The sun shines, and I really want to spend lazy time close to water. Perfect: there are tons of ponds, lakes and reservoirs in and around Boston. Last Saturday we’ve started a pond tour of Boston…
Chandler Pond. We ride for about 20 minutes before reaching this tiny pond. We really are in the city, but at the bottom of this street, it looks more like countryside.
I envy the people living in these houses: countryside, but very close to Boston, that’s chic. People are nice, they are gardening and say ‘hi’ when we pass in front of their houses.
NB. I have a particular fondness for the English word pond (étang, in French). When I was an intern in a publishing house, the first book I worked on was about ponds. It was a translation from a English book, so we were used to call it ‘pond’. The subject stroke me: who can be interested by building a pond in his garden?! Actually, I learned that one of my closest friend loved ponds, and even built one in his parents’ garden in South of France… Now I learn to like them too!
Chestnut Hill Reservoir. We keep going, randomly, and we arrive at the end of the Green line of the ‘T’, at Boston College station (I’ve learned since the difference between college and university, it’s a matter of size, right?).
Buildings are huge, even austere. Streets are enormous too, and empty. People get a tan on the grass. It’s quiet. The ambiance is rather strange.
We reach the reservoir, a kind of pond but with unnatural edges. People run around, a painter is busy painting. We ride slowly, it’s easy, flat. We pass in front of a Waterwork with a very particular architectural style; the reservoir used to feed Boston with water.
Boston College is very bucolic, but I’m glad that Manu’s campus is in the city. Nature is great, but only for weekend. And when the weather is so beautiful, we tend to forget that it can be awful, and I don’t want to go out in this case.
Walden Pond. Totally enthusiastic after this day, we decide to go and picnic in Walden Pond, a famous pond close to Boston.
Thoreau, the American writer, spent two years in a small cabin in the edges of Walden Pond. He wrote there a non-fiction book about life far from the “city life” and all its implications. Well, I haven’t read his book, so check on Wikipedia, I don’t want to paraphrase it…
NB : Lonely Planet 60 trips in New England presents a literary tour of Massachusetts. There are so much American writers who lived there: Edith Wharton, Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe (I love here Uncle Tom’s cabin – read in French when I was young) and Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, the title in French is Dr March’s 4 daughters, I loved reading it over and over!), Jack Kerouac, Hawthorne (Scarlet letter really stroke me too).
But let’s be honest, it’s not a literary curiosity that brought us there on this sunny Sunday. We wanted to spend time as we had in Maine, ‘pond in a forest” kind. But only 40 minutes away from Boston (just to say, I only like the ‘pond in a forest’ style when it’s sunny – it looks too spooky though).
I’d like to have a canoe…
We spend the perfect bucolic afternoon: picnic on a nice spot close to the pond, good and fresh salads, divines strawberries, friends who play to ‘skips’ stones in the water, napping and singing some ditties to learn French or English.
Daily Star. A bunch of tourists passed close to us, and one of them said ‘Beautiful !’. Manu went away so the guy could take a picture; but actually, he wanted Manu on the pic… ‘Beautiful’.
Nature, yes, but not too much. When we get to the woods, I remembered friends told us to be careful of black flies, specially active during May. Am I too naive? Nobody until them told us it was true…
Best day of my life, ever, I saw a chipmunk:
And that’s it! Champagne !! We moved to a new flat… and we can really say that this time we are living in Boston for real…
