Category Archives: a sense of place

ownership and choice [#move2014]

02 Monday Jun 2014

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Annotated street map, Hyde Square, Jamaica Plain (Boston, Mass.)
Photo by author.

I started this blog post last week and somehow it failed to save automatically, erasing several full paragraphs of text. Damn you Google, the way you lull us into complacency with your automatic back-ups! Still, I’ve continued to think about the themes of this post in the intervening week and will write a different post now than I would have last Sunday. And I think I’m mostly okay with that.

Ownership, and choice.

Last weekend, Hanna and I had a conversation about buying furniture. Our household is currently composed of some odds and ends, a few really awesome, we’ve picked up through the street-side equivalent of dumpster diving and IKEA purchases, again some quite excellent. Hanna moved here following an escape from an abusive relationship and a string of insecure housing situations, neither of which lent themselves to long-lasting furniture investment; I moved here from the Midwest with everything I needed for grad school packed into the back of an “economy” car rented from Enterprise. We’ve been constructing our household from the ground up.

The discussion we had was about buying some non-IKEA furniture, specifically a coffee table and a couple of bedside tables (perhaps matching!) for lamps and the inevitable stack of books-to-be-read we both accumulate. It would be nice, we feel, to have bedside tables with little drawers so Teazle won’t spend the hour between 2-3am every night trying to wake us up by swiping our spectacles onto the floor.

We’ve been thinking about L.L. Bean this time around, specifically their “Mission” or “Rustic” lines, which for us means maybe a piece or two per year depending on the size of the vet bills and how much we care about traveling to England in the next decade.

Then last weekend I got thinking, if we’re going to spend $500 on a coffee table or $250/piece on a pair of end tables, maybe we could do better than give that money to Bean’s. They’ve a good reputation as an employer, and are regional, sure. Their pieces are made here in the U.S. But what if we went a step further down this path and actually hired a local woodcrafter to do the job?

“I dunno, I guess I’m just not used to having the money to make that kind of choice,” Hanna observed. “It makes me anxious. I mean, it’s always the way I wanted to spend money, but Evil Ex always fought me on it. And then when I moved down to Boston I was worried about feeding myself and paying rent.”

See, despite the fact that we’re still renting (and yes, as we prepared to move everyone kept asking us if we were buying; there’s a whole separate post in me about the unexpected pressure I feel as a married person in my thirties to buy into the real estate market — it’s seriously more pressure than we’re feeling about the babies thing, maybe because we’ve made that decision in the negative already) this feels like our first home as a married couple. Our first purpose-“bought” space. We made our grad student digs work for eight years — eight years? the management company rep kept repeating when I handed him the keys, eight years? whoa. that’s gotta be a record. — and while we made the move because we needed a bigger space, it was also a move that consolidated our commitment to Boston. Despite the fact we’re tenants, not owners, of this lovely new home, we already have a sense of ownership.

Because we’ve chosen to live here — this city, this neighborhood, this building, this space. So even though we’re still writing that check every month to the landlord, not the bank, we’re putting down roots. Hanna bought a sage plant. We’ve introduced ourselves to our next-door neighbors. We do our part wheeling the trash to the curb on Monday mornings.

We talk about hiring a local artisan to build our furniture, even if it means we’ll have to wait for a year to get those matching end tables with the drawers where we can keep our eyeglasses safe from questing paws.

Jamaica Pond, May 2014
Photo by author.

Because we can afford to wait a year. We’re thinking in those terms, now, more than we used to.

And it’s definitely a good place to be.

new perspectives on boston [#move2014]

20 Tuesday May 2014

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We almost have enough bookshelves…

We’re still unpacking here in J.P. but the living room is taking approximate shape. And I think my biggest observation from this first week in a new location in the same city is how much one’s understanding of a big city like Boston is filtered through the situational perspective of daily activity. I mean, “duh.” But we’ve shifted three miles south of our old home in Allston and suddenly our daily routine moves from one set of neighborhoods and local businesses to another.

Eventually, the living room will have an office space!

My initial impression is, weirdly enough, that Boston feels a lot more like a big city living in J.P. than it did living in Allston, on the edge of Brookline. Living in Allston, most of our daily routine happened in The Fenway/Longwood/Brookline neighborhoods, and Brookline definitely feels like a self-contained village enveloped by the greater metropolitan area of Boston. Jamaica Plain, too, feels like a very distinct neighborhood — but within the city of Boston. It feels very conscious of its status as part of Boston, and I feel woven into the fabric of big city life in new ways. No longer does my evening commute cut passed Fenway Park and up Beacon Street through Coolidge Corner … now I cycle by Symphony Hall through Roxbury to Jackson Square along the reclaimed Southwest Corridor Park.

“Kitty TV” has a new view…

Here are some of our discoveries from week one:

  • Ghazal makes (and delivers!) tasty Indian fare
  • The Southwest Corridor Park offers me a safer, more peaceful bicycle commute
  • Koo Koo Cafe is not a new discovery, but is now on our walk to work!
  • As is Green T Coffee, on those days when our path through
  • Olmstead Park is too meandering a route to Countway
  • The local fabric and yarn shop, JP Knit ‘n Stitch, where we picked up fabric to recover our ageing IKEA chairs
My selection…

… and Hanna’s

In the coming weeks, we’re looking forward to checking out:

Hope all of you are well! Those of you whom I owe emails, I haven’t forgotten! The moving exacerbated my tendinitis and exhausted us generally … last night I was mostly asleep by 7 o’clock. Little old lady hours. But I haven’t forgotten you!

❤

#move2014 in photos [what it says on the tin]

14 Wednesday May 2014

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So we’ve moved.

I’m headed back to our old place one more time today to pack up the fridge and a few left-over things so the cleaners my parents are paying for can come and do the final scrub down. Then, hopefully, new people will come along soon and find Old Number Twelve a good place to live, as we did for many years.

Meanwhile, I promised pictures — so here they are!

This is a lot of what the last ten days have been about.

The cats liked all the piles of clothes and bedding to sleep on.

I think they were worried we would leave them behind, so kept trying to get us to pack them!

There was a lot of turning around and finding this.

How did we fit all this stuff in one 535-square-foot apartment?!

The BEST THING about the move was when the movers — Patrick, Mike, and Damian — arrived.

They took the things away and packed them so swiftly!

While Hanna waited with the cats at our new place, I was left to “supervise” the departure by drinking my latte and taking pictures of the emptying apartment.

The last box…

… Of serials, naturally. We’re librarians after all!

Books will be our biggest logistical hurdle. Here they are stacked up in the Inner Sanctum (what will eventually be Hanna’s meditation/yoga space (and our guest bedroom! … plus books).

These bookshelves (and three more) are already filled.

This is the new living room space (with a study nook to the right of the frame).

As predicted, Teazle and Gerry LOOOOVE this long hallway for chasing one another (particularly at night). I’m standing in the living room, and the room at the end of the hall is our kitchen. Off the hall to the right are the master bedroom, bathroom, and Inner Sanctum.

The movers put our bed back together, people!! It was the first room we made usable, after the kitchen.

Our kitchen has a table for eating! And gorgeous appliances.

Hanna found this photograph in the back of one of the cupboard drawers. Worrying? Charming? You decide! It now lives on our fridge.

We share our second-floor porch with the next-door neighbors and their cat, Jelly, whom Gerry and Teazle have only met through the window so far. Our plants are very happy outside, and we can dry out laundry out there as well! There are five huge maple trees shading the back lawn (And sheltering our house from the worst of the summer sun.

And not to brag or anything, but THIS is our new walk to work…

More house-proud pictures once we’ve actually had a chance to settle in and Teazle has finished the unpacking and investigatin’.

see you on the flipside [#move2014]

10 Saturday May 2014

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Chez Clutterbuck-Cook 2.0

We’ve reached the “where did all these damn books come from?!” stage of packing/moving. It’s not like we didn’t know we had approximately one thousand books (not to mention serials and DVDs…) in our 535-square-foot apartment. But books shelved actually take up comparatively little space, all neatly lined up along the wall. Books in boxes, on the other hand, seem to pile up alarmingly quickly. We’ve boxed about 50 records center-sized plastic bins so far, and once Hanna unpacks a couple dozen this afternoon in our new home, I’ll be trekking them back across town to fill them with more.

The movers come tomorrow to deal with the furniture (bookcases … and essentials, like, you know, the bed).

Teazle continues spreading her sunny, exploratory nature everywhere. Last night while I was boxing up books from the bedroom closet (yes, we kept books in the bedroom closet), I kept turning around to find Teazle sitting jauntily in the box, whether empty, partially, or almost entirely full. Once it was filled, she climbed on top of it.

And then, when that job was done, there were the cleared shelves to scramble up upon and inspect.

Geraldine, meanwhile, has taken to huddling in our vicinity where she can keep an eye on the proceedings and emit misery vibes.

Today is the day we move them from old to new home, letting them get used to the space for a day before we have to contend with the chaos of movers. Hanna’s going to set herself up as unpacker-and-cat-wrangler-in-chief this afternoon while I drive all of the oddly-shaped boxes and bins back and forth from Allston to Jamaica Plain (and the empty bins back for more packing). I anticipate one night of separate sleeping as Hanna co-sleeps with the kitties in our new home and I crash at our soon-to-be-old home to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the movers at 9am tomorrow.

Hah!

Coffee. It will be our friend.

Photos to come.

brattleboro, vermont [photo post]

28 Monday Apr 2014

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We’re moving, y’all. May 11th! It all happened very fast and, as fate of course would have it, on the weekend that Hanna and I were supposed to be enjoying a communications-free getaway in Brattleboro, Vermont — our first couples’ trip since the honeymoon.

Then Hanna’s sprained ankle developed plantar fascitis (which, let us both tell you, is agonizing as pain goes), our realtor called with a potential rental, which we went to see and apply for practically on our way out of town, subsequently had to negotiate the lease long-distance for, and in the midst of it all I developed a three-day migraine! So … ya know. Our weekend was slightly different than previously planned.

But still lovely in parts! (The not feeling like a railroad spike was being driven through my right eyeball parts or the we-have-to-be-grown-up-and-negotiate parts.)

This, for example, was a nice part. Monday afternoon in Brattleboro was just warm enough to sit out in the sun and read.

We were staying for two nights at the Forty Putney Road Bed & Breakfast, in the former carriage house. We’d booked the Hummingbird Room, but got the classier Maple Room at the same price instead because the housekeeper cleaned the wrong space in a rush to get to her family’s Easter dinner!

We didn’t complain (and left her a tip).

The property was built in 1929 as the home of the superintendent of the nearby Brattleboro Retreat, a (still!) highly regarded residential mental health facility nearby. The superintendent must have been a decent fellow because we didn’t encounter any vengeful ghosts during our stay!

Spring is finally (finally!) bursting into bloom, in both Boston and Brattleboro. I caught this crocus in the lawn of the B&B.

We mostly dined on food purchased from our beloved Brattleboro Co-op, in their newly-built location adjacent to their old (and nostalgically missed!) home on the Whetstone Brook.

They provided us with delicious gluten-free cheesecake!

And an amazing Greek potato salad.

If there’s a sensible explanation behind this thank you note on the co-op wall, we don’t want to hear it!

We also attempted to eat at the new Whetstone Station on Sunday night, though my migraine got the better of me and we had to stage an emergency evacuation. Their sweet potato tots with choose-your-own dipping sauces are heavenly.

The innkeeper, Rhonda, provided us with a delicious breakfast every morning in the main house, as well as fresh-brewed coffee from Hanna’s favorite Mocha Joe’s and tea from a local supplier.

On Monday, I even had the time to write a few notes! …

… and read the first half of Megan Marshall’s Pulitzer-prize-winning biography of local feminist (and fellow migraine sufferer) Margaret Fuller.

We hope to make our Patroit’s Day weekend stay in Brattleboro an annual tradition, and look forward to returning to Forty Putney Road in 2015! Perhaps our dear friends whose Christmas money helped fund our stay will join us at some future date.

And at the end of the weekend, we ended up successfully negotiating a twelve-month lease with our new landlord and driving back into Boston to sign for our future apartment in Hyde Square, Jamaica Plain. We take possession of the space on May 1st and next week’s post will have photos of both the apartment-to-be and, I suspect, the apartment-that-was, full of packing boxes and questing cats.

on regional holidays

21 Monday Apr 2014

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I was going to have a book review post for y’all today, seeing as we’re on a three-day holiday and I had reading plans … but then I spent yesterday afternoon and evening incoherent from migraine pain, so. Here are my thoughts on the holiday weekend instead.

Having moved to New England from the Midwest, one of the most fascinating things about Boston culture from my perspective is how seriously we take our federal and local holidays. Columbus Day weekend, for example, is a three-day weekend in Boston — not just meaning no mail delivery but that schools and places of work are closed. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, President’s Day, Veteran’s Day — hardly a month goes by that we don’t have a Monday or floating holiday on which a good proportion of the professional classes, at least, expect to get a paid day off from work.

I’m betting most of you, if you haven’t ever lived in Massachusetts or Maine (and, according to Wikipedia, Wisconsin?!), won’t have heard of Patriots’ Day or know what it commemorates. Patriots’ Day is today, which is why Hanna and I are in Vermont enjoying a lovely post-breakfast snooze in our B&B, and why thousands of runners are currently pounding the pavement between Hopkinton and Copley Square for the Boston Marathon. (My advice? Ignore all the endless “Boston strong” coverage and watch Saint Ralph instead.)

Patriots’ Day commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord, early skirmishes in what would become known as the American Revolution — aka that time we Americans eventually kicked some British ass. If you’re like me, you haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about that aspect of American political history, but in Boston — home of the Freedom Trail (America’s first history trail) — it’s huge.

I don’t really have anything profound to say about all of this except it’s funny what parts of American national history are important or not-so-important based on regional experience.

I mean, would it really have been that horrible if we’d remained part of the commonwealth, like Canada did, instead of fighting a long, miserable, and bloody revolution?

There’s I’ve said it.

Happy holiday, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing today.

michigan monday: stuff & things

24 Monday Mar 2014

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I’m not gonna even pretend Hanna and I are fully back in Boston headspace, although we arrived back home mid-afternoon on Saturday. It’s been a pretty intense ten days (two weeks if you count from the day my grandmother had her initial stroke).
So instead of any substantive post, here are a few Michigan-related things for you. Starting with the Detroit symphony orchestra’s flash mob performance of “Ode to Joy” at a suburban IKEA. (via)
You may have heard NPR’s coverage of the event on March 9th.
On a related note, the city of Detroit is offering free houses to writers looking for a place to live and be creative. I admit that part of me wishes that librarianship & archival science were slightly more mobile professions, since it would be really exciting to be part of a rejuvenation project like that — and the urban core of Detroit has some amazing, historic spaces.
Within driving distance of Brewed Awakenings, this trip’s coffee shop find.
And half a day’s drive from Gaia Cafe in Grand Rapids, the visual-sensory display in my head whenever anyone uses the word “granola” as a cultural descriptor.
Plus, soon enough Hanna and I would actually be married-married there. Instead of Massachusetts-and-federally-married there.
In fact, Hanna and I heard the news about Judge Friedman’s ruling overturning the Michigan ban on marriage equality while we were driving through New York (oh, the endless endless miles of I-90) on Friday. Huzzah!
I read the DeBoer v. Snyder decision yesterday afternoon. Some of my livetweets:

Judge Friedman also turned up the snark to full volume by pointing out, in a quote too long to excerpt on Twitter, that:

Taking the state defendants’ position to its logical conclusion, the empirical evidence at hand should require that only rich, educated, suburban-dwelling, married Asians may marry, to the exclusion of all other heterosexual couples. Obviously the state has not adopted this policy and with good reason. The absurdity of such a requirement is self-evident. Optimal academic outcomes for children cannot logically dictate which groups may marry.

As of this writing, Michigan marriage licenses for same-sex couples are on hold until further review, but it’s worth noting that Friedman himself didn’t issue the stay — I think it’s pretty clear he’s had enough of these anti-gay shenanigans.

And finally, for anyone who missed it on Twitter and Facebook, my father wrote a lovely obituary for my grandmother (his mom) which appeared in the local paper this past Wednesday.

unfinished thoughts about putting down roots

21 Friday Feb 2014

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The Fens from Charlesgate, Boston
(December 2007)

As we lay the groundwork for locating and moving to a new apartment, and possibly a new neighborhood of Boston, later this year, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means for Hanna and I to be putting down roots in this city. We both moved here for graduate school and have stayed for the professional opportunities Boston’s cultural institutions have offered. Moving within the city — out of the apartment Hanna originally selected with her grad school roommate — feels like choosing or re-choosing the city as a place we want to live in, make a life in.

I find myself inhabiting the city with new eyes and new investment. I’m no longer thinking about it as a space I move through as an observer. Rather, I’ve become a participant. Although I’m still learning what it means to me to participate in the life of this city that has become our chosen home.

A short list of things I’ve (we’ve) been doing that feel like part of that learning process:

  • Walking, biking, taking public transit. Hanna and I are both committed to using the city “at ground level” if we’re going to be living in it. We map the neighborhoods by foot and measure our progress in coffee shops passed. While I don’t think owning a car precludes one from belonging to the city (clearly many drivers are Bostonians!) not having a car means we’re more reliant on public infrastructure within the core urban area, and that space and time get measured differently. By necessity, we need to shop for groceries, pick up our library books, visit our doctor’s office, meet up with friends, get our hair cut, all within a three-mile radius and ideally between point A (home) and point B (work). This is a fundamentally different way of experiencing the geography of one’s life than when life requires daily driving — I lived the first twenty-seven years of my life in a car-dependent town, so I’ve experienced this shift first-hand.
  • Supporting local non-profit organizations. It probably says something fundamental about our socioeconomic backgrounds that as soon as Hanna and I reached a sustainable level of income and could start thinking about charitable donations, the first thing we did was become members of our two local NPR/PBS networks (WGBH and WBUR). It was reflexive: this is what adults do. Yes, National Public Radio is a nationwide network, but each station is local too. We wake up to the local weather forecast and enjoy the broadcasts of America’s Test Kitchen (filmed in studios next door to one of our favorite coffee shops!). We currently give (tiny!) monthly gifts to WGBH, WBUR, and Classical New England, all of which broadcast out of the Boston metropolitan area. We’ve also chosen to provide ongoing support to Black Cat Rescue, our favorite no-kill foster cat program here in Massachusetts and the Greater Boston Food Bank. I’m also starting to get involved on a volunteer basis with our community health center, Fenway Health, which provides nationally-renowned health services to LGBT folks, women, at-risk teenagers, and the elderly of the Fenway neighborhood and greater Boston.
  • Relying on local non-profit organizations. There’s a lot of high-level philanthropy around Boston, including at the institution where I work, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the notion of “charitable giving” and the distance it implies between those who selflessly give to those in need. That kind of giving (hopefully with no strings attached) obviously has its place, but I also like the immediacy and intimacy of providing support for those whose services we need now, or in the future: our health center, our public library, the social safety net. I’ve been doing a lot of research lately into housing programs here in Boston, both grass-roots advocacy organizations and government-funded programming. In doing so, I’ve have the opportunity to reflect on the importance of using as well as passively supporting social services of various kinds. Even though Hanna and I are (at least temporarily) middle class professionals, it seems important to me to know how my city cares for the marginalized; how we could be cared for if we became marginalized.
  • Learning local history. When in doubt, turn to books! I’ve been reading, reading, reading up on the history of the Boston area and learning how its past has shaped our present and will continue to shape our future in the decades to come. 
What are the ways that you’ve gotten to know the place(s) where you (have) live(d)? What components need to be in place for you to feel like you belong to and are invested in a place, a community?

blizzard of ’14: black river books [photo post]

10 Friday Jan 2014

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Yesterday, in an attempt to re-boot the vacation we’re inadvertently having, Hanna and I took a small road-trip to South Haven, Michigan, to visit a bookshop Hanna found via the Internets.

Black River Books was well-worth the thirty-minute drive down I-196. Our outbound trip was punctuated by a stop at Uncommon Grounds, where we refueled with two French Giana lattes. 
We paused at the cafe’s community bulletin board to wistfully gaze at the “for rent” advertisement featuring a three-bedroom house on offer for less than what we pay per month for our one-bedroom in Allston.
South Haven was quiet, still digging out from the beginning of the week.
Sidewalks clearly weren’t a top priority.
Hanna and I were the only two customers at the bookstore, which made for leisurely browsing. The shop was clearly set up as a sit-and-read business, complete with coffee urns and comfy chairs.
Like all used bookshops worth their salt, Black River Books had stacks of overflow (neatly labeled!) on the floor and steps-stools for easy book access.
They also had two shop dogs, who snuffled us out upon entry and then curled up in their appointed locations by the shop counter, waiting for snack time.
I have to say that only in West Michigan are you likely to find a religion section subdivided by Christian theologian (and “Jesus” shelves alongside [Philip] Yancey and Matthew Fox).
Though to their credit they also had extensive LGBT and Sexuality sections, as well as separately-shelved erotica, clearly labelled and tucked away above the paperback mysteries.
In the Sexuality section, I was delighted to find a 1972, hardcover and full-color edition of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex for which a review post will simply have to be forthcoming. Its loving sketchy drawings of the heterosexual couple enjoying intimacies of various configurations are as delightful as Dr. Comfort’s opinions about things such as bisexuality are antiquated.
In any event, if you ever find yourself stuck in West Michigan for ten days longer than you anticipated in the middle of a snow storm, Black River Books is definitely a place we would recommend for a field trip!

blizzard of ’14, day six [an update, with photos]

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

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Today, our flights were re-scheduled for the fifth time in a week — pushing us out to ten additional days in Michigan! It’s wicked wild (as a Bostonian might say) how far the ripple-effect of cancelled flights and serial bad weather can reach.

So it’s time for more self-soothing photography!

Playing with reflections on the dining room windows a couple of nights ago brought out some interesting visuals.

The family Christmas tree, mirrored in the glass against the falling snow.

A neighbor’s out-door lights as seen across the church parking lot, drifted with snow.

The “brisk” temperatures of the Polar Votex brought in some gorgeous frost on my parents’ windowpanes. This was yesterday’s patterning on our bedroom window.

This morning, a strange globe of light appeared in the sky for a short portion of the morning. We took the opportunity to go out on a few needed errands: emergency prescription refills at Model Drug pharmacy, emergency coffee at lemonjello’s, emergency trip to Herrick District Library for books.

Shoveling has become a bit daunting.

We’ve been so grateful for lemonjello’s caffeination and gluten-free muffins!

The fierce wind and cold temperatures have conspired to create some fascinating snow sculptures along the eves of many buildings.

When I got off the phone with United this afternoon, first I spent a few moments pounding my fists on the floor in frustration. Then Hanna and I decided an emergency trip to the library was in order.

Because where do two snowbound librarians find peace, except in the stacks?

I like the way the children’s room decorates …

… and, perhaps more importantly, attends to the nutritional needs of its young readers!

On our walk home, Hanna snapped a few wintery pictures as the snow, once again, began to fall.

This has been another update from the Clutterbuck-Cook family adventure of January 2014! We hope all of you continue to be well.