Day 77 (lucky sevens!)

My two best men on the harbour ferry today.  They are both explaining something to the other at the same time, using their hands to talk.  26 years of understanding there.  Boston skyline in the background.

It is interesting to see your city through the eyes of a traveller, someone who has not been here before.  Boston is a really pretty city, and this was a really beautiful day, like mid-summer in Manchester, according to Stephen.  When she heard I was going to live in Boston, I remember my mother's friend telling me that it was the most beautiful city she had ever been to, and that I was going to love it so much!

We arrived at the end of February, in bleak winter, and everything was covered in filthy snow ( I had naively believed that snow was white), all the trees looked dead and blackened, with no hope of ever sprouting green again, there was no colour anywhere that I could see, except American flags flying all over the place in case you forgot where you were for a moment.  And they flew in the most unexpected places, like out on a breakwater in the bay of the first town we lived in!  And it was the coldest cold I had ever felt!  I thought, "This is the ugliest place I have ever seen!"  But of course I have grown to love it, as we must grow to love our chosen homes, even when they are very far from our heart's home.

Tim would love to live in the city when we are older and the boys have gone off to college and left home, but I don't think I could bear it, not to have a garden, and trees, and woods to roam, and a beach with waves in which to swim in summer.  A city sometimes seems to me to just be lots of people living together like rats, and there are crowded streets everywhere you look, and I am not very fond of crowds at the best of times.

So here is my self-portrait for today, another photograph because the day has been too full for drawing.  So this is Stephen and I reflected in the window of a building on our long and varied walk through Boston today. And there is some sort of ghost above our heads.