Boston

Photoscribbles Throwback (with video read-aloud at the end)

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere” - Longfellow

My birthday is the day of the San Francisco earthquake of Angels in America proportions and the midnight ride of Paul Revere. There is a woman buried in history who supposedly also rode a heroic horse of notification, but isn’t that just the crust of always we walk upon here in America? The tectonic aggression of penis history where we ovarians are so much chattel and the holder of leaning kids’ torsos over harborsides?

I step on slick streets through our history. America. Oh beautiful for stormy skies and enchanted by silversmith spoons and the finery of historic bedrooms and heirloom amazements. Hole in the wall Italian restaurants and the buttery lobster rolls and questionable mussels that land me urpy and digestive like when I eat fried chicken and can’t always proceed through the rest of the afternoon.

America, you’re rich in food and foolishness. Revolution and artwork. My fellow Americans we drench in umbrellas and watch ferries arrive and depart, a municipal, state and federal leveled wonder of transport, shipping, industry, legality, humanity. Look at what we’ve built!

It is staggering. It is stunning and to think of jolly old England bloodshedding in belief that an unruly democracy could ever be contained in a spirited yearn to breathe free and fellows founding something experimental and true.

We the people now kick each other in the teeth online and in person but that’s our stupid happy fundamental right to and I say kick it. Go right ahead. We have truth and consequences, and I traveled to Boston with barely any paperwork and I pledge allegiance to the same flag we all do here on the tea drinking tea hurling tax paying shores of a beautiful sideways street and accented city my kids now know more about than Chicago.

And we wrapped up our spring break there at Freedom Trail, Harvard and Fenway glanced with a vow to return on that airport ferry to carry us back to our home. The middlewestern face turning east to the sunrise and toward Boston every morning. It is a beautiful dream to wake up to. It is a colony germinated to seed spread and squalor. We sowed the seeds of brutal independence. We grew and maimed and claimed and became things, and we tangled our roots down deep and tight in the demarcated rainy earth, inextricable and intractable, and we won’t be ripped up now.

Background soundtrack graciously given by the one and only Chad Watson