I wander out of Harvard Yard, skirting the broad Science Center Plaza or passing through the wrought-iron gates to cross Mass Ave. I turn right, circling past the First Parish Church cemetery with its leaning headstones, and the worn stone marker that always gives me pause: Boston, 8 miles. It harkens back to the days when Boston to Cambridge was a journey, when hazards lurked along the roads, when traveling from one fledgling city to the other took much more effort than hopping on an often-too-slow Red Line train.
I walk up Garden Street, keeping an eye out for leafing trees and nodding daffodils. I reach Appian Way and ramble through the sunken garden, site of many lunch breaks when I worked at the Ed School, and still home to dozens of flowering plants: sprouting ferns, almost-spent crocus, tiny blue scilla. I cross Radcliffe Yard, glance at the concrete bulk of the A.R.T., head down Hilliard Street to see what’s blooming in the flowerbeds there this week.
These streets and corners and gardens were mine before they were ours. I discovered them a decade ago, when I took a job at Harvard and began exploring, finding my own routes through the Square. I worked at Harvard for five years, holding four different jobs in three administrative areas, doing a lot of writing and even more emailing, spending many mornings at Mem Church and untold hours at Darwin’s.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you also know: I fell in love with a man who was then slinging coffee and sandwiches and chai (my favorite) at Darwin’s, and we walked miles and miles through Cambridge together. We eventually expanded our reach: parts of Somerville, Back Bay, Brighton and East Boston all became ours, at one point or another. But these streets, lined with brick and tall lilacs and elegant houses a century old – more than any others, these streets were ours.
I stayed away from Harvard Square for weeks after we broke up. I couldn’t bear to step onto the streets where we’d spent so much time together, to meet our former ghosts around every turn, to face the memories from the time when we were happy. I missed my beloved haunts, like the gardens above and (of course) my florist, but I couldn’t make myself go back for a while. Even now, sometimes I round a corner or spot a familiar landmark – most of them not otherwise famous, but intimately known to us in our ramblings – and it’s like getting kicked in the chest.
But I couldn’t stay away forever. This patch of ground, home to an ancient university and a neighborhood I adore, has been integral to my life in New England: a place where I built a home for myself, brick by brick, through loss and strain, joy and challenges, and the daily rhythms of the community I made here.
I found my way back to the Square last fall, walking the streets as the leaves turned golden and crimson, popping in to see Stephen and pick up a bouquet of dahlias or sunflowers, slipping into Sunday-morning services at Mem Church. Now, months later, the Square is part of my rhythm again; some Sundays I browse a bookstore or two, or pop into Roust for a chai, or head to Flour for a steaming cup of spicy tomato soup. On most Sunday mornings, you can find me hurrying across the Yard, hoping to make it to Mem Church in time for the opening hymn.
I’d braced myself for a little pain as spring came on: as I wrote recently, spring carries an aching melancholy, a chill-edged bittersweetness that mingles with mild sunshine and new leaves and the fragile beauty of budding flowers. That holds true no matter what I might be dealing with in my life, but in the last few years – with all their losses and light – it has felt especially tender.
I expected that this year would be no different, and I expected, too, to think of him as I watched our favorite places come back to life, alone. But it has felt important to reclaim these streets and gardens for myself. Despite the memories that now taste bittersweet, this place holds other layers of past and present that still resonate with me. The nodding daffodils along the river; the stand of tulips along a white fence near Mt. Auburn Street; the triangular bed of crocuses that are always the first to bloom – these places are still my places, and I wanted to come back to them, to revel in their beauty as I do every spring.
Some weeks – I won’t lie – it still hurts. I see a bright robin or a pink hyacinth or spot a budding lilac, and I remember how it used to be, how we shared these delights for years. I walk along the streets where we strolled and biked and noticed, and I remember how it felt to be together when spring is in the world. There’s no gainsaying loss: it is real and it doesn’t disappear all at once, and its sorrow is not always negated by joy.
Alongside the sorrow, though, is an equally vital truth: the familiar flash of joy, the delight that blooms in my chest in response to a mauve stand of hellebore or the fronds of neon-yellow forsythia. Spring is in the world, and I’m back in my beloved Harvard Square. I am reclaiming these streets, these hidden corners, these gardens: the trees and bulbs, the parks and flowerbeds, that have fed my soul for so many years.
I am adding another layer of spring memories to this palimpsest: not erasing the sadness, but learning to live with it, learning not to let it dominate. I am reclaiming witch hazel and early azaleas and (soon) tulips and lilacs, alongside the stark beauty of winter and early spring. I am walking these streets again, just because I want to. And it feels good. It feels grounding, right, nourishing. It feels, in short, like finding my way back home.
cakes, tea and dreams 