News from My Changing Landscape

Brief pictorial update and I explain why audio recordings were paused

Here we are in New England on the cusp of May, and everything seems to be coming back to life with song and color. My family lives right by the Charles River where nature’s first green is gold.

Picture from after a run the other day.

The azaleas are erupting out of their dark pink buds.

Bright pinks are starting to brighten our front yard.

And yes, there are flowers everywhere. I am notoriously allergic to the cherry blossoms in Washington, DC where I went to college, but the ones in Boston, where I was born and raised, have never given me any problems.

Taken beneath my neighbor’s tree.

With the blossoms and increasing daylight we have diggers and dump trucks. Construction season is fully underway, and it has been for some time now. It started in mid-winter like this:

This used to be a very cute 2-bedroom house, with a master bedroom that had huge windows and a porch that opened up to a view of nature. Now it looks like they are laying the foundation for a much bigger house.

This is the way it is in much of Boston. Small, affordable homes are being bought and torn town to make room for much larger places that will cost millions of dollars. There are long term ramifications to the community, of course, but in the short term this means that I am dealing with lots of noise during the day. The digging for this foundation was even more disruptive for my neighbor whose house was shaking so much from the excavation. But now that the foundation is being laid things seem calmer, and I think it may be safe to resume recording Shakespeare’s sonnets and other poems soon. We will see.

For now I just need to get through this week. I have my last MFA class tomorrow night and some non-Substack work I must complete in a couple of days.

And aside from audio recordings I hope to publish a complete contradiction of my Taylor Swift essay soon—complete with Whitney Houston, The Proclaimers, and strange stories about brown bears. Stay tuned.

Until then, thank you so much for reading.

Pax et bonum!