nine miles out from the busy bustle of the waterfront.

Long ago, Native Americans paddled out to these islands in search of fish or refuge from enemies.  For a very long time in recent centuries,  they were part of a busy, messy, fast-changing Boston culture that lived and died by the sea.  For four centuries, Boston built on these islands,  lighthouses and docks, forts and prisons, hospitals for contagious diseases and catch-alls for orphans and delinquents and those who fell under wartime suspicion.  Families lived out here on some of the islands, fishing and managing tiny farms and crafts, connected to the mainland by small boats and an incredible hardihood. On others, wealthier sorts seeking peace from the reeking city built the occasional summer home and played at boats and picnics and watercolor painting. The guide showed us old black and white photos of Gilded Age ladies in enormous hats, posed on the beach with their long skirts sweeping the wet sand.

During the Second World War, a fear of dark dangers that might track across the Atlantic caused the US armed forces to take over almost all the chain, building in great guns and mines and radar nearby the crumbling forts from the Civil War and War of 1812.

Mysterious (Stone) Skin: Another Urban Woods Question

Ok, urban detectives: somebody out there may know what these fragments are?

 

Another favorite place I have in our corner of the city is Millenium Park, the rewarding but not overly-prettified piece of rescued riverland scrub along an upstream bend of the Charles River near the VFW Parkway.  This undramatic wetland, long snubbed and left aisde for graveyards, DPW storage, a dump, and the backyard of the Irish Alehouse, got rescued a few decades ago, and turned into a really well-thought out park and the home grounds of West Roxbury High, as well.

It retains an air of strangeness, if you feel it.  Exit through one wooded side, and you can wander into the grounds holding a few fragments of the long-vanished Transcendentalist commune called Brooke Farm, where Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller and their pals messed incompetently around at idealized rural living.  Away along one of the graveyard drives is an old marker stating that Civil War troops long ago trained in what were open fields.  Follow other paths, and you can wander through Gethsemane and several other miles of abutting graveyards. Over there, a train bridge, and the commuter rail carrying business people headed down town. The other way, Route 1 and a couple of miles of McDonald's, Bed Bath and Beyond,  and discount carpetlands. That way, the top of the Blue Hill. Another way, the distant ice of the Hancock Tower.

An Urban Wood, and Mysterious Bits

Don't you love it when a weird little bit of mystery wanders into your life?

First off, one of the great things about postmodern city living is the empty spaces that open up even in the middle of dense development, and the way the woods creep and sneak back into the gaps.

And from something neglected or overlooked comes something cherished.

Accidently in Love (More Photos and Flowery Things)

Saturday I accidentally discovered the glory of the Arboretum at dawn in May.

This is an idea that has existed somewhere in the theory zone of my brain ("someday I'll get up and visit the park at the height of its glory--at sunrise"), but very comfortably shelved in the "unspecified future" overflow parking lot quite aways off,  and never in the "this morning,  ass leaving bed"  parking space right out front of the cerebral cortex.

But that morning the fricking 4 AM birdsong reached some sort of ecstatic, nonsensical, brain-penetrating height and I had late coffee the previous night and things on my mind and somehow, boom, I was wide wide awake at quarter to five in the morning with a complete conviction that sleep was never coming back. And somehow this translated into my feet hitting the floor and stumbling out the door at 5 AM on a Saturday.

I found:

• the Rhododendron Path lined with towering, ridiculous beauties with their petal balls of purple and pink and white, beside a quiet, dark stream, and the shadowy Hemlock Hill rising behind as backdrop
• secret dells of shadowy ferns
• great spiraling fountains of ivory spirea
• glades of tangerine azaleas
• cliche-perfect dew-beaded white roses
• purple and yellow irises reflected in a dawn-colored pond, and leaping frogs that kept startling me with a plop and nearly landing me in said pond
• blackbirds crying deetle donk and songbirds galore
• last of the lilacs falling gently to pieces into deep green meadows

It was a feeling almost of intoxication.

Like Wind From the Sea (A Writing Lesson)

Do you know what a cinquain is? I'm a word lover and a former English teacher and a writer and yet I didn't,  until a wonderful workshop this week at 826 Boston I helped at where . . .

"OH OH OH!"

"Keshon. Yes."

"Cinque is FIVE! That's SPANISH! I *know* Spanish!"

"Nuh UH you don!"

"Yeah I do! "

"Say summthin in Spanish! Say "you fat'!"

KIDS. No. Eyes on the teacher.  He's teaching a really great workshop. It's all about how we're going to learn to make a poem called a cinquain,  where there are five lines, each containing a set number of syllables . . .

About a Landscape

So I'm taking this class called "Word and Image" over at Leslie University/Art Institute of Boston, taught by the wonderful Karen Davis and Cassandra Goldwater.

This is the first homework I did for the class. It's, well, classy, I think.  There was a prompt given from Wallace Stevens (No Possum, No Sop, No Taters), and I was all over that jelly, with these wintery photos I've been making for the past few months, and some sketched in charcoal crows, and the carefully arranged objects from my garden: dry skeleton of coneflower, tendril of red-twig dogwood.

It was well-liked by others in class, and on target, and barring some production values which could be better, quite the sort of thing one does.

The problem I have with it is this is the sort of thing that got me into trouble to begin with, going all the way back to early days, school and what have you.  The ability to create intelligent answers to fit an assigned criteria, careful all the while to reveal as little as possible about myself and to make no commitments whatsoever to any point of view.

Memories Like Snowflakes

Don't you find that you have scraps of memory from winter more weird and vivid then pretty much any other time of year?  My guess is because, despite the fact there can be snow on the ground any time from November to March up here in New England, a lot of times the exact conditions happen less often, and are in existence for less time,  then almost any other weather.

It seems like you get a thousand sunny moments that are like one another in the spring and summer.  But that opaque blend of snow and fog you drove through one day where the rivers and ponds disappeared utterly? Maybe happens only three days this winter. So you have fewer of each winter memory, and more rare and short-lived ones, and they get preserved, instead of shading away into a drift of nearly identical moments in time like those of promiscuous summer.

The day your house windows froze into perfect snowflake crystals like an exhibit in the museum. The hour with a hawk hanging over you in a cloudless, blue,  infinitely cold sky and every footprint in the snow and twig and leaf casting its own perfectly defined shadow against the glaring white background. The afternoon you went hiking with snow underfoot and snow-threatening sky above and the entire landscape was defined in forty shades of whites, grey and black. All of these might happen a handful of times all season, or once.

Also, the time of our lives (most of us) where we really live in and with the winter and the snow is limited to childhood,  and makes up fewer years of our lives.

Like, I have these winter memories of setting out with the other girls from Holy Name School to go ice skating, and we hung our white skates around our necks on the tied-together strings, and took the bus down to the MDC rink by the Charles.

Adults wouldn't let you do that nowadays, either the skates around the neck thing, lest you fall and cut a carotid in a tragic, bloody mess that traumatized all the other little girls, or the taking the bus around town in little packs of unchaperoned, awkward, mittened Catholic girlhood.

Snowflakes and Insufficiency

The camera--well, as wielded by me, right now--can't do justice to what the eyeball can see. 

The Arboretum's collection of evergreens from everywhere mean that in this small corner of Boston you have a winding Japanese pine and a towering Serbian spruce and a stand of skinny hemlock and some dense English gardeny ornamental shrubs all living together on a few hillsides, wound through by the original little brooks that shaped this neighborhood.

And then an especially clinging snow sifts down on it all and traces out all the detail -- long needles and short, small, personable little Christmas trees and 100 foot towers, evergreens with shapes that are dense, opaque and watchful, and others with open, swooping boughs like candelabra.  And it's so amazing?

It would be more admirable if I could truthfully write that I walked about this scene full of virtuous and clever thoughts about the natural world, its transformation in winter, and the oncoming New Year.

However, I did not.  I walked about it simultaneously overcome by a sense of sense-swamping beauty and complexity,  and my utter inability to *make* something of it. Each time I reach one level of satisfaction with picture taking, I seem to pass right into a sense of just how far down the learning scale I am with my camera, and get overcome with something very much like a nine year old child'lump-in-the-throat "WHO CARES ANYWAY!"

All Souls: Halloween Is Weirder Then We Let On

Here we are again this weekend, on our National Holiday of Candy, Children, and Death.  Which is a confusing mixture, almost as much as as the National Festival of Rebirth, Snow, and Materialism.  Also, skeletons and spiders are scary, but not as frightening as a man coming down your chimney who's also following you in his magic snow-scope all year, detecting when you're Bad.

No, there actually is a point to it all, beyond our weird habit of ingesting the folklore of ancient peoples and making them available at Walmart.  As the days shorten and the leaves flame and then fall in northern lands, October has always seemed psychologically the right time for a day to deal with the dead. 

The church, in its liturgical way, meant for All Souls day to be all serious business and fasting and prayer for sinning souls, but the popular folk of Europe in their more literal mode said "hey, all this calling upon the names of all the dead and stuff . . . isn't that a little effed up and scary?"

Beauty and Creepiness (Forest Hills Cemetery, Halloween Week)

You know about the Puritans and their whole death thing, if you grew up around here.  Because when you were just a weeny New England kid enjoying your schoolday of crayons, off-key singing and those tiny cartons of tepid milk, suddenly you would get dragged off to one of the local historic boneyards and given a tour of the places where all the famous history people were buried.  Paul Revere holding a silver teapot and all the Pilgrims and all the Colonial time people were down there somewhere. The Pilgrim people in their black and white uncomfortable outfits, the Revolution dudes with their triangle hats and wigs and kneesocks, the ladies in little squishy bonnets who were so useful about spinning cloth and making soap and boycotting tea.

Well, so the Puritans and other early colonists were pretty up front about death.  You look at their graves and what do you have? Skulls.  Cross-bones. Timeglasses with time-running out. Sometimes a full-on skeleton in a hoodie with his death-dealing scythe. You know, they didn't pretty things up much.

Sometime around the Civil War and all its sorrows and the Victorian period and all its proprieties, things changed, though.  The folks in Boston went out to what was then the edge of town and made this huge spectacular death park, with an ornamental lake, and a thousand graceful trees, and fancy gates, and filled it with stone lilies and wreaths and ornate urns instead of bones,  and monumental ladies covered in drapery and gentle regret. And angels--lots and lots of angels.