It’s been well over a year since I’ve made a solo-overnight trip to Boston, and with my friendship with Kira in the balance, it was time. After looking at the weather, I moved this quick journey up by a day, so I’d have most of Thursday in town, while the sun was shining and the weather was warm. That turned out to be proper planning, as the city as alight in blossoms and beauty until I departed the next day.
All the little squares before the brownstones were filled with flowering shrubs and plants. These tiny gardens, some protected by wrought iron gates and fences (which lend an even more inviting atmosphere with their dare-to-defy-it air of the forbidden) are often bathed in dappled sunlight, giving a feeling of shaded relief from a hot day.
After parking the car, I walked through the bloom-festooned Southwest Corridor Park and stopped by the condo, where I peered out the window and looked down on this Chinese dogwood. One of the few times I’ve been afforded such a vantage point, it was a lovely welcome back to the city I love, and in which I still manage to find new enchantments, even if it’s in the simple turn of a new view-point.
My main purpose for this trip was to see Kira, and see what could be done to improve or mend our slightly-frayed friendship. She’d gone through some difficult times in the fall of 2020, and basically stopped corresponding without explanation or reason. It’s her usual method of operation, but in 2020 I was having troubles of my own – who wasn’t? – and I relied on simple texting and phone calls with friends to keep me going. She wasn’t there for that at a time when I really needed it, and I know she was going through stuff of her own, which is why it would have been more timely and important to connect then. She tends to push friends away at those times, and normally I let that happen – this time was different. We’d gone several months without getting in touch, and my sadness began to be shaded with anger and annoyance. Not one to be rash or quick to end a decades-old friendship, however, I wanted to re-connect and see what we could do to make things right again.
Usually, I’d have invited Kira to spend the weekend with me at the condo, but this was a different world, and that just wasn’t possible. All I could do was meet up with her for a lunch near her workplace, so I made my way to Beacon Hill.
Taking my time, I peered into the garden plots along the way, pausing to take a picture, or sniff an iris, or just to let a memory make itself known, and remembered.
Boston is filled with such ghosts for me, especially now. They are mostly happy conjurings, accompanied by wistful half-smiles, and sometimes little chuckles. The older I get, the more they tend to move me, and the sadder ones feel more poignant with the passing of time, and the arrival at places closer to wisdom and acceptance. On this day, I recalled the ghosts of Kira and myself – and the much-younger and less-formed shapes of the people we would one day become. I protected those memories, and set up a fortress around the past, much like these little iron gates that forbid access to the flowers and plants that stood behind them. I just couldn’t tell if I was putting up gates to delineate the past from the present, or whether this was an ending or a temporary protection. It was a beautiful and bittersweet befuddlement, and Boston would send me on another journey that answered far fewer questions than it raised…
