Day 22: Deja Vu

Hills of Jamaica Plain and Anderson Park, Brookline, MA, 6:45am-7:45am
fantastical clouds, frigid, sleet, hail, some sun


It's a quintessential Boston experience: you're traveling somewhere you've never been before when suddenly a familiar intersection or landmark appears and you think, "So, that's where that is!" New linkage made on that internal Boston map...

That's how I felt when I finally reached Anderson Park this morning, picked off my bike map for its impressive altitude of 250 ft. Make that Lars Anderson Park, which houses both a large public skating rink (!!) and the Anderson Auto Museum, where I had played a gig a couple years ago. Deja vu! (At the time of the gig I thought we were a long way from home; it seemed to take forever to get to, and we drove through lots of woods to get there. Must have taken the scenic that time!)

This morning's journey to Anderson Park was only a couple miles, but all uphill, and took me through the campuses of Dexter and Alexandria Schools, the Boston British School, and the Showa Institute in search of a sunrise vista.

I had no idea that there were posh prep/boarding schools a couple miles from my house. To be honest I didn't even know those hills were there!

Had a mediocre view of a spectacular sunrise -- all kinds of fantastic clouds, some billowing and dramatically etched, others long and languid, still others dense and impenetrable. But I ran out of time to find a good spot to watch from, and had to settle for a "limited viewing" position: perched on a fence post, peering through a couple trees.

Right after the sunrise, I had time to wander the grounds and find a much money-er spot a bit further down, with a clear view. (One should never settle.)

That's when it started to snow.

Did I mention that my hands were frozen and my nose about to fall off?

OK, so what looked like snow quickly turned out to be sleet and tiny hail. It was ridiculously cold, but thankfully, short-lived.

I then hung out with some leetle leetle birdies -- tiny and greyish, with short yellow beaks, and white and black edged tails. These cheeps are SO HIGH they sound like electronically produced blips to me.


My approximation takes me higher than one is technically supposed to be able to play on the violin. I can't believe there exists a situation where I wish I had an even higher string on the (usually plenty high) violin!


The little birds are so plentiful I feel that they must be fairly common (thus less special). However, when they fly it is wondrous. They are so fast, flitting and gliding and suddenly changing direction. I see two flying in tandem, one a few inches above the other, and it is a miracle of synchronized motion.
I sketch an idea at home to mimic this.