A Taste of Massachusetts

Self-promotion is a fact of life for authors. Unless you're Stephen King, nobody's going to plan and underwrite a book tour for you. If you want a book tour, you plan it, you book the speaking engagements, negotiate the terms; you purchase and haul the books, pay for the hotels. I happen to enjoy traveling to speak, but it's not just a merry jaunt. A lot more goes into it than just showing up signing books, and accruing fame.

Because I believe that life should, if at all possible, include beauty and fun at every turn, I've learned to budget in time to visit friends and family, see some beautiful places, and that has been richly rewarding. It makes me want to do these speaking tours. It's the carrot I reach for. 

My longtime friend Alan Poole, for whom I did over 200 drawings when he was Editor of The Birds of North America: Life Histories for the 21st Century, has been inviting me to come see him in So. Dartmouth, Massachusetts for years. I finally took him up on it when I was in Massachusetts in December. I wanted to see where he lives, what it was about that place that clearly has a hold on him for good. It didn't take long to figure it out.

Here's his new house. It's small but mighty beautiful, lit clear through with windows, furnished simply and tastefully--a house to die for. Walking into it, I felt as I sometimes do when looking at a Pottery Barn or Restoration Hardware catalogue. I know I, with my endless crap and clutter and art gear, could never live this tastefully or simply, but oh I'd love to. 

 And he's got these amazing garden beds. This is early December in Massachusetts, and Alan's still harvesting all kinds of delicious salad greens and the most exquisitely sweet, brittle carrots I have ever tasted. Who knew that South Dartmouth has a microclimate like North Carolina? The Gulf Stream comes up and warms this magical corner of Massachusetts' coast. And there are truck gardens all over the place, taking advantage of this secret boon. Amazing.

The giant pinnate leaf is cardoon, eaten like fennel. There was spinach and mache and mesclun, sprinkled with fresh herbs...garden salads in December!

Heaven can wait if I can have these carrots, right out of the Massachusetts soil. 

Alan, cooking local bay scallops for us in his kitchen. 

His neighbor and culinary muse, Eva Sommaripa, well known among Boston area restrauteurs for her business, Eva's Garden, supplying them with incredible microgreens and herbs. Eva's a dear friend of Alan's and purveyor of such amazing and intensely delicious local food. I was humbled and star-struck to meet her. And I loved her outfit, perfectly suited to the New England climate. Layers!

Alan took my friend Erin and me to the beach just down the road from his home. 

He said, "This is my loon lookout." We climbed the dune and as we popped over the top, a common loon yodeled mournfully. If you click, you'll see him!

I couldn't even believe the sky.

Crab tracks.

Alan bent to pick up a handful of slipper shells. 

"Crepidula fornicata! "

I thought fast. Hmm. Crepidula would imply a crackling sound, crepitation, and -ula means small. Fornicata, well, hmm. I chuckled and gave up. Tell me!

"So a bunch of these guys pile on each other, and the one on the bottom changes its sex in response!" 

Well alrighty then! I was sasified.

That beach kept revealing its treasures, like the micro-leopard prints on a lady crab's shell. The closer we looked, the more wonderful it got.

And then standing up, the expanse and the junipers, the water on either side of the spit we were on...it was all too beautiful, even under a heavy December sky.

I love those winter days when you can't even tell what time it is. It could be morning, late afternoon...it's as if the sun itself forgets where it is.

This glimpse of a person living fully and well, in perfect harmony with the local climate, foodstuffs, people and landscape, was deeply moving and inspiring to me. In the end, it's love of place that speaks to me most of all. People who truly love where they live are the people I want to hang  with. That passion runs deep, and it's passion, after all, that I respond to. Well, that and beauty. For what else is there?

Wild Turkeys Take Cambridge!

I love love love going to Cambridge and Boston. It feels a bit like going home. I’m too deeply rooted in southeast Ohio to feel completely at home anywhere else. But it’s as close as a city is going to get. Cambridge has a part of my heart, because there’s so much beauty packed into its narrow streets; because it is stuffed with highly evolved, sentient people who appreciate its architecture and plant to enhance. Remarkable, really, to see the roses and daylilies spilling out onto the streets in an overabundance of beauty; to stumble on a moonlight garden, all white roses, hostas and hydrangeas, or a secret grove of river birches with a stone path winding through them. To see people bending over backward to save this fair city’s immense copper beeches, thankfully far outnumbering the ninnies who would cut them down. Oh, there are ninnies, and it doesn’t take many to ruin a place, but Cambridge somehow holds most of them at bay. As I watch the giant sentinel trees being cut down all along my county road, I think some of them have come to live in Ohio. Grumble.

Being an observer of changes both small and immense, I like pointing out the things that are different now than they were when I last lived in Cambridge in 1981.

photo by Kris Hodgkins Macomber

For one thing, there are a LOT more places to sit now. It’s a much kinder, homier place. Harvard Yard blossoms with multicolored chairs each May, and people actually use them, because they can move them around and form fluid groups for conversation and study. I find myself, with delight, arranging to meet friends "in the chairs in front of Weld," whereas before I'd have had to sit on the dorm steps. There's something so lovely about walking through the Yard and seeing healthy, thriving turf and groups of people visiting, studying, texting, snoozing and even reading analog books in these colorful Luxembourg chairs. Just beautiful. It's like a happening, every day.

Photo by Kris Hodgkins Macomber

Photo by Kris Hodgkins Macomber

Radcliffe Quad, where I lived, has white wooden Adirondack chairs sprinkled around in shady spots! And Adams House courtyard now has teak benches, chairs and a rope hammock, where I gladly melted of a lazy Sunday morning and gazed up at a flawless Massachusetts summer sky.

So humane, so welcoming, so homey. The man behind it? Michael R. Van Valkenburgh, Graduate School of Design professor. Read the wonderful story here.  Harvard, I salute you for opening your arms to students, visitors, and local folk alike. Probably the cheapest yet most profound change in use that could have been effected in this private space turned public.

And speaking of changes...

It was probably four years ago on a brink-of-spring night when I looked up into a tree next to the Harvard U. Science Center and saw what looked like a bag of laundry in a pin oak, backlit by the glowing urban sky. Is that a…turkey??? And it was a wild turkey, roosting alone in a concrete courtyard. I would see her walking alone on the sidewalks on that trip. I knew there were turkeys in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, but here in midtown Cambridge, she looked very much out of place.

Hodge, John and I saw the Harvard Turkey, or one of them, while enjoying a Saturday evening lime rickey and a burger at Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, a Harvard institution that neither takes credit cards nor has a bathroom, and doesn’t need either to be slammed all the time. Burgers are generous and delicious, onion rings and sweet potato fries are light, tasty and authentic, and I could drink their raspberry lime rickeys all day long. And it was while filling our empty ten-mile hike bellies that we spotted the Harvard Turkey. She came stepping across Mass Ave, allowing a sedan to come to a full stop for her before she finished her crossing. She walked like a queen, like she knew she was worth stopping for. And who would want to argue with a 16-pound turkey? A hard bump she would make in your grille.

Our Mr. Bartley's waitress was chagrined when we told her the Harvard Turkey had just graced us with a sighting. This gal was born here; she lives and works here and she’s never seen the famous Harvard turkey. Huh. I see turkeys every time I come to Cambridge. Maybe it’s because I’ve been looking for them ever since that wintry night when I saw the duffel bag sleeping in a pin oak.

Still, I wonder how they manage. I wonder what they eat. The answer is probably everything, from sweet potato fries to crickets to crabapples to flower buds to acorns. Ah, acorns—the staff of a turkey’s life. It seems like a meager existence, but apparently is not. I marvel that a creature of such majesty and presence, not to mention mass, can make its way in such an artificial environment. The formidable brain of a wild turkey, applied to the conundrum of living in gardens, cemeteries, sidewalks and streets, would be more than adequate to the challenge.

I have live, hot off my iPhone video evidence that this odd experiment in colonizing the city is a success. Not only are wild turkeys making their way; they’re reproducing. Leaving Hodge’s Den of Sleep at 7 AM, I walked barely two blocks and lucked into the ultimate Cambridge wild turkey encounter.

 I’m pretty proud of this bit of hand-held wildlife cinematography. Seeing the hen walking slowly down a bricked garden path, I guessed from her watchful demeanor and rapidly turning head that she might have poults trailing behind.  I led them a bit, following the trajectory of the hen, and hunkered down to make this video about where I figured the chicks would be crossing the sidewalk. Bingo!

Enjoy the June parade!