Tag: Boston

coming home

Home.  I have chewed on the concept and the actual location of the place for a long time.  I have lived in places where I never felt at home, sometimes gradually finding enough of my people in those places to hold on and not wither away. I lived in places that felt like home, left them with every intention of coming back, never to return. There are places in-between—places where I felt some connection with the air of the place and made important friendships. Boston is one of those places. I moved from Jersey to Cambridge in the middle 70’s to live with David. He had been at Brandeis, dropping out to play in the pit band of the show, Lenny, and then just staying on.  I liked the city then and the neighborhoods in Somerville and Cambridge where we lived.  I was willing to move back to somewhere around here after we finished our degrees. David wanted NYC as home and very certainly, I fell in love with NYC and had no regrets. 

We never returned together to Boston, and when we left NYC for the midwest, I forgot that I had feelings for Boston, the place. 

And I did not quite realize, when I lived in Madison for twelve years, how much that had grown to be a home. It was a hard place to leave. Not the home that I came from, I will never be a midwesterner but the place with the people who supported me, and Julia, those first years of her with us and all the years after David left.  

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Posted on by Suzanne Buchko 2

of ghosts and christmas tree lights

I have been trying/drafting and deleting/ to explain just how this week is.  It is time out of time, ordinary moments out of ordinary order, days of big meals and late church services and traveling and visiting. And too much traffic through tunnels and delays at airports.

No flying this year, but I noticed something I have not really taken account of before.  I have been aware but not articulated to myself the presence of so many ghosts in and around every event, every visit, every meal, every ornament hanging on the tree, every candled trimmed to fit into Julia’s great grandmother’s menorah.

Not one of those events, practices or things stand by themselves. Nothing is new. Rather they are the latest version, the pencil sketch with many erased sketches beneath, the latest in the series of what I remember as winter holiday times. I am aware of both what my eyes perceive and also what I hold in my heart.

The winter holidays always bring on some blues, as they did a few weeks ago, but the sitting with the revelation of sketches in time has brought some awareness, some clarity, some way to find the joy, the blessings in the times that have past.  I am aware of the richness and the subtlety, the near inmoveable traditions dressed with the changes that time brings.

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because it’s june, june, june, june . . .

I am a gardener.  

I’ve begun at least four memoir pieces with that sentence but honestly, I wondered if I would ever really feel like I was that declaration again.  At the blue Victorian that we moved to from Madison and in which we spent the Covid years, I cultivated a small vegetable patch that was shaded part of the day by the houses around it.  It is never a glorious garden but it gave us something to do that first summer of shut down and there were tomatoes and greens and peppers and a small pumpkin. 

Early on in my tenancy at our present house, I asked the landlord if I could garden.  The foundation planting was sparse and old. There must have been other shrubs and bushes at one time but what was left was four plants spread far apart and planted up close to the house.  

My landlord said I could do what I wanted to do and even volunteered a bit of help—his landscapers trimmed bushes that needed the trimming and even took the grass up when I decided on the shape of the front garden bed.  

I started planning the front bed while I was sick and unable to do much running around.  As I began the planning, I wondered if it made sense to invest in a garden that would take a few years to develop and cultivate in a rental house but I came to the idea that I have made three gardens, each in a house that I owned.  But that after planting and tending and loving those gardens, I sold the houses and left those gardens. And it wasn’t so much the beauty of the gardens that I was/am most attached to, it is the process of making a garden and making a garden in the front of this house that we live in would give me pleasure.  

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transformation

At church in small group ministry, we are talking about transformation this month. And to a person, everyone  in my group had a bit of trouble with this topic. We all wanted that Disney Cinderella transformation, the magic wand that turns a pumpkin into a coach and rags into ball gowns. And we could not think of any or many transformative moments in our lives that was quite like that.

Someone suggested that it is more evolution than magic wand, and this morning, I think that so much is in the eye of the beholder. The heart of the dreamer. What and when is that magic wand moment?  And how?  Therein lies a mystery.

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the ride

This morning, Julia is taking The Ride, Massachusetts’ para-transit service for people who can’t use public transportation or drive due to disability.  She is going from home to Elliot House and back again. She needs to be met on both ends right now.  It is a restriction that can be lifted in the Spring if she does well.  

And this gives me an extra two hours in my day, plus no energy drain from the driving.  I did not realize that there was an energy drain until we came back from traveling.  I had not been responsible for driving for 6 weeks and I felt the difference almost immediately upon taking it up again.

This morning, Julia just left, and I feel the quiet and peace settle over this house like it never has.  Like the old feeling when she was in school and the bus came to get her or she went to catch the bus. I feel rich beyond measure. This is a moving on from the 11 months since she has been without programming.  The Ride doesn’t give her programming, but in a sense, it gives her just a taste of her old school life when she had direction and support.  I didn’t know that she would feel this way about a para bus picking her up but this morning, after 3 rides this week, it clearly does. For the first time in 11 months, I feel like the services cliff that she fell off in January is becoming a ramp.

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the diner

Nothing like falling into a place. And entire world whose comfort is undeniable.  How long has it been since this has happened to me?

Maybe forever.

I credit today to the slow recovery from Covid.  Both Julia and I tested negative this morning—she probably would have tested negative days ago.  And me too, probably, but I waited.  It didn’t matter to wait.  We were being very careful—masks and going to very few places.  And it was well past our quarantine time.  

But anyway, this morning I woke up, still coughing but otherwise restless.  It was and is a dreary almost-spring day.  45 degrees, rain with shades of gray above.  My upstairs neighbor had planted daffodils around the house that are waving their yellow heads and the Covid fog, which I hadn’t realized I had, is beginning to clear. (I guess it could be late winter foggy head or old lady fogginess but I’m blaming Covid today.) 

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unpacking

“It’s Wisconsin,” Julia said Friday morning as she stepped outside.  As if Wisconsin was a season or a a weather description like sunny or cloudy.  It was cold yesterday and overnight and this morning it is colder—cold enough to run a bit of water in the kitchen sink to make sure the pipes don’t freeze.

But it is hardly Wisconsin.

And I check myself to see if I miss those brilliant sunny and frigid days in Madison.

Yes, somewhat.  What I miss is my people, my community, my chalice circle, my Quest group, Julia’s teachers and therapists and some very good friends.  

I do not miss the cold.  I could feel nostalgic for every one of those people if temperatures there never once dipped below freezing.

We are a week in the new house.  There are fewer piles of boxes in the corners, there is a somewhat comfortable arrangement of furniture in the living room, there are some books on shelves.

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my new year

 

Frank Bowlings’ Julia at the MFA

This is a time of deep diving into chaos and it is not over yet.  

We are leaving the blue victorian house that has held us safe and warm since we left Madison three and a half years ago.  It has never been the perfect space but it has served us well through lock down and Covid, through the rough months without services for Julia and through her toughest transitions—the last of which was a bit more than a week ago when she turned 22 and aged out of school-based services.  

The end of her transition services program, Community Connections or “CC”, was marked by a pizza party with most of the students and faculty and staff of CC.  When her Inclusion Facilitator and I first talked about her party, we thought that something small with a few students would fit her best.  Something like going out to get nails done, Asian noodles and a bubble tea with a few people.  But Julia knew what she wanted and she wanted a big party with cake she made herself.  She invited me and VNM but when we joined the party and I asked if we could sit with her, she preferred sitting with the teachers and aides who have been part of this experience.  It was great to see her chatting and holding court. It was great to see her happy.

She misses everyone at CC and especially those staff members who she spent time with.  I think she is texting with at least one of them and she wants to go back to visit. Connection has always been so important to Julia and it was good to see that she had made some in this program after those last years of high school which were so isolating and difficult.

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baby shower

Finally today, I have caught my breath.  From the long holiday weekend and the catch up week that followed.  I still have an overdue phone call to my advocate at Healthcare For All and another call to MassHealth.  I’m saving that which I know will be frustrating until Monday.

It was a good weekend.

Justin’s mother and I threw a baby shower for our children and their impending baby boy.  It was a bigger shower than it would have been had there been had there been the planned-for wedding. We invited more people and people from further away than we might have.  Still, there were those from too far away who were missing.  

Still, it was a good party.

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winter profile (an update)

Last summer I wrote a status report about Julia.  It was rather grim but I needed to get it all down in order to understand where I thought Julia was, and to help me to begin to wonder in some sort of a systemic way, what to do next, where she was going, what I should be striving for, fighting for.  And what the hell was the goal!

The big question that was and remains: What will happen when Julia is finished with Community Connections (“CC”) next January on her 22nd birthday.  [In Massachusetts, students with disabilities can stay in the public school system until their 22nd birthday in compliance with the federal IDEA.  After high school, students can enter a transition program and in Newton, we have Community Connections. The purpose of the program is to teach independent living skills and job skills.  Students can then transition into employment or into the adult services programs run by the state.]  While services for students with disabilities is guaranteed until the age of 22; adults with disabilities merely qualify for services.  Depending on the state, the availability of funds and the willingness of the powers that be, students may or may not get services.  Even living in Wisconsin and Massachusetts, where there is  decent to good willingness to provide services, it is always necessary to advocate for services.   

For an adult with disabilities nothing is guaranteed.  And all services are so much more dependent upon money and the whim of the legislature. So, strong advocacy is only more important.

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