Boston, You’re My Home
Boston is a city that continues to draw me in. Having moved back here a third time five years ago, I’ve now spent almost a decade in this city, a place that continues to fascinate me and inspire me and challenge me and consume me. I’m from Upstate New York, from a city equidistant between Boston and New York City, and I’m eternally glad that we always turned our car east for vacations and visits, instead of south. My father’s family had been vacationing on the Cape back when it was just scrub brush and locals, and my mother married into the Massachusetts obsession. My brother moved to a little apartment near the Fens in the mid-‘90s, and I remember being amazed that he walked everywhere. That was back when the T was 85 cents to ride. That was back when, while waiting on Newbury Street, we were handed a flier for a Toad the Wet Sprocket concert. That was back when, to get the Cape after visiting my brother, we took to the air and the Central Artery, and I remember looking down into Quincy Market and Rowe’s Wharf, feeling like I was literally on top of the world. Boston sealed the deal for me when I found a $20 bill on the floor of the Union Oyster House bar. No one claimed it, so I got to keep it. I bought a cassette at Tower Records. Why do I love Boston? Nostalgia, familiarity, and captivation.
You return to places because they become nostalgic, familiar, comfortable. Long Wharf became my refuge and study area during my freshman year at BU. Later, my first apartment was in the North End, and I relished in the street festivals and community, afterwards longing to move back when I moved away. Coffee shops became my coffee shops, walking routes across the cobbled streets became my routes. I still don’t get tired of the view of the skyline from the Red Line passing over the Longfellow Bridge. Why do I love Boston? Because I’ve made the city mine.
Speaking of Longfellow, long ago I fell in love with authors who happened to be residents of Boston and the areas surrounding. My first literary crush was Henry David Thoreau, challenging the thoughts of the time from his perch at the edge of Walden Pond. He walked Boston streets. Ralph Waldo Emerson tilted the balance of religious affiliation in his Divinity School speech in Harvard Yard. Nathaniel Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody at her sister’s bookshop in downtown, one of the streets branching from Tremont to Washington. I still can’t walk by the Old Corner Bookstore, once the hub of 19th century publishing and now a…Chipotle (it hurts to write it) without thinking about the Kickstarter I will someday launch to buy it back and turn it into a proper museum. Why do I love Boston? It’s home to such rich literary history.
A few weeks ago, tens of thousands of people marched on the Common in a counter-protest against white supremacy and Nazism. A few months ago, members of the community did the same thing at a women’s march, at a science march, at an immigration march. The people of this city are fighting for equality, for each person to be recognized as important, for each story to be recognized as meaningful because, at the end of the day, we’re all attempting to make sense of this thing called life. Boston is a progressive city, and continues to embody its reputation. But I see these acts of resistance simply continuing the path that began with the men and women who settled these shores, abandoning oppressive governments and seeking the freedom to worship freely; the path wound to the Sons of Liberty desiring the right to self-govern, resisting the tactics of taxation without representation; it wound to the rise of the first American-born philosophy and the new American identity of self-reliance created around it, throwing off old ways of culture, thought, and society, and seeking new light; it wound to bold, educated women – women who were condemned as “unsexed” and “unnatural” – speaking publically for their own equality; it wound to the tireless Abolitionists speaking and writing and educating, even in the face of the Fugitive Slave Act; and now it’s wound to us.
Why do I love Boston? Because it never ceases to think, never ceases to evolve, never ceases to continue the fight forward. And while there have been missteps and set-backs, it continues seeking, moving, like an ever-rising current against the shore, rising until all are rising, until all have risen. The path winds to me; how can I ensure that every story is heard, that every voice is counted? The path winds to you, too; there must be some story inside of you, even something faint, that makes up your history, that makes up your identity, that contributes to who you are.
Jessica A. Kent
Associate Editor
