For some reason I wasn’t expecting to see so many crucifixes at the Smith College Museum of Art.

My fault for presuming the vibe, especially when the main exhibit on view was European Painted Wood Sculpture from 1300-1700. Naturally there was going to be a lot of Christian art in there. I didn’t go there for that exhibit though. I went because it’d been announced that as of July 1, the museum is now free for all visitors.

A free art museum? In walking distance of my apartment?! Hell yes!

I quickly discovered the catch though—or at least a potential reason for it being free. The museum at the time of my visit was heavily under renovation. My admission mostly involved the greeter informing me of all the areas of the museum that were closed, including all of Level 3.

With one floor totally closed, and the atrium and the Asian Art wing also closed, the museum felt pretty small, but also eerily intimate. There were so few visitors. I could take my time exploring, stopping at whatever I wanted to see. That was kind of a nice change from the big and bustling museums like the ones in Boston, where you’re always at risk of being in someone’s way or photobombing.

There was a lot of Christian art and some ancient art. More fitting for the vibe of Noho though was the protest prints and photographs exhibit. I also enjoyed the video gallery, where I stood alone in a dark room watching a black-and-white video of ocean waves.

But my favorite exhibit of all was…the bathrooms! Art in toilets, who knew! On the lower level there are two all-gender artist-designed restrooms. I checked out both of them, even though I didn’t really need to pee. No one was around so I got to wander without feeling too weird. That discovery alone was worth the (free!) visit.

Currently, I don’t have a bike. But since moving to Northampton, I do find myself having increased stamina for outdoor adventuring. For example, a jaunt down the Northampton bike path near my apartment turned into a four-hour-long journey (with breaks) over the Connecticut River via the connecting Norwottuck (Branch) Rail Trail and into the farmlands of Hadley.

The Norwottuck Rail Trail is… very long. 11 miles from Northampton to Belchertown. Most of the travelers are on bikes, and the trail is relatively flat and shaded. One of the more scenic stops is on the Norwottuck Rail Trail Bridge overlooking the Connecticut River.

Zel and I went as far as Hadley, veering left of the trail to head towards the farmland and the long walking trail along the river. While mostly unshaded, walking through vast flat land with mountains in the background was surreal and worth applying the extra sunblock.

My favorite part though was walking the more tree-covered path along the river. I’ve since learned that this area is called the Alexandra Dawson Conservation Area and it has nearly 2 miles of trails. The views here were incredible. More incredible was the fact that hardly anyone was around on such a nice Sunday afternoon. We did wave hi to some river boaters though!

I didn’t expect to see a bald eagle nest and a swooping bald eagle parent within three weeks of moving to Northampton. But that’s what happened on my first visit to the Meadows.

Since moving, I’ve learned that “The Meadows of Northampton” can mean pretty much anywhere along the Connecticut River that’s just above “The Oxbow” — another term I’ve since come to know well. But my first meadow experience was in the conservation area that’s north or (or maybe even part of?) the Mass Audubon Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary.

The entrance to the conservation area—or at least one of them—is behind a residential street, Pynchon Meadow Road. I’m not sure where one would park if they drove there, but it’s fairly easy to find on-foot. Then again, I say this as someone who followed a guide there. I’m actually not sure I would’ve ever found the place myself. Which is maybe why no one seems to ever be here, despite it being a peaceful, lovely place with lots of birds.

While there’s some swampy shady bits, it seems less like a meadow to me and more like an open grassy field with views of the mountains that blew my mind when I first saw them (and they still kind of do, to be honest).

Alongside a mowed path there are some trees. On this day, there was an active bald eagle nest! It was hard to get too close, but even still, when the eagle swooped low, I might’ve screamed a little.

The walking path makes a big loop, turning into some dirt roads at some parts. It extends all the way down to The Oxbow, which looks like a fairly basic river and boat launch from the ground. I didn’t full appreciate what a cool and unusual formation The Oxbow really is until later, when I saw it from above, atop Mount Holyoke.

Last Friday I went to go see Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein presented by ArtsEmerson. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was in the mood for some Victorian horror, and I do love me some Mary Shelley. The show’s description promised “more than 500 handmade puppets” plus “animation and live music.”

Not only were there over 500 puppets (most but not all of them shadow puppets), and live music, and animation… there was also singing, acting, costuming, a gender-bending Doctor Frankenstein (!!), and robotic tambourinists.

And they all came together create—of all things—a movie.

In short, it was one of the most impressive and entertaining things I’ve ever seen happen on a stage. I still can’t fully wrap my head around it.

“How would I even begin to describe this to people?” one audience member asked Manual Cinema in their Q&A after the 70-minute performance/movie. The audience had lots of questions, and most of them boiled down to the same one I had: How?

“It’s like going to see a movie, but the movie is also being made right in front of you,” was one answer to the question.

I admit, it took me a good fifteen minutes to figure out the full wizardry of what was happening on stage. I was too busy watching the four musicians (plus some robots) and the large screen above them, which projected a silhouette animation telling the story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein after the sudden death of her baby, Clara.

Then suddenly I noticed that behind the musicians, near the back of the stage, there were people in full Victorian costumes acting against a white backdrop, providing some of the silhouettes on the screen above.

Oh cool, I thought, some of these scenes are happening live! But, um, where are these 500 puppets at?

Then, to my total bafflement, I noticed the costumed actors rushing back and forth between the shadow screen and what appeared to be some kind of lightbox down low.

Wait… I thought, are they… creating these animations right now? LIVE? With shadow puppets? HOLY SHIT THEY ARE!!

MANUAL CINEMA. DUH. GOT IT.

Sometimes in the silhouette scenes, it was hard to tell the difference between puppets and humans. Judging by the one (surprisingly intense) puppetry class I took in college*, shadow puppetry is a deceptively difficult artform. To see this level of detail and mastery was mind-bending.

Just when I thought my mind could be more blown, the puppeteers/actors moved to the other side of the stage to tell the Frankenstein portion of the story, and Mary Shelley became a drag Doctor Frankenstein acting in a silent-movie-era film (I know, this is very hard to visualize and explain). These were some of my favorite scenes.

Frankenstein’s creature was played by both a 3D puppet (made of ripped purses and other found textiles) and an actor/puppeteer in costume (who ALSO played Doctor Frankenstein’s wife… like, come on!). Everyone in the incredibly small cast, including the musicians, played multiple parts.

The live “movie score” included spotlighted musicians taking turns playing the waterphone during some of the creepier scenes. Even the way they played the instrument varied, with both bow and mallet. Everything about the performance/movie was intentionally multi-faceted like this.

For the movie’s “credits,” the cast took a traditional bow before running around the stage with name cards, holding them up over each performer, puppeteer, and musician’s head.

Maybe most incredible to me—during the Q&A portion, they told us that the manual movie we just watched was in no way recorded! The next night, they would do it all over again, and so the movie is never 100% the same. I just love the concept of a taking a visual art like film and making it ephemeral.

*Note: I will never forget my Katrina Van Tassel shadow puppet doing an accidental backbend during my one-and-only performance of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in front of my puppetry professor and classmates. Yes, it’s possible to fail puppetry.

Despite spending most of my life on the NH seacoast and seeing a fair share of local theater, I’d somehow never been to The Players’ Ring Theatre in Portsmouth NH until this past weekend.

When my sister invited me to a play there, I couldn’t even picture where the theater was. Turns out that’s because it’s pretty inconspicuous, located in a flat brick building on the edge of Prescott Park, not exactly downtown.

My sister wasn’t feeling well the night of the play, so I went with my dad to The Players’ Ring to see C33: The Queer Story of Oscar Wilde’s Undoing, a new historical play about Oscar Wilde’s arrest and imprisonment for “gross indecency” (i.e, being and acting gay) in the mid-1890s.

The Players’ Ring is a fairly casual, seat-yourself black box theater. It’s also maybe the smallest theater I’ve ever been to. That’s great for an intimate performance and not so great if (like me) you’re sometimes uncomfortable with being right beside the action.

Thankfully my dad had been to the Ring before and knew we should sit back a row. Given the stage size and setup, there wasn’t really a bad seat in the place. It ended up being a pretty full house.

Despite the play’s serious topic and tone, it was hard not to laugh watching the people in the first row sometimes flinch at the sudden emotional outbursts or movement from the actors (the play was one with lots of shouting and banging of fancy canes and cups).

I thought I recognized a couple of the actors from other local theater productions, but maybe not. In addition to The Players’ Ring, Portsmouth is home to THE REP (Seacoast Repertory Theatre, but THE REP is more fun to say) plus outdoor theater via the Prescott Park Arts Festival every summer.

After the play, many of the actors hung out in the little lobby, still in their Victorian attire, to mingle with the audience and thank them for coming.

I left with the impression that what differentiates The Players’ Ring is its intimate minimal-frills setting, its support for local artists (C33 was written by a local playwright), and a dedication to community theatah.

Photo Credit: The Players’ Ring Theatre website.

I picked a poor time to go to the Harvard Museum of Natural History—Sunday morning, which I learned is when the museum is free to all Massachusetts residents. Not only that, there also seemed to be some sort of dinosaur storytime happening in the paleontology wing, bringing in throngs of excited children and their less-excited (i.e. anxious and exhausted) parents.

Thankfully the exhibit I’d come to see was the quietest spot in the museum. In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss is a special exhibit open through November. 

Pitched as a “modern artistic interpretation of Henry David Thoreau’s preserved plants,” it includes some of Thoreau’s original pressed flowers and plant specimens from Walden Pond and the surrounding Concord area. The full collection is stored at the Harvard University Herbaria. Maybe not the most thrilling subject for MA families who’d rather see dinosaur bones. But as a Thoreauvian, it was something I didn’t want to miss. 

To my surprise, Thoreau’s original physical plant pressings were tucked in glass cases against the walls, not the featured items at all. The focal pieces of the exhibit were the “artistic interpretations” mentioned in the description.

This included a video projection wall by Robin Vuchnich, made up of digitized plant pressings, moving and rotating with quotes and facts, including how nearly 30% of Thoreau’s documented species are now extinct, and 36% are in low population. This loss is despite little to no human interference in the protected places where Thoreau first gathered them. In other words, climate change is behind their demise.

There was also a large wallpaper display of Thoreau’s flowers using cyanotypes for data visualization. Plants against dark blue backgrounds are extinct. Medium blue, they’re endangered. Plants on white backgrounds are still alive, some even thriving. The wall, which one might imagine would lean more blue, was a solid mix, showcasing not just the loss of plant life, but the overall change caused by global warming.

My overall takeaway from the exhibit was the importance of historical preservation in studying the affects climate change. Which plants thrive and which die in this rapidly changing climate, and what can that tell us about the future of the planet? Without the record-keeping of Thoreau and other naturalists, answering these questions would be far more difficult.

Once I’d had my fill of flowers, I figured I’d explore the rest of the museum a bit. It’d been years since I’d last visited.

Skirting around the dinosaur storytime chaos, I walked through another new special exhibit all about sharks, displaying toothy jaws and watery blue light projections on the carpet.

I said a brief hello to the glass flowers and peeked into the rocks and minerals room. The Great Mammal Hall hasn’t changed at all, except some of the taxidermy animals are looking extra ragged. Surely Harvard has the budget for some fresh faux snouts? 

“Kids (and Their Parents) Say the Darndest Things” Harvard Natural History Museum Edition: 

“I want to take the big egg home!” “The big egg has to stay here in the museum, sweetie.” (cue meltdown)

“Daddy daddy daddy why are its bones like that?” “I don’t know, honey, but looks like it’s a [reads Latin name off museum label].” “But WHY are its bones like that?” “I don’t know.” “But WHY—” “I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ITS BONES!”

“See? Those are all shark mouths.” “What happened to the rest of the shark?”

“This bird looks like it’s dead.” 

“BYE BYE ANIMALS BYE BYE.” 

For nearly three years now, I’ve lived ten minutes away from The Center for Arts at the Armory in Somerville, MA. For nearly three years now, I’ve wanted to check out the community art space. But for nearly three years now, I’ve been mostly holed up in my apartment due to a little global pandemic and other fun facts of life.

At LAST I visited the Armory this past weekend to see queer performance artist and musician Bitch perform her one-woman musical, Bitchcraft.

The most surprising thing about the Armory to me (and this isn’t obvious in pictures online) is that it is located very much in a residential neighborhood. At first the Lyft dropped me off in front of someone’s house on Highland Ave and I was like, “excuse me?” until I saw the strange stark white building up ahead in the dark.

As a concert venue (at least for this particular concert), the Armory had a laid-back, communal DIY, “we just built this tonight” vibe that personally I really like. Think folding chairs, bulletin boards, volunteers, and a beer-and-wine-only bar.

The charming scrappiness of it all was made even more apparent when it came to the show, which had some sound and technical difficulties that derailed the musical for a good ten minutes. Bitch and the Bitchcraft crew made light of it, engaging with the audience as we patiently waited for things to resume (this was definitely NOT a boo-hiss kind of crowd). “So what the microphone doesn’t work? We’re all going to die someday anyway!”

These pauses allowed me time to take in my surroundings. The Armory is an odd building both inside and out. The ceiling in the performance hall has exposed pipes, beams, and insulation. Curtains only partially cover the half round windows. The shape of the room was is a bit irregular. Naturally, I found myself wondering about the history of the place.

“Here we are, together, in an old weapons hall,” Bitch joked at one point during the show. I thought, oh, right. Armory. Arms. Weapons.

According to the History page on the Arts for the Armory’s website, the building was constructed in 1903 for the Somerville Light Infantry of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia. It housed the MA National Guard for nearly 70 years and has been a community arts center since 2008. And that’s about all I can find online about it.

Now knowing I was in an old military building singing along to Pussy Manifesto with a buncha dykes just makes the whole experience feel that much more surreal (and wonderful).

“Wow I feel weak!” announced the man seated in front of me at the conclusion of Sacre, a 65-minute acrobatic dance performed by Circa, an Australian contemporary circus company. By “weak” he didn’t mean he was moved by the performance, per say, but physically weak.

“What do you mean? I can totally carry three people on my shoulders!” his friend quipped, referring to one of several strength-defying stunts we’d just witnessed on stage.

I’ve been to the circus. I’ve been to contemporary dance performances. But I’ve never seen anything quite like Circa, who performed Sacre at the Boch Center Shubert Theatre in Boston on February 9. It featured ten barefoot dancers dressed in black under stark white spotlights and strobe lights.

The dance began with discordant electronic music that gave me uneasy horror movie vibes. The dancers climbed and jumped onto and off of each other in ways that were suggestive and strong, sexy and strange. Every once in a while someone would appear to die on stage and lie there unmoving.

The lights intentionally shadowed the Circa dancers’ faces, so it was difficult to track who was who. Six male dancers wore black suit jackets, sheer shirts, or no shirts alongside four female dancers wearing long black maiden-like dresses. Though the costumes were gendered, the dancing wasn’t as much, which I appreciated given the heavy eroticism (i.e., gimme gay shit gimme gimme). 

It’s hard not to read meaning into movements that involve lots of touching, falling, and catching. “Ah yes, they’re courting! Now they’re breaking up? Or, no wait, now there’s a third person? And now she’s dead? Hm!”

During one part, two dancers appear to wake up side-by-side, as if in bed, and then climb over and around each other as if having sex, if sex involved crab walking and being swung around by the wrists like a human Skip-It (maybe I’m just doing it wrong). 

Then, without much transition, the music shifted to Stravinky’s “The Rite of Spring.” With this change, the dancing became less rigid, more bendy and organic. This included some of the most wild stunts, like the aforementioned one where three dancers balanced upon the shoulders of one and branched their limbs like a human-tree.

In one of my favorite parts, all ten dancers form a sort of writhing earthly mass and push up a singular dancer, like a blooming flower, who then falls and is (thankfully!) caught by the others. 

The performance, which had no intermission, concluded with all the lights cutting out and a guttural male groan that prompted the audience to chuckle a little. I’m not sure the purpose of the noise, except that it seemed suddenly absurd that in all their exertion—lifting and catching and balancing—the dancers had been totally silent. There had only been the slapping of bare feet and other body parts on stage.

This realization prompted another question for me—how on earth are these dancers not bruised all over at the end of each show?  

After months of wanting to see the exhibit, I finally caught the last guided tour of Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment at the Harvard Art Museums on January 15.

I was interested in it specifically for Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty’s 1746 anatomical print “Muscles of the Back” that was featured in many of the exhibit’s marketing materials. I was already familiar with the illustration due to a morbid anatomy phase* in my early twenties. It stuck with me because of my personal history with spinal issues and surgery. 

I had to register for the (free) tour ahead of time because it was limited to fifteen people. Yet ten minutes into the tour, there were somehow already about thirty people tagging along. All these folks choosing to spend their Sunday afternoon listening to the curator talk about Enlightenment era graphic arts! Wow!

I’m usually not one for tours, preferring to wander and engage with what interests me, but I’m actually glad I chose the tour route for this exhibit. I’m not sure I would’ve fully understood or appreciated the connections between the scientific illustrations and the more fantastical artworks depicting imaginary architecture, vehicles, religious figures, and mythological animals. A few pieces didn’t include museum labels, intentionally so. 

Rooms painted deep blue displayed prints organized by high-level Enlightenment-era themes like “Empathy” and “Imagine.” While the Age of Enlightenment is generally associated with the Scientific Revolution—a  period that emphasized rationality—the exhibit paid special attention to topics of morality and what it means to be human. Some of the most interesting prints were ones that directly challenged religious authority and the ethics of corporal punishment and slavery. 

Human anatomy featured less than I’d expected, “Muscles of the Back” being one of only a handful of prints on the subject. Probably the most interesting fact I learned about that particular print is that, despite its weirdly seductive and unreal quality, the illustration and its labels are actually anatomically correct.

*If you’re wondering what exactly a morbid anatomy phase involves, I can say it involved reading a lot about medical art aesthetics and anatomical venuses, attending lectures about the macabre, watching Oddities on the Science Channel, and seeking out (sometimes collecting) medical antiques at Brimfield. The phase ended when I started getting faint from some of the Victorian-era anatomical photography. Oh those darn daguerreotypes! 

This wandering includes a spooky story!

While Aisha and I were visiting the White Mountains of New Hampshire over Labor Day weekend, we found that we had some time to kill before our timed trip up Mount Washington via the Cog Railway. I suggested we drive down to Jackson from our hotel in Gorham and then make our way around the state forest. We could stop at anything interesting we saw along the way.

But besides Attitash Mountain Resort and an alarmingly busy Story Land, there wasn’t too much interesting to see, at least nothing that felt worth stopping at. Winding around mountains, we passed the time in the car by playing a game of “They’re a 10 but…”

By the time we got to Crawford Notch, I pulled into a small free parking lot so we could stretch our legs. There were a few other cars in the lot, which was tucked in a valley between mountains next to the Saco River. Across the street stood a couple brown and green houses advertising fudge, ice cream, and public restrooms.

A nearby sign read: WILLEY HOUSE HISTORIC SITE. Even though I’m from New Hampshire, I’d never heard of this place—an apparent tourist destination, though a small one. The mountain views were majestic. My phone had zero service.

We walked along the river path and put a couple quarters into one of the old-timey “Fish & Duck Food” dispensers. We fed a few ducks and tossed the rest of the pellets into the river, causing excited fish to splash to the surface.

We sat in the shade at one of the picnic tables beside the river for a bit, watching a family with a loose labrador upset some of the water fowl. When it got too buggy, we decided to cross the street and check out the fudge and ice cream situation. Neither of us were hungry, but curious nonetheless.

It was a typical New Hampshire tourist stop, complete with moose and black bear paraphernalia and maple leaf candies. I always think it’s funny to see the tourist idea of my home state. I’ve never seen a moose, and the only black bears I’ve seen rode scooters at Clark’s Trading Post.

We left without buying anything and stopped to look at an important-looking boulder beside the house. The plaque on it was hard to read, but at least it said: THE LANDSLIDE 1826. Curious. I made a mental note to look up more about this place later, once I had service again.

But honestly, after a somewhat stressful Cog Railway adventure (let’s just say it involved a wrong turn, a flashing car maintenance light, and a call from our landlord), I’d mostly forgotten about our little stop in Crawford Notch.

The following week, I had an assignment to read the 1835 short story “The Ambitious Guest” by Nathaniel Hawthorne for a horror writing class. The tale tells of young man who stops by a family’s house one September night while traveling through “the Notch of the White Hills” in “the valley of the Saco.” They discuss the young man’s ambitions, as well as visiting “the basin of the Flume.”

As I read, I begin putting the pieces together that this must be northern New Hampshire. In fact, the more I read, the more uneasy I begin to feel. At the story’s conclusion, the family and the guest are all killed by a sudden landslide. The guest’s ambitions are forever unfulfilled.

I immediately took to the internet to look up “The Ambitious Guest,” and discovered it was based on an 1826 tragedy in Crawford Notch where a landslide killed seven members of the Willey family and two others.

That’s right. The story is based on none other than Willey House, the historic site we’d visited just the week before on a total whim. I had never heard of this place, the tragedy, or the Hawthorne story before.

A creepy coincidence, or a sign from the universe to watch out for landslides?

Did you know that there’s a 40-foot-tall Virgin Mary statue overlooking Logan Airport in East Boston? Welp, neither did I until one restless winter day when I was scouring Atlas Obscura for something interesting to go see or do outdoors nearby. Omicron spike + New England winter = cabin fever for real.

I’d seen the signs for Madonna Queen of the Universe in East Boston before, but I thought it was just a church. There is a church next to the statue, and Sunday mass was happening while Aisha and I stopped by and said hello to Mary. She was fairly easy to find, up some very steep hills.

We watched a couple planes land at Logan Airport. But it was so cold and windy up there, we only stayed long enough to take a couple pictures and say a Hail Mary.

After spending a week in the woods for my solo writing retreat in Warwick, MA, I decided to explore the surrounding area a little bit before heading eastward towards home.

My first stop was was to the Montague Bookmill at the recommendation of my Airbnb hosts. They knew my New England bookish soul would swoon for this used bookstore housed in an old 1840s grismill. I absolutely loved this place. After spending way too much time exploring all the used books in every room, I got some tasty lunch and coffee at The Lady Killigrew next door.

I thought my little detour couldn’t get any better, but then I stopped in Turners Falls which I’d seen on a map as a little mill town with a canal walking trail. What a surprise gem of a town! Well, not technically not a town, but a village in the town of Montague. There was free and easy parking near the start of the Canalside Rail Trail, a walking path running along a canal beside to the Connecticut River with views of a mostly-vacant and shuttered paper mill. After some rain, the river was so high, and the cloudy weather against all that faded brick was a vibe.

I followed the trail loop back through downtown, an avenue cutting through a grid of streets and multi-family homes clearly built to house mill workers. So much brick. The avenue, Avenue A, looked to have some cute shops and restaurants, but most things were closed due to it being a Monday during a pandemic.

It’s hard to put my finger on why, but I was just so charmed by this place. I later learned that during the 1970s, Turners Falls was home to the Renaissance Community, “one of the largest and most enduring communes in the northeast U.S” according to Wikipedia. Which honestly only makes Turners Falls even more intriguing. I’d love to go back and spend more time there once things open back up again (please let it be so).

We went to the North End for the first time in forever. Got some brunch at Parla and then said hello to Paul Revere. Looked at his house from the outside. Despite it being July 4th, there were no festivities going on during the day. Ah, such is a pandemic.

We were about to leave North Adams after our MASS MocA excursion when I saw on Google Maps that we were less than ten minutes away from something called Natural Bridge State Park. A state park? With a bridge? That is natural? SPONTANEOUS DETOUR!

As we drove down a windy road, we saw that parking would be $5 for our car with MA plates. What a steal! An even better steal—when we finally got to the park, we saw a sign claiming that the $5 fee was waved for the day—hurray! The only other car in the parking lot was the state park maintenance folks. Because this was shaping up to be a little horror-movie-esque, we skipped the Welcome Center (which appeared open, maybe?) and went straight to the trail to find this so-called “natural bridge.”

But first! A dam! And not just any dam, but the ONLY white marble dam in North America (according to the sign)! What!! So cool.

We followed some short trails over some iron (i.e. unnatural) bridges and stairs that led us in between cool rock formations with water running between them.

We walked down to the marble quarry which was an equally impressive sight. I’d only ever seen quarries by the ocean, filled with water. This quarry had a vast grassy lawn at the bottom. It would make a great picnic spot on the right day.

All in all, the park is kind of small, though it would’ve been worth the $5. And I’m still not sure which bridge was the natural one? Hmmm!

Aisha and I took a mini vaxxed vacation to North Adams MA to visit one of the largest contemporary art museums in the country—Mass MoCA! This was Aisha’s first time to the museum, and I hadn’t been in over a decade. My underlying motivation for this particular destination was to take photos for visual inspiration for my novel-in-progress, which is set in and around a similar (albeit much smaller) New England mill building. Also, I wanted to see some weird stuff.

Mass MoCA is enormous. We went on a Monday with our timed tickets, and it wasn’t particularly busy. We had some whole exhibits to ourselves for wandering and photo-taking. We spent about four hours there, including a break for lunch at the museum cafe, and I’m still not confident we saw it all.

One of the main draws of Mass MoCA is the James Turrell light exhibit, which required a separate timed ticket for entry. The exhibit involved standing in a totally white room with a handful of strangers as colored lights changed and flashed around us. Felt very Willy Wonka, minus the candy.

We also kept accidentally walking through this incredibly giant room that had epic music, moving shadows, and strobe lights going on sometimes. One of the times we walked through, I just absolutely cracked up because I mean… how did we get here?

I loved the three-story Sol LeWitt exhibit. Very colorful, with lots of surprises around corners (all except for one harsh orange and green mural that is forever burned into my retinas). It was around the LeWitt exhibit that we were trying our darndest to get to one of the buildings on the map, and we just could NOT figure out how to get there. We finally got to it by going outside, checking out a couple outdoor exhibits while we were out there, and then climbing up a fire escape. Pretty sure we weren’t supposed to do that, but another visitor saw us and let us in and it was all good.

After the museum we walked around North Adams’ downtown a little bit. There wasn’t much to see or do, and lots of things were closed on a Monday. So we got some beer at Bright Ideas Brewing and some A-OK BBQ and ate in the tented picnic table area in the museum parking lot. Yum.

We stayed a couople nights at Porches Inn which we both enjoyed so much, especially the pool and the “granny chic” aesthetic. Oh, and the porches, of course!

Came for the gardens, stayed for the statues.

Tower Hill Botanic Garden was very much under construction in late May. After showing our timed ticket at the gate, we were greeted by a yellow beeping backhoe, and signs guiding us around a literal mountain of construction. But hey, we drove all the way to Boylston, so we were going to make the most of it.

The indoor Orangerie was oranger-empty. The Limonaia? More like Lame-onaia. Okay, okay. Once we got past the confusion of “where are the heck are there any gardens around here?” we did enjoy walking through the wooded trails, which were dotted with little sculptures and surprises, like a statue of Pan and a big bird’s nest that was fun to sit in.

We enjoyed the Rustic Overlook and the Rustic Pavillion, both rather rustic, as well as the shade garden that had some cool mossy steps.

Finally towards the end of the trip we located some flowery gardens, more like what we were expecting. The Lawn Garden and the Not-so-Secret Garden were lovely and I especially enjoyed all the azalea bushes.

I’d like to go back sometime in a different season, maybe when all the construction is finished!

Aisha and I celebrated my official vaccinated status by going to the Franklin Park Zoo in Dorchester. Because if I’m going back out into the world, why not start with the zoo? The park was operating at limited capacity, so we bought timed tickets online in advance.

It’s wild that Franklin Park Zoo is smack-dab in the middle of the city. It comes out of nowhere. As we were approaching and the GPS was saying that we were only 4 minutes away, I was like, “Where? How?” And then BAM — there’s the zoo!

Franklin Park Zoo has some adorable animals. I loved seeing the giraffes and zebras, and the lions and tigers (no bears, oh my). The prairie dogs were very cute and yippy. A few exhibits were under major construction or only partially open, I’m guessing, because of Covid times. For example, the hyenas were MIA. And there was a whole big flight cage with what appeared to be only one or two vulture-ish birds inside. Like, no shade to the vultures, but did they really need a whole flight cage to themselves?

One thing I wasn’t expecting was the peacocks that were freely roaming the zoo. I’m glad they weren’t confined to a cage, but they were very screamy and kind of scary. They weren’t putting up with anyone’s nonsense!

The zoo also has what I can only describe as a “90s Jurassic Park” vibe. Not that there were any dinosaurs. But there was a safari jeep for kids to play in (pre-Covid… it’s now closed off), and some structures looked like they hadn’t been painted since the 90s either.

The most tedious part of the zoo was waiting in line to get into the indoor Tropical Forest exhibit, which only allowed certain number of people inside at a time for social distancing. We almost gave up, but it turned out to be worth the wait because it was our favorite exhibit. Not only were there pygmy hippos, but there was a fresh BABY pygmy hippo, which is maybe the cutest animal in the world. There was also a baby gorilla but the gorillas in general were staying far away from the glass and people, understandably so. It looked like an open-air version of the Tropical Forest exhibit was under construction beside the indoor one. Thank goodness!

But probably my favorite part of the zoo was how it wasn’t busy at all, and that’s likely thanks to the timed ticket requirement. On an overcast May Sunday in any other year, we might’ve not seen as many animals as we did, or we might’ve had to wait and wade through even more people. Limited crowds is one perk from Covid times that I hope sticks around for a little bit longer.

We’re coming out of Covid winter (please let this be true!) and I’m ready for more socially distant outdoor wanderings. I’ve been meaning to return to the Medfield State Hospital in Medfield, MA. The shuttered college-like campus of the former psychiatric hospital is one of the stranger places I’ve visited in the Commonwealth. A cloudy February day made for perfect conditions for being around eerie decaying brick buildings, and Aisha and Laura brought along their fancy cameras.

When I first visited Medfield State Hospital back in 2014, there wasn’t a whole lot written about it online. I can’t remember how I found out about it, but I got the sense that it wasn’t widely advertised that the historical landmark was open as a public park. Maybe that was to keep vandals away, or maybe because the hospital closed in 2003, only about a decade prior.

Seven years ago, the park was heavily patrolled and there weren’t many people there. One older woman who was hanging out there with her family and dog, was surprised we were going around taking pictures. She told us that she grew up on the campus, as her mother worked on the hospital staff cutting patients’ hair. She described a largely self-sustaining community of farming and trade work, patients and staff living all together on campus, like what’s described in this 1997 video, one of the few in-depth historical resources I can find about the hospital: 

Seven years later I was pleased to read online that the campus was still open as a park, and I was curious how it’s changed, if at all. Well I observed at least one major change to the hospital campus and it was this: DOGS. 

So. Many. Dogs. Big dogs. Little dogs. Dogs on leashes. Dogs off leashes. Dogs sniffing each others’ butts. Dogs sniffing my butt. Corgis and huskies and dachshunds and dalmations and very many mutts. That’s right—Medfield State Hospital seems to now serve mainly as a dog park. And everyone in Medfield must have a dog, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many dogs in my life (Aisha and Laura are in agreement with me on this—there were a LOT of dogs). 

Besides all the extra dog poop, the campus is largely the same as I remember. The most prominent building is the chapel, with its wooden clock perpetually stuck at the wrong times, made famous by its pseudo-appearance in Shutter Island (2010). The brick buildings seemed mostly in the same condition, with their boarded windows and crumbling steps. Not all the pathways were plowed, just the main roads, but the snow was minimal enough for us to crunch through to go up to buildings (and get away when there were too many dogs convening). 

Patrolling must be working because I saw little to no evidence of vandalism or break-ins. Every building is locked shut with large signs warning against unlawful entry and hazardous conditions. My morbid curiosity burns stronger wondering what the insides of these buildings must look like now after all these years. I imagine mold, mice, and asbestos. The few photos I can find online say to me that even rulebreakers don’t even dare trespass.

Someone or some people had decorated the campus for Valentines Day, hanging hearts on lamp posts and candy conversation hearts on the buildings. A strange choice, in my opinion. I guess that’s one way to lighten up a somber atmosphere of a former psychiatric hospital. But something about a decaying “Womens Convulsive Ward” saying CALL ME or TEXT ME just didn’t really sit right, but hey, I’m just a tourist. 

Speaking of the Women’s Convulsive Ward, that was something new I noticed this time around—each building was labeled with a number that corresponded to a map at one of the main parking lots. The map listed each building’s former purpose. If the map existed back in 2014, I don’t remember seeing it. Since we parked in a different spot, we didn’t even get to the map until we were over halfway done exploring the campus. I took a picture of it for reference as we toured the rest of the hospital so we could identify the buildings.

Another new addition was the presence of haikus on some of the buildings. A little sealed paper next to each poem explained that this was part of a larger town-wide Medfield Poetry Project put on by the Medfield Public Library, Medfield TV, and the Cultural Alliance of Medfield. Their goal is to “bring people together to enjoy the property and build support for future arts and cultural activities on the grounds.” 

There were also quite a few sap buckets tapped into maple trees around the hospital campus. Taken together, these present-day details—the sap buckets, the poetry, even the candy hearts—made it comfortably clear that the hospital grounds are being watched over and cared about. The millions of dogs made that pretty clear too. I’m curious to know what will come of the historical hospital in another seven years. 

Also, I apparently contributed an article about Medfield State Hospital for Atlas Obscura back when I first visited. I was reading the article when researching this adventure and was like, “Hey I wrote this?!” Ha.

On top of Mount Major
All covered in trees
Aisha lost her poor face mask
No one better sneeze

It was a beautiful fall-ish morning for a hike up Mount Major, and thankfully not too many people on the trails. We went up the longer but less intense Brook Trail (yellow) and came back down the steeper Main Trail (blue).

The Middlesex Fells Reservation — or “The Fells” as locals call it — is an enormous park situated between Medford and Stoneham, MA. It’s sheer vastness and the lack of visitor information online about trails and parking has prevented me from checking it out in the past. But, after an August heat wave in quarantine kept me home for so long, I was ready to entertain just about any promise of some outdoor exploration.

Our initial destination was Wright’s Tower, on the Medford-side of the reservation. But, alas, even on a cloudy afternoon, all the parking along South Border Road was very full. We reprogrammed the GPS to send us to another potential parking destination—Copland House, up by Spot Pond in Stoneham. It was a 12 minute drive to the other side of the park. What!

Copland House appears to be an abandoned house that is maybe historic (?), but no plaques or anything say what it is, exactly. Thankfully there were a couple open parking spots. Most people were headed into the Virginia Wood Trail. Not anticipating a woodsy walk, and with no trail map, we headed in the opposite direction to walk along the edge of Spot Pond.

On Pond Street (appropriately named), most of the pond views were obscured by trees, so we headed towards the Spot Pond Lookout on Google Maps, hoping to see some water there. This took us along the backside of Stone Zoo which was an unexpected treat, because we could clearly see into the zoo through the fence! Inside the zoo we saw a goat, a crane, maybe a cougar, and a chipmunk. The chipmunk was not part of the zoo, we don’t think!

The pond lookout was a small beachy area that was lovely, if not a bit eerie, because there was absolutely no one around. No one on the sand, no one on the water. Emptiness. Social distancing success?

Because the Middlesex Fells Reservation is so big (have I mentioned how BIG it is?) there was no easy, short way for us to loop around, we turned back to go to the car. I would still like to go back at some point to see Wright’s Tower (maybe early in the morning will be less busy?) or one of the many other destinations that must be there within the reservation.

It’s no surprise that 2020 hasn’t been the best year for wandering. Massachusetts was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March, just in time for spring. Since then, parks and museums have largely been closed, and shows and events canceled or moved online.

But now that there are far fewer new cases of the virus in the state, some places are starting to reopen with restrictions.

In mid-June, I was excited to get an email from The Trustees announcing they had reopened the grounds of some of their parks, including the deCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA. Aisha and I moved to Medford in April (yes, mid-pandemic), so now it was a short drive away.

Finally, a way to get outside and see some art while still social distancing!

We had to reserve our ticket online beforehand and select which hour we would be arriving. This way, they could stagger the number of visitors. Ticketing was through Eventbrite and super easy.

The deCordova Museum itself (an awesome castle-esque brick building with viney sides) was still closed, so admission was only $15 per car to get into the sculpture park. Face masks required. No bathrooms. And please, no touching the sculptures (so said the signs posted everywhere across the park). Disinfecting sculptures must be a challenge!

There were lots of people on the grounds of deCordova, which at first was unnerving, but the park is so big, everyone could and did stay well far apart. Many folks were just sitting and relaxing on the main lawn, enjoying being outside on a nice day. Lots of families with young kids who had to refrain from climbing up on some of the sculptures (some seemed unable to resist).

The main thing that I missed was having a print map of the park to know where all the sculptures are and to learn more about them. I used the deCordova’s digital tour and map on my phone, but I find it harder to see and follow that way. There may be some sculptures we missed, but that’s okay, we saw so many, and not having a map at all times forced me to embrace the wandering.

Here are my attempted descriptions of some of sculptures we saw:

• A large panel of horsehair / re-claimed cello strings blowing in the breeze

• A series of what look like glass doors but were more likely clear plastic

• Turrets made out of cloth, so they look more like tents

• A copper goose with a golf ball in its bill

• Pots, pans, and plastic fruit all hanging from steel hooks

• A crumpled crochet blanket but WAIT it’s made out of bronze!

• Fake jello molds with moths and bugs on them (OBSESSED)

• Something called “Donut with 3 Balls”

Oh! And we saw a snake! Or rather, I saw the snake, then pretended to have not seen the snake, but Aisha saw right through me and I had to tell her about it. But maybe it was just an elaborate moving sculpture! Right?! :)