New York: A Big Apple Interlude

With fall nearing its end and Thanksgiving rapidly approaching, we take a long weekend getaway to New York City, traveling again by rail for the second November in a row. We’re joined by my parents (visiting from California) for Jordan’s first time in the Big Apple (and my and Jane’s first time visiting since my summer internship in 2011). We spend a handful of days exploring by subway, walking around Midtown and Central Park, visiting the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn, riding the Roosevelt Island tramway, and catching up with my friend Ali for the first time in nearly two years. Toddler family as we are, we’re mostly limited to half-day outings around town, sticking close to playgrounds and parks, and skipping most of the big tourist attractions with the exception of Liberty Island, where Jordan poses with the “Statue of Liberry.” It’s a four-hour ride back to Boston on the Northeast Regional, and Jordan chatters non-stop the entire way home.

Massachusetts: Writing the Future

"Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past. She has come to think of them as her private Archive, herself an Archivist, and she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change."

— Daniel Mason
North Woods

Quickly now, we’re moving into November and late autumn. October seems to have come and gone in a hurry. Dating back to late September, it has been a whopping six weeks since all three of us spent a weekend together here at home (counting two weekends on-service for me, two weekends in Baltimore and solo-dadding, and two weekends on the road in Cape Cod and New Hampshire). Autumn colours have been strange here this year, as they have been all over New England. In some pockets, there was early colour and early leaf drop. In other places, the changes have seemed to last and linger; the red maples around our house here in Brookline are putting on the best display we have seen in our years living here. Overall, the foliage has been patchier than most autumns, owing to yet another summer of severe drought. But at last, the oaks and birches are having their moment, and the ground is as crisp and golden as each morning’s air. The region’s hardwood forests - and their flora and fauna - are just as beautiful as always if you get out there and look.

Aside from the visual landscape, autumn has been strange this year for me, for another reason altogether. At work, sweeping upcoming changes in the landscape of Boston palliative care mean that I find myself making a series of long-range career decisions where the tradeoffs are clear and present. I am quite used to thinking about the future, and about change; I’ve written ad nauseum, it seems, about the dreams I have (of dying), and the awareness of impermanence that permeates my everyday life and my creative energy. And yet - it is rare for me to be quite literally writing the future: putting visions down on paper and knowing they will affect me and many people around me. Always too soon, the time draws near when I’ll have to make some weighty decisions. And thankfully, I think I am someone who has processed this moment long enough (and gone through enough therapy and self-therapy) to know roughly where I stand. That does very little to diminish the weight of the decisions, though. Nor the emotional toll.

For now though, the fall rolls onward, and the year marches toward its end. On the docket: a train trip to NYC, more grandparent time; a year-end visit to California. As the days grow shorter and the nights grow darker, I begin to close in on the things that really matter. Wool socks, a good book by lamplight, Jordan growing up quickly beneath our roof and before our eyes. A certain spaciousness and clarity that comes with the colder weather and the barren trees. Open sightlines, long horizons. Maybe, one of these days, a future to call one’s own.

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October 31, 2025: Jordan’s third Halloween, trick-or-treating up and down the residential streets here in North Brookline with his bestie from daycare. We have matching costumes (a zombie family), which of course means that Jordan will wear his mask for no longer than two minutes before removing it permanently. He’s been talking about eating our (and everyone’s) brains for the past half year - our little zombie, developing quite the forceful personality.

November 1, 2025: A morning spent at the Blue Hills Reservation in Milton, MA, which I visited with my field naturalist cohort almost exactly a year ago. In the Trailside Museum, Jordan enjoys seeing the venomous snakes, playing with binoculars and slide, and meeting the nature center’s rehabbing animals. He self-determines that he should buy a stretchy frog from the museum gift shop; when we point out that he does not have his own cash or credit card, and ask him who will be paying for him, he turns to the cashier and asks, “Can you buy it for me?” The kind man very nearly does. We take a brief walk up the nearby trailhead to take a family portrait (our first in awhile), and Jordan builds a “leaf house” for his stretchy frog before we head home by way of Panda Express in Dedham, MA.

November 8, 2025: Shots from the few blocks between our house and the Brookline Village T stop, the last few glorious maples doing their thing for the season.

Massachusetts: Falling In

All of a sudden, the favored season is here. The summer - eventful and memorable as it was - has come and gone in a flash. Moving day is past, and the kids are back in school. Jordan’s now the oldest kid at his daycare, and it’ll soon be time for us to look into his next steps. Meanwhile, life marches on. I’m heading toward my final distance run this training season, followed by a prolonged taper into my first full marathon in October. In between - time with family, time with friends, an unexpected but welcome upcoming visit to Maryland (Jordan’s first), the usual autumn projects, and a host of new challenges and directions in the workplace. I’m trying to get deeper into prose writing; even photography feels more intentional. But it’s not easy to juggle the hats, to pivot from one mode to another, to tend to all the varied parts of me that make up the kinda-functional whole. Time, as always, is the limiting reagent. Fall, for me, is always a marker of time’s passage in my life. Especially here in New England, it is the most beautiful season, the most ephemeral one, the time that makes me look inward and forward. I make my resolutions in the fall, rather than with the new calendar year. And every fall, certain commonalities emerge that, if one views them only superficially, make it seem like little-to-nothing has changed at all. Another academic year, another foliage shoot. The window units come out, the days grow shorter. Once again, gathering fallen maple leaves from the sidewalk.

And yet, so much has changed. A year ago, I was preparing for my first half-marathon in five years - nervous as hell, with no thoughts of ever achieving more; today, I can wake up after any decent night of sleep and run twenty miles for kicks. A year ago, I was taking field naturalist coursework; today, it is gratifying to look around and realize how many patterns, plants, and species I recognize (and know a lotta shit about) in my surrounding world and neighborhood. A year ago, I was grappling with my roles as a father, a husband, and a human being who wanted to be more than my normative roles; today, I’m still grappling, but a lot more comfortable with who I am and where I am in life. I am where I need to be. I’m going where I need to go, and doing what I need to do. There’s still not enough time. But I’ll get there eventually. And I’m looking forward to what comes next.

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September 6, 2025: A morning visit to Walden Pond with Jane, Jordan, and my parents on their last weekend with us this month. It’s our first time visiting this place since five years ago (almost to the day), and so much about us (and so little about Walden) has changed. The pond’s southern shoreline is heavily fenced off for construction of a new bathhouse for swimmers and boaters, and the weekend atmosphere is no more peaceful or idyllic than it was during the pandemic. But such is life nearly two centuries after Thoreau’s time. We take a family selfie with his statue (Henry holding the phone), and Jordan spends an hour tramping around the shore and tossing rocks into the water, before we move on to Concord to explore the annual Ag Day farmer’s market.

September 10, 2025: My annual self-imposed, self-care day on the Wednesday before fellowship interviews get underway (thrice makes a tradition, right?). I take a long, ranging morning walk through South Brookline, documenting the first signs of fall creeping in along the Emerald Necklace, and grabbing an outdoor lunch with Turkish ice cream at Dolma Mediterranean Cuisine. At Wards Pond, I photograph the swan family we have been visiting intermittently since the spring - the cygnets all grown but still bearing their downy juvenile feathers. “They grow up so fast,” says the lady at pond-side with me. “I want to see them fly,” I respond.

September 13-14, 2025: A night in the woods. After our brief but enjoyable car camping night at Wompatuck in June, Jordan can’t stop talking about camping. He wants to call Ah-Ma and Ah-Gong from the tent. We drive up to Harold Parker State Forest in Andover, where we pitch said tent (which is large enough to hold half our household belongings) in an Eastern white pine forest beside Frye Pond. Jordan’s carsickness / mild GI bug notwithstanding, we have a fun time exploring the woods, learning about plants and animals (Indian cucumber, poison ivy, and spiders - woo-hoo!), listening for crickets, frogs, and owls at night, and whisper-partying in the tent before dawn. In the morning, after catching sunrise by the pond, we drive up to our favorite breakfast spot in the entire Commonwealth - Smolak Farms in North Andover, whose farmstand, orchard, farm animals, and rainbow train playground have become something of an early fall tradition.

October 11-12, 2025: Some phone snaps from the long-awaited race. Jane, Jordan, and I head down to Falmouth so that I can run the Cape Cod Marathon on Sunday, October 12th. I’ve been training for this all year, and the weekend after my 35th birthday is a festive one. Sadly, it’s not the coastal race I was hoping to run: heavy rain and wind from an incoming nor’easter; a stiflingly hot anti-rain visor (never wear new gear on race day!), and a tough couple of weeks of taper (turned into busy travel, work, and generally being careless about eating, sleeping, and staying race-ready) means I over-exert more than I realize in the early going. By the time I realize, it’s too late: I’ve perfectly executed my desired pace, but wind up bonking at mile 13 and run-walking my way through cramps for the back half of the race, through an increasingly torrential downpour. It’s my lousiest performance in over a decade (since I cramped hard in my first half-marathon), and yet - I finished! And under my original goal of 5 hours, though not under my eventual stretch goal of 4:30. The lessons are well-learned for next time. (Wait, next time?!) Well, it’ll probably be awhile before I run another marathon. The duration and intensity of training for this distance simply takes so much out of my life. Weight and muscle loss (impossible to keep on mass regardless of how much I eat and train, for the first time ever); finishing work late at night (in order to squeeze in daylight runs during weekdays); and countless 3 AM wake-ups (to avoid missing an entire Saturday morning each week with my cuties) have made this one of the most physically demanding years of my thirty-five. I do want to continue with some speedwork (perhaps scaling back to the half-marathon distance) this winter. Assuming my toenails ever return to something resembling healthy, I don’t think my running days are over quite yet. We’ll see, then…