Day 324, Year 7: To Concord and Cambridge
Date: Thursday, September 27, 2012
Weather: Mostly Sunny
Location: At Home with John Reed, Cambridge, Massachusetts
When I typed the date, September 27, a flood of memories came forth. In
1975, my first born was due on September 27. It was a Saturday in
Alexandra, Virginia, and the baby didn’t arrive. And then she didn’t arrive
on Sunday. By Monday, I decided to take action. I called a woman named
Kathy whom I had met in Lamaze classes and asked her to go with me down to
the Potomac River to just sit and watch the water. I have always loved the
water and I was sure that would start the labor process. We went, we sat
all day, and nothing happened. Then I went home to fix dinner. It worked!
While I was fixing dinner, I had the first contractions. It was a loooong
labor as Heather wasn’t born until almost midnight the next day, but finally
a beautiful baby girl was born. Even though September 30th is her birthday,
September 27 has always felt like it should have been the day.
Thanks to the graciousness of John and Sue Reed, we are spending tonight and
tomorrow night in ‘our’ room in their home. Sue is at her alma mater, Smith
College, for the weekend, so John is our host. It is so wonderful to have a
place to stay when we need to be in Boston for medical issues and we are so
appreciative. Thank you, John and Sue.
We started our day by rowing the dinghy to shore getting it loaded on the
truck. The repairman, EJ, will have it back to us on Saturday morning, and
hopefully he will be able to find and repair the leaks by then. We then
drove to Heather’s so I could so a little garden work and Mark could do his
public radio consulting work. It took us both longer that we had thought,
but we both got a lot done. Heather and I picked beans and tomatoes and
then I worked on cleaning up the bee garden and got a start on mulching for
the winter. I got the jars ready for canning the apple butter Heather made,
but it needed to cook down a little more, so I had to leave Heather with the
job of canning it as well. By doing it by the slow cooking method, we
didn’t have to add any sugar and it tasted so good. It was noon by the time
both Mark and I finished, so we had some lunch and took off for Concord, New
Hampshire. There was no traffic and we were working in the storage unit by
2:30 pm. By 4 pm we were done and the car was full. We got the winter
clothes we will need, a heater, and an extra gas can for dinghy fuel. We
also put in all of my teacher resource boxes for teaching science to little
guys. Since Heather is volunteering to teach science to Sam’s kindergarten
class every other Friday, I thought she might want to look through the
materials I have. We finished so early that we had time to go to a shopping
mall in Manchester, NH, so that each of us could buy a pair of jeans, and
then it was on to Taipei and Tokyo, the restaurant in Manchester where I
learned to love sushi when we first moved to New Hampshire in the early
1990’s. It was good sushi and it was a good day.
Our day begins early tomorrow as Mark has a 7:30 am scan and then the
surgery at 9 am at Mass General. I’ll hang out at the hospital all day
waiting to find out whether or not they will release Mark or have him stay
overnight. Hanging out at Mass General has become one of my favorite
activities. There are lots of comfortable places to sit and read or work on
a computer and when I get tired of that, I can walk to almost any place in
downtown Boston in twenty minutes. So Boston, here we come.
