A visit to Beacon Hill is always a good idea.
Established around 1625, Beacon Hill is one of Boston’s oldest and most quaint neighborhoods. The series of streets are home to beautiful, stately federal and Greek-revival style mansions and row houses. The people who have called some of those residences “home” range from Louisa May Alcott to Sylvia Plath to Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Gaslamp lampposts dot the narrow sidewalks. I always half-expect to turn a corner and run into Bert and Mary Poppins coming back from taking a spin around the rooftops. Window boxes and front stoops are tastefully done up for every season: pumpkins and mums in the fall; birch and bows and pine greenery in winter; pansies and hydrangeas in the spring. Some of the buildings sport strange little doors a few steps below street level, definitely spiriting the visitor away to the Shire and not, more likely, to the laundry room. Beacon Hill is an entire universe of details and intricacies, but you won’t notice them unless you’re paying attention. And this is why it pays to wander.
Wander is laconic drift. It’s movement propelled by feeling over purpose. Wandering lets you cast the net of your attention wider, allowing all kinds of things to slip through—scenes, images, thoughts, connections. It’s one of my most favorite sources of creative fuel.
Climbing up a side street I noticed a poof of pink rising just above a couple of short apartment houses, growing in some unseen courtyard probably the size of a make-up compact. The color tractor-beamed me over. As I got closer I saw a thin, wrought iron gate barely separating the two properties. An alleyway stretched beyond. It was washed in the rich lemons of a sunny spring morning, tinted slightly by the blossoms of the pink tree overarching the passageway. A door in the wall of one building stood invitingly half-open. A gaslight lamppost hugged the other side of the wall.
That’s the detail that got me. It’s possible that I was looking at what was a side street at one time, slightly repurposed once a second building came along. But why leave the lamppost? Especially if all this space was meant to be was functional, for example, a delivery or servants’ entrance. Then again, intention can hold a lot of grey, especially when it’s applied to something like a public space. This alleyway had charm and character. It felt less like just another slip of concrete and brick dividing two places and more like a destination. I’ll leave the gate open for you and be waiting by the lamp. One person’s lack of imagination and limited vision becomes another person’s creative playground.
And this is why it pays to wander.