I am pasting a recent Facebook post below to share some news.
So – an announcement. Jean-Paul and I (and Tobias) are moving this weekend. We are heading to quieter pastures, to a place, in fact, where there actually ARE pastures. We are moving from our Cambridge home, which we’ve shared for 11 years, to a more rural part of Massachusetts, the Berkshires. After more than 20 years in the Boston area for me and almost a lifetime for Jean-Paul, we felt it was time to move on. Cambridge is getting more crowded and busier and less friendly in some ways, with a new office park being built at the end of our street, new zoning allowing construction on every corner, and a beloved bucolic bike path now closed to be “modernized,” a process that has already included cutting down nine cherry trees. They are paving paradise and putting up a figurative (and in some cases literal) parking lot.
We are moving out of the small house that once belonged to Jean-Paul’s mother, where he lived during part of his childhood, and we are heading to an area not far from where I spent much of my childhood in upstate New York — swinging from one side of the pendulum towards the other. This is our chance to be surrounded by fields and mountains and nature and wildlife instead of by cars and buses and electric scooters and construction cranes and bicyclists almost knocking you over and speeding through red lights and drivers leaning on their horns when you won’t make a right turn on red into oncoming traffic and the houses being renovated for wealthy buyers who park their hulking brand new Defenders in your parking spot and allow construction crews to park trucks on an elderly neighbor’s yard.
Not that I hold any grudges.
There are many things I will miss about Boston and Cambridge, from the friends I will miss (though I will see them on visits) to the “old guard” neighbors whom we’ve chatted with on the sidewalk or shoveled with when it snowed, to the pubs and the music and the neighborhood places “where everybody knows your name.” There is a “we are all in this together” spirit here, a chip-on-the-shoulder-when-it-comes-to-New-York smaller but bustling city ambiance. I will miss the gruff, unfriendly friendliness, the plaques that tell you you’re standing where something historic happened during the American Revolution, the shamrocks in every window on St. Patrick’s Day, and the squirrels and the birds and the bunnies in our yard, whom I stopped feeding when the snow finally melted this year so they would learn to find their meals somewhere else, which they have.
It is time for a new adventure — not the final one, we imagine, but a new one for now. Life goes on, through all of its ups and downs and all of its losses and all of its new beginnings. This is one of the new beginnings for us.
Good-bye, Cambridge. “For every storm, a rainbow. For every tear, a smile. For every care, a promise. And a blessing in each trial.”