I am slowly coming home. Every time my toes curl into the hot sand at the beach, my fingers pull at a weed in the garden or pluck the clothes pegs from the clean laundry snapping on the line I feel another little root take hold. We have a whole summer to find our way back, a soft landing a friend called it, a place that already feels safe and beautiful and right to us all. We are very lucky.
Still, September is only a month away and already, the sun rises later, the moon looks more golden, dahlias unfurling faster and faster, hydrangeas fading. It is time to think beyond the Cape.
On the day I found a house to rent in Cambridge, I took the T to Harvard Square. I carefully chose which denomination Charlie Card I wanted–a whopping 5$–and fed a limp $10 bill into the the machine. In London the transit pass is called an Oyster Card, I can’t imagine why, and in New York, Metro Card. Here, I pictured the storybook Charlie who loved the Boston T so much, he rode it endlessly, grabbing a sandwich from his wife’s outstretched hand as he came through the station. I smiled to myself as I planned to tell Emma the story.
A small queue had developed behind me as I stood. I felt suddenly foreign, surprised by the sound of American voices around me, inept at sorting the money, even now, a month into our return. I was almost certain that if I opened my mouth another language entirely would spill out. Change spewed from the machine but instead of a bill, five large coins tumbled into the cup. I scooped them up. They were heavy in my hand, gold, edges ridged and for a moment I was sure I saw Queen Elizabeth’s raised profile on one side. No, Susan B. Anthony, a more different woman there couldn’t be. For a moment I was undone by their weight, their shape and the way they sat in my hand as pound coins used to: solid, familiar, weighty and worth something. I was overcome by how far from home I was, even as I stood in the middle of Arlington Street Station in Boston. I couldn’t know that in less than an hour I would be standing in front of a new home. The man behind me shuffled forward and huffed, aheming in a grumpy but polite way until I jumped and sputtering apologies, skittered sideways out of the crowd.
I waited for the T, nervously tracing my route on the map, a tourist in my own country. I grew up in Manhattan and remember taking the subway (the C train, in case you wonder) from the time I was a toddler. My mother’s hand hung from the leather strap above me as my sister and I sat on the bumpy rattan seats–rattan, as if a tropics-obsessed city planner had dropped an Indonesian passenger train into 81st Street. Mom could tell you how to get anywhere on the New York Subway. She not only knew every letter and number train, she knew what service it belonged to. “Take the IRT to the IND, switch to the Shuttle and pick up the BMT,” she would ratttle off. That kind of music sticks with you. To this day, if there is a subway-themed clue in the the Times puzzle, I’m your girl. But, standing on the platform watching the tall, skinny, wide-windowed Boston T pull in, my throat clutched and I hugged my book to my chest like a school girl. ‘The Green Line to Park Street, the Red Line toward Alewife’ I chanted under my breath as I climbed up into the car.
When I got off at Harvard Square I had that panicky moment when you don’t know which exit to use. You’re certain that if you get out of the wrong one you’ll have fallen through the rabbit hole and with absolutely no way to get back. When I worked in New York I took the subway to Rockefeller Center every morning. I swear, at least twice a week I got turned around in the crowd and ended up prowling the bowels of Radio City instead of the Time Life building. Once, when I worked in midtown, I got swept up in the press and was carried along and into an elevator in the Pan Am building. I worked several blocks over from the Pan Am building. At any rate and in this city, Cambridge, I did get out on the wrong side of Harvard Square. After a minute of spinning in place, I found Brattle Street and started off to meet the realtor. ‘Brattle to Mt. Auburn to Gibson.’ More chanting. I walked along the red brick sidewalks in a mild state of anxiety. After all, we needed to find somewhere to live in the next ten days so that we’d be set before Will and James went to college and Emma made ready for her new school.
As I headed off I was struck by how quickly I’d left the hustling urbanity of Harvard Square behind. Within five minutes birdsong had replaced the sound of cars and the clack of heels on the street. The scent of neat box hedges guarding faculty houses was sharp and clean. The parade of plaques marking academic buildings and deaneries marched at my shoulder, their dates, if not as old as the blue plaques of London, old enough to bring to mind frock coats and buckle shoes. I drew a settling breath. Yes, this was a city I could call home. This little village by a river, narrow elegant shells rowing silently through the water, Russian sage and Queen Anne’s Lace waving along white fences, crooked shingled houses and proud Victorian manses nestled together behind rose bushes; this place felt right.
Suddenly, on my right, there was a break in the parade: a deep green and red chalet, trim crisply painted, windows sparkling in the early sun. What, a chalet here? Why yes, The Cambridge Skating Club, wide back lawn flooded in winter, as silvery and still as any hidden pond in a wood. And in summer, today in fact, filled with children and teens playing tennis. Here for over a hundred years New Englanders were doing what they do best: run around outside in any weather. That felt right, too.
I turned left onto Gibson. It was shady and cool, only ten houses deep, the footpath rumpled by roots of trees older than the street itself. I looked for number 40, the last house but one on the lane. It was a clapboard cottage, pale grayish green and tiny. There was a small porch and a rutted, grassy driveway no more than 20 feet long. A handwritten note on the door said “Please don’t let the cat out, she’s a part of the family.” I stepped back across the street to look at the house from a remove. My fingers went to my throat, tamping down the hope that welled already, before I’d even been inside. Oh, I thought, this could work.
As it turns out, the house is possibly even smaller from the inside. Barely three bedrooms, a living room and space for a dining table, a long galley kitchen and a garden that is surprising in its depth. Already the butterfly bushes are drooping under the rising heat, the three scraggly rose bushes have surrendered to pale orange hips, they should have been deadheaded weeks ago. I pull my hand before it reaches to snap a hip off. There is a yellow finch balanced precariously on the side fence and a small stand of bright pink flox are startling in the shadows beside a lilac bush. A bench sits at the bottom of the garden, partially hidden by plantings, both designed and wild. It calls to me and I drift towards it for a moment before I remember myself.
So, this is home now, or at least for now. We will search for a place to buy, a “forever place” as Emma calls it but for the next year we will tumble over each other in the house on Gibson Street; the boys too big for the bed they will have to share, the slightly rickety four burner stove too small for the elaborate dinners I love to cook, bookshelves to shallow for the literally thousands of volumes I’ve collected over the years. But, that’s fine because everything about this place is pretty damn right and I am incredibly grateful.
“We live in London,” I have said for years. My lips begin to form those words again in answer to the question “Where do you winter?” Instead I say, “We live in Cambridge.”
“Oh, how lovely,” the woman who asked me replied.
“Yes,” I said. “We are very lucky.”
All Stories Are True... 