Walking with Nikki

New Bedford, August 2012.

Boston Common, 7 a.m.

I regret only that these photos do not communicate how strongly I dislike that city.
August 2012. 

Nikki, New Bedford Harbor

Dancer and mansion and drooping pine

I like dancers, the things you catch them doing in in-between moments. It's like they're speaking in verse while everyone else is stuck in prose mode. This is my newlywed friend's sister.

Pre-wedding van errands, New Hampshire

Backyard, southeastern Massachusetts

A story from late last summer

Cat's cat

Escaping / (freedom is seeing what is)

"it is looking in the mirror. seeing what's there. not seeing what your mind sees. seeing what is physically in front of you. that reflection is ok. that reflection is perfect. that is what you learn. and you keep looking. at each limb. at each freckle. at each hair. at each curl. each wrinkle. each line. each curve. and you look. and you see. and you learn. you are more than enough. you have the strength to be you.

"focus not on the walls but the gaps in the fences. for they are always there."

– Liv

Forest-dwellers and moss for fingers

Scone dough

What we did with the raspberries (the ones we didn't eat right off the bush). I actually did not get to taste these; while they were still in the oven the time came to hug my friend's mom goodbye and get in the car for Anna to drive me to the airport. But I heard they were good, and that they got fed to a social worker.

Here is something we did in September

Cat and Contesserate by the sea

August, because a fine glittery snow is dusting down tonight and I just talked to that Cat. We hadn't seen her in three years until that day. We picnicked and I stepped on a fish hook, which was exciting, and we watched a seagull smash a quahog. I'm not sure why I had difficulty exposing these correctly, but I like them anyway.

Hippie attic

A New England place where I slept and woke. Incense-smelling.

Echo, rain

Burlington, VT. Most beautiful ex-roommate, still-kindred spirit. In my head, in every memory of us, we are in our bunk beds at school talking, or we are drinking tea, or we are outside in the rain.

Floating

"The sun was low in the west, and the breeze soft and languorous that came up from the south, charged with the seductive odor of the sea." 
– Kate Chopin, The Awakening

I won't forget: wading into the Atlantic in the evening and the evening of summer until it was deep enough to float instead of walking. Wearing it on my skin. Being in open water under the open sky gives me such a sense of freedom and peace. Have you read The Awakening? The night-swimming scene early on left the most lingering impression on me — "She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude..." — I am reminded of it any time I go swimming in the sea, properly swimming past where my feet can touch and past where the waves break, I mean.

The traditional association between women and the sea makes me feel genuinely and personally lucky. I rather think it's one of the best things the female sex has to its name.

Wandering an unfamiliar university

Darkened hallways, but I felt some air moving under a closed door. It was unlocked. Drab seventies concrete architecture, Brutalist to the max, but: windows, and August wind. I went to the back of the classroom and sat inside the curtains and was grateful and moved; I might have laid my hand across my heart or just said, Oh quietly to no one.






An intermezzo, maybe.

And Massachusetts is one place I have seen

Having successfully crossed the country to spend a week and a half in New England, I am now happily back at school outside of Chicago, sort of settled in and mostly in one piece. Notable:
- A gorgeous old library built by robber barons

- Being surrounded by New Bedford/Boston accents

- The view from Mount Monadnock, and greedily combing the wild blueberry bushes on the way down

- Breakfast in a library-turned-café

- Unbelievably yummy fresh juice on the Dartmouth (College) Green

- Wandering around old New England graveyards

- Spraining my ankle practicing a slip jig step in a parking lot the morning before my flight home (and consequently getting the wheelchair treatment in the airports on the way back to school)

- Getting skipped ahead of two dozen surly New Bedforders in the ER and fearing for my life when I walked through them in the waiting room again on my way out (srsly, the guy across from me looked like he could kill someone with his bare hands)

- Frolicking in a creek with my roommate's half-wild little sisters

- Feeling like the sickly city girl in Heidi who goes to the mountains to be transformed into a sturdy, rosy-cheeked non-invalid

- Getting my bag stolen, and my camera, cell phone, wallet, and checkbook along with it

- The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

- Seeing humpback and finback whales on a whale watch

- Said ninety-minute whale watch actualy being a four-hour trip

- Plymouth turning out to have amazing fudge, even if Plymouth Rock is "the most anticlimactic thing ever" (to quote my friend the local). As well as the oldest church in the U.S. and an absurd number of salons.

- Cooling my feet in the Atlantic Ocean

- Watching Secret Window in an old house in the middle of the woods
I shall try to find some good pictures of the museum, the mountain and the library for my next couple posts.