Lisa (happy birthday, love!) and I have been doing a lot of walking around Boston the last couple of days. We both wanted to get out of the house and away from the TV after the last few days.
Saturday started with a walk from our home in the North End to Tealuxe on Newbury Street. We walked through Quincy Market, past Faneuil Hall, into and through Boston Common and the Public Garden, and past some very expensive shops on Newbury (including what Lisa says is an outpost of the best coffee store in Milan). All this before breakfast–maybe a little much, but it felt good to get out and do some walking.
Our normal breakfast at the Tealuxe in Harvard Square was a personal pot of tea and a scone for each of us. The Newbury St. Tealuxe actually serves food (albeit just sandwiches), so I varied it with an egg, cheese and bacon sandwich that had been pressed in a grill. We shared a pot of Golden Tippy Assam tea. I ended the meal with a cinnamon scone. Afterwards we walked to the Boston Public Library, just around the corner in Copley Square. It all seemed a bit over the top, maybe, but at the same time it was incredibly important–we were celebrating being together and being alive.
Saturday we also started seeing monarch butterflies. One dogged our steps returning to our apartment along Richmond Street. Sunday, we walked to school so I could pick up some readings for my classes, and we saw another one as we crossed the Longfellow Bridge. It fluttered along beside the bridge, careered across the traffic, and over the other side of the bridge. When we saw it, it was winging lazily across the Charles.
There were more of them. Practically every five minutes–on Massachusetts Ave, in the shadow of Calder’s Great Sail… I couldn’t decide, and it seemed very important at the time: had they been there all along and were just leaving? Or had they just arrived from another place, just when we most needed to see them?