october on minden st.

01 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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Minden St. from Heath St. across the Hennigan school yard. October 2015.

October is one of my favorite months, generally speaking, in terms of both weather and rhythm of life. We’re passed the dog days of summer and over the panic spiral that is the first month of school. I’m mostly spared the academic stress these days, due to no longer being in school, but Boston being one gargantuan college town it still seeps into the cracks on the pavement affecting everyone. We’re all, more or less, on the academic timetable in these parts.

This year’s October careered by at inadvisable speed. Hanna and I were both busy at work with that busy that seems to move various deadlines closer yet never quite manages to shorten the list of things to do. I got some things done, had to postpone others.

Hanna and I both at that point in our working lives where we’re figuring out how to “lean out” perhaps more than we lean in — carving out time to enjoy each other and our life together while still taking pride in our work and bringing home enough income to put food on the table, keep a roof over our heads, and have enough “pin money” left over to enjoy our morning coffee and maybe take a trip every so often. Continue reading →

an equidistant past [looking toward a ninth year]

29 Saturday Aug 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in life writing

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boston

Selfie taken at Simmons College library (Sept 2007)

I realized on my evening commute yesterday that not only was this weekend the eighth anniversary of my arrival in Boston, but that this is the fourth anniversary I’ve celebrated since completing my graduate program at Simmons in May 2011. Which means I’ve now spent more time as a professional librarian in Boston than I did as a graduate student.

Thank the gods.

There were two things that almost broke me when I moved to Boston. One was the grief (still real, though muted by time) at uprooting myself from the social and physical ecology of my growing-up years and transplanting myself in a wholly new environment. It slayed me, emotionally, and was physically debilitating for most of my first year in Boston. I had panic attacks and couldn’t keep food down in the mornings, I struggled to sleep restfully without waking up in a cold sweat from inchoate nightmares.

Hanna likes to remind me on a regular basis how, during our early acquaintance, she thought I found her boring because I would fall asleep in her rooms on a regular basis when we hung out — it was one of the few places that read as “home” to my body and as a result I’d crash halfway through movie night (she still hasn’t forgiven me for snoring through the middle of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). I know this sounds like some sort of trumped-up “soul mate” fan fiction trope but I swear that’s how it happened. I spent the next year getting up about two hours early for work so I could commute into the city with her, unable to face the task of getting from A to B without her beside me.

She found me confusing a lot. Until we figured out that kissing helping bring many things into greater clarity. But that didn’t happen until June 2009. We lived together for a year first.

Yes, our relationship did actually unfold like a story posted in response to some “last ones to figure out they’re already married” prompt.

Selfie at the MHS with my feminist librarian’s magic wand (July 2014)

The other thing that almost brought my graduate student career to a screeching halt before it began was how much I hated being a student again. Living in a dorm was expedient, moving as I did from the Midwest without any local intelligence and few contacts. Living in the dorm, even as a graduate student, felt like a bajillion steps backward into an earlier stage of my youth instead of forward into adulthood. In short, it sucked. It sucked so much. I chaffed against being a student again even as I rejoiced at some of the new intellectual horizons opening for me.

I’m grateful for the doors graduate school opened — the opportunity to do my oral history work with the Oregon Extension, the launch of my career at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the connection I made through graduate school with Hanna (and thus the home we’ve established together), the fact that people now send me free books and occasionally pay me to review them — but yesterday when I realized I had spent more time in Boston not in graduate school than I spent as a student, it felt amazingly freeing.

I am over and done with that part of my life. I made good use of it while it lasted, and I’m glad to have moved on. I am glad to be an older adult than I was then, the same person but with an undeniably different sensibility. When I was in my late teens, early twenties, even later twenties, I used to scoff at the people who described having been a different person than they were as younger individuals (some of these people were older than I am now — thirty-four — and some of them appreciably younger). I felt a great deal of continuity with my past selves for many years, and resisted age-based narratives of change. But these days I would acknowledge that I am embodied in the world in a very different way today than I was five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. And I think part of my job in this coming year is to figure out what that shift in embodiment, in how I move through the world within which I am now rooted, really means and how it will shape my living in this next phase of life.

This has been your annual update. Enjoy your own autumn traditions, avoid Storrow Drive, and enjoy cider donuts from whomever your local supplier may be.

Selfie on the SW Corridor Path (August 2015)

an eclectic list of delightful things [summer 2015]

27 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in linkspam

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boston, cat blogging, family, links list, photos

It’s a busy summer around these parts, and while I have a lot of blog-worthy thoughts in my head I haven’t felt much like blogging. Go figure. In the meantime, I thought you might like a rather eclectic list of things which I am enjoying this summer.

1. Today’s defeat of the bid for Boston to host the 2024 Olympic games.

2. Gardening at our community garden. We have two babby pumpkins growing bigger by the day!

3. My #365feministselfie project (now on day 120).

4. Welcome to Night Vale.

5. A great deal of the Hawaii 5-0 #fanfic on AO3.

6. The Plaid Jacket latte at Voltage Cafe.

7. This list of needed words.

8. The fact that Seanan McGuire is coming out with a second Indexing novel (!!!).

9. The Farmer’s Lunch sandwich at City Feed & Supply.

10. Reading books and reviewing them.

11. Magenta. As a color one can wear.

12. @HorribleSanity‘s Twitter feed.

13. Looking forward to the release of Carol in December.

14. Having borrowing privileges at the Harvard libraries again.

15. English muffins.

16. Walking Boston.

17. Being married in all fifty states.

18. Being protected from workplace discrimination by existing law.

19. Our cats being ridiculous.

20. @EarlGrayTea’s epic Inception AU.

21. My #RelentlesslyGay umbrella.

maine, london, jamaica plain [our june 2015]

20 Saturday Jun 2015

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boston, maine, photos

Max and Sadie watching the hummingbird feeder.

June has sped by with a lot of activity for our household: We successfully launched the Boston Summer Seminar, Hanna traveled to London for a meeting at the Wellcome Library (and to play tourist in London!), I spent a weekend in Maine with my in-laws, and of course we’ve been busy gardening.

Garden plot, April 2015.

In April we were assigned a garden plot at the nearby Roundhill St./Day St. Community Garden — one of several Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN) community gardens in the neighborhood. Above is what our plot looked like upon assignment.

Garden plot, June 2015.

This past week, I snapped a picture of the green things growing on what used to be barren dirt: nasturtiums, pumpkins, English peas, fennel, leeks, radishes, basil, sage, and wildflowers.

The Luggage, carrying home our first CSA share of the season.

Today, when we picked up our CSA share from Stillman’s Farm — the first of the 2015 season! — and bought three heirloom tomato plants for $10.00 to grow on the back porch.

Matt, our neighbor, helping install our Little Free Library.

On my trip to Maine, while Hanna was in London, I picked up a Little Free Library built by my father-in-law Kevin to our specifications (Hanna particularly requested the TARDIS blue). Our neighbor, Matt, offered to help install it with his electric drill. Thank you, Matt!

Boston Summer Seminar, evening session, June 2015.

Hanna and I were both involved in designing and running the Boston Summer Seminar, which ended up overlapping with Hanna’s travel abroad. We had three research teams of faculty and undergraduates from Hope College, Kenyon College, and College of Wooster, converge on Boston to do amazing work on food and national identity, women and education, and nineteenth century ballet.

Wife tattoos, May 2015.

This month marks the sixth anniversary of our coupledom. I snapped this photograph of our wedding tattoos while we were waiting at Fresh Hair salon a few weeks ago waiting for an appointment. I’m starting to hanker for another tattoo. My most recent ink was done in honor of my grandmother’s passing in 2013 and the two-year itch has definitely arrived. Not just because I wrote a piece of Haven fanfic involving wedding tattoos.

Feet selfies at City Feed and Supply, Jamaica Plain.

Feet selfies (Hanna and Anna) at City Feed and Supply, Jamaica Plain, 4 June 2015.

My #365feministselfie project continues, and in addition to posting them daily on Facebook and Twitter, I am gathering the images in an album on the feminist librarian Facebook page.

Geraldine, June 2015.

Teazle, June 2015.

What’s up for the rest of this summer? My work at the Massachusetts Historical Society will pick up in July and August as our 2015-2016 cohort of research fellows begins flooding in. Hanna, meanwhile, is taking a six week summer class at Harvard on Celtic literature. We typically don’t plan vacation time during the summer months for that reason — that’s a treat we save for Septembers, around the time of our wedding anniversary. We haven’t made plans for that time yet, this year, but we’ll probably spend a long weekend in Maine and maybe take another long weekend in Vermont or on Cape Cod, just for ourselves (finances willing).

Other than that, it’s gardening, books, and maybe I’ll make some time to finish that mosaic table-top project I started. And set up the sewing machine my mother-in-law handed off to me. And finishing my Haven fanfic. And all those other side projects that happen in the magic hours between midnight and midnight…

a year later, on minden st.

03 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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boston, family

A year ago, yesterday, Hanna and I picked up the keys to our new apartment. A year ago today, we started packing in preparation for this:

And this:

There’s been a lot of stress for our household over the past year, but I can honestly say that our new home and new neighborhood has, rarely, been the source of it. Our landlord is responsible and responsive — something we particularly appreciate in the midst of crisis! — and the space suits all of us, cats included, miles better than the apartment we’d outgrown in Allston. Given Boston’s real estate market, we know we are genuinely privileged to be able to afford a comfortable apartment within walking distance to work in a neighborhood that’s a good fit for our lives.

As we head into year two of life in Jamaica Plain, we’re digging into our plot at the neighborhood community garden, showing off our favorite neighborhood haunts to out-of-town friends, and working out ways to be (hopefully!) good neighbors. The tensions of gentrification hang over JP as they do all of Boston. In multiple ways, Hanna and I fit the profile of those to whom gentrifying interests cater: We’re white professional queers with a taste for artisan coffee shops, shopping “local,” cycling, and compost. At the same time, we still technically qualify for affordable housing opportunities according to the Boston Redevelopment Authority table. Which simply is what it is, something the majority of thirty-somethings seem to be coming to grips with in one way or another. Privilege is, as always, intersectional and complicated. We’re try to live, and put roots down, in ways that honor both where and who we are.

I’m looking forward to finding out what year two has in store.

On a related note, this will be my eighth summer in Boston. I don’t even know.

spring on minden st.

11 Saturday Apr 2015

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Spring is creeping up on us here in Boston. This weekend I noticed green shoots from the bulbs in the backyard poking up from beneath last autumn’s leaf mulch. Here’s a brief round-up of what the Clutterbuck-Cooks are up to.

I bought us a wagon! Our trust granny grocery cart, which was in attendance at our wedding, had lost all tread on its wheels last season and the local bicycle shop staff shook their heads sadly when asked whether replacement wheels could be obtained. So we’ve upgraded to a Radio Flyer all-terrain cargo wagon! Teazle helped me put it together last night.

We’re taking a quilting class at JP Knit & Stitch (thanks Mom and Dad for the Christmas gift!). We had our second of three weeks’ classes today and came home with the quilt “sandwiches” of top, batting, and backing, all pinned together with basting pins in preparation for next week’s quilting. Hanna’s is at the top, mine is below.

Our teacher, Kate Herron, is a fellow Michigander and history nerd who consults with local historical societies on integrating craft events into their public programming — for example, a knitbombing workshop with kids!

And finally, today we attended the new gardener’s orientation at the Day St / Roundhill St. Community Garden just around the corner! We’ve secured a good-size plot to tend together and will be ordering seeds this week for veggies, herbs, and some bee-friendly plants. On the list: larkspur, catnip, chamomile, cosmos, dill, rose basil, English peas, heirloom tomatoes, leeks, and fennel. I’m sure pictures will be forthcoming once we’ve had a bit of a cleanup of our plot and begun the work of planting!

Meanwhile, we’re looking forward to Michigan faces over the next few weeks as friends fly out for visits and conferencing.

Enjoy the spring!

commuting thoughts

20 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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boston, outdoors

When Hanna and I started shopping around for new neighborhoods, over a year ago, one of our first and highest priorities was that we remain within a 3-mile radius of the Fenway/Kenmore neighborhood where both of us work.

I’ve rarely been as glad as I have been during the past month that we’ve been able (and willing) to deliberately build and maintain a walkable life.

Modified transit map via Transit Maps.

While normally Hanna and I walk to work in the mornings, I typically use some form of public transit — subway, Hubway, or bus — to get home in the evenings. This week, though, I’ve been walking. Between the reduced service, uncertain travel times, and stressed-out fellow commuters, I’ve strapped the YakTrax onto my boots and struggled my way down uncertainly-cleared sidewalks to work and back, roughly a 5-6 mile round trip.

While I have my frustrations with crosswalks with ice dams, fellow pedestrians who won’t take turns down one-way snow canyons, and areas where the sidewalk simply disappears altogether, I’ve mostly been able to count on getting places in the time it takes me to walk there. I know I can leave the house and arrive at work 45 minutes later. And, crosswalks and drifts aside, I can mostly maintain my distance from other human beings — no jockeying for space in airless trolley cars — and enjoy some quiet thinking time along the string of Emerald Necklace parks of the Southwest Corridor path.

Some proponents of walkable urban landscapes maintain that parks are dead space, uninteresting to the eye and inconvenient to the commuter — thus barriers to two-legged traffic. It’s struck me, walking home during these frigid winter evenings, that perhaps urban designers are by-and-large not quiet people, or did not grow up in areas of the country where you learn to pay attention to the changing landscape of wild places.

The snow, this winter, is a wild place.

Local journalist E.J. Graff wrote a column in the New York Times today that has been widely shared on Twitter by New Englanders with whom it resonates: “Boston’s Winter From Hell.” She observes:

In just three weeks, between Jan. 27 and Feb. 15, we have had four epic blizzards — seven feet of precipitation over three weeks — which crushed roofs, burst gutters, destroyed roads and sidewalks, closed schools and businesses, shut down highways, crippled public transit and trapped people in their homes. The infamous Blizzard of 1978 brought around 27 inches of snow and shut down the region for a week. In less than a month, we’ve seen more than three times as much snow. The temperature has hovered between 5 and 25 degrees, so the snow and ice haven’t melted.

…For workers paid by the hour, the impossibility of getting to work means disaster, especially since high housing prices have pushed poor people out of the city to outlying communities like Brockton, Lawrence and beyond. When I commiserated with a checkout clerk at my grocery store yesterday — he’s been missing work when the buses break down or just don’t come — thinly veiled panic showed in his eyes. “People will be losing their houses,” he said.

As tenuous as our ability to afford living in Boston is, Hanna and I nevertheless remain in the city hanging on by our fingertips — and the socioeconomic privilege of being able to do so has rarely been as clear to me as it has been since January 26th, when the first of the major winter storms barreled down upon us.

the long winter continues [updates from minden st.]

15 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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boston, fanfic, outdoors

The Great Snow of 2015 continues, breaking records of all kinds. It’s hard to believe a month ago, January 15th, we’d had almost no snow so far during the season.

Hanna had her gallbladder surgery on Friday, thankfully during a couple of days’ break in the intense snow. While hospitals are no fun as a general rule — can I say as the patient’s spouse that it sucks 150% not being allowed to sit in the operating room throughout? I would hands-down rather be there than stuck outside in the lobby — the staff were warm and professional, the surgery went smoothly, and the extremely unhelpful gallbladder has been removed to already-evident improvement.

So whew for having that done.

We’re particularly excited about the fact that it looks like Hanna’s gluten sensitivity may have been a byproduct of her chronic gallbladder malfunction, and that now her digestive system isn’t struggling we will be able to bake with wheat flour again! I celebrated yesterday by making homemade bread, which made the kitchen smell absolutely divine.

We’ve stayed in today, what with the snow and bitter cold wind whipping about. It’s been so cold and so snowy for so long that while those of us in more comfortable circumstances enjoy a record number of snow days, many people are reeling from the impact of skyrocketing energy costs, hit-and-miss childcare, and cuts to their wages as stores close early or open late — or the underfunded transit system fails to provide them with a way to get to their jobs.

If you can, consider donating to the Greater Boston Food Bank, a well-respected local organization dedicated to feeding those who face food insecurity.

You can see how the wind is making snow canyons up against our fence. The compost bin is in that drift…somewhere. Hopefully cooking away underneath all the insulation making us good dirt for the spring.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time while Hanna sleeps her way to recovery watching Haven on Netflix — and this morning I wrote a little ficlet that Hanna says gave her cavities. So I guess you’re warned. The title, “A Windless Peace,” comes from a poem by Elinor Wylie that I sang on youth chorale — it would have been two decades ago now! Somewhere my parents have a cassette recording. Here’s a children’s choir from Ann Arbor, Michigan singing it:

I also posted parts two and three of the Jack Robinson/Phryne Fisher porn I started last July and had cold feet about. “Placetne” is now finished, and I’ve invented the tag #queerhetsex because I’ve decided that’s what I write.

This has been an update from Minden St. Now I’m off to watch Duke, Nathan, and Audrey flirt shamelessly over dead bodies and steel myself for tomorrow morning’s shoveling.

the great snow of 2015 in jamaica plain [photo post]

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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On our sixth snow day of the winter, Hanna and I beat the cabin fever by taking a walk out along the Southwest Corridor Path to Ula Cafe for breakfast, and then up to Forest Hills and back via the grocery store for a few essentials.

I took the camera along.

Since my Monday post, Ula has gained a significant amount of snow!

Continue reading →

snow on minden st. [thoughts on urban winter]

08 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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boston, outdoors

When I moved to Boston from western Michigan in 2007, I was baffled and amused by the seeming hysteria that overcame city residents at the advent of snow season. Schools and businesses closed, people seemingly forgot how to drive, “snow emergencies” were declared … for real? I thought. Sheesh, these city dwellers. Jumping at shadows. Or, you know, snowflakes.

The thing I didn’t really grasp, at that point, and which I’m only really starting to understand eight years later, is that urban density of the kind that Boston and a few other major metropolitan areas in the U.S. feature, fundamentally alter the experience of heavy snowfall.

Walkable urban density is one of the city’s great features — it’s resource-efficient and convenient for those of us who live within it; Continue reading →