Somerville, Massachusetts

Weather: 36°F, light snow, with a windchill of 30°F

Yup, it’s winter, folks. I know it’s still allegedly fall, but if the windchill is below freezing, it’s winter in my book. I woke up this morning on Peter’s futon, and looked out onto a gray street, closed in by fog. After my rather melodramatic, sleep-deprived post of yesterday, we had an even slower and more exhausting trek on the train into Boston. The most depressing part was pulling into South Station an hour late, but still five minutes before the last commuter rail left for Middleborough, and then being stopped on the tracks just long enough to wait for the MBTA train, our train, to pass us outbound. Argh.

So after an exhausting 26-hour sojourn around the great lakes, we had to hop a red-line T to my Harvard Square, yet again, and trek the mile to my brother’s apartment, where I pray we aren’t wearing out his and his roommates’ welcome. I made French toast this morning as a palliative, and it is always great to see Peter. Even with all our exhaustion, we managed to get in two discs of The Office before we drifted off into a Steve Carell-spiced slumber. Today we head back to Marion (via two more trains and a truck) for Thanksgiving. And that gives you just a taste of our travel-weary ways over the last month.

The sad part is that we’re not even half done. We still have treks to make to Chattanooga and Maine.

Later...
South Station, Boston, Massachusetts

At the apartment this morning, Karl finally dragged himself out of bed, asked about trains, and we had a frenzied forty-minute dash including a one-mile walk through damp, messy, slippery snow and a twenty-minute T ride that was supposed to be fifteen, only to miss our train at South Station. I am consoling myself with a clementine and with free public wifi. Still, argh. It seems to sum up our travel travails in general. Travel just involved travail, I know, but it’s becoming far too exhausting.

Now we have a two-hour wait in the frigid climes of the vast public train station, surrounded by tempting, expensive coffee, magazines, and food. All of this is beginning to wear on me, and I want to go home. Home to my own French press coffee pot, my own slowly rusting RV stove, my own skillet, my own icebox, my own slow breakfast over New Yorkers and a blue-green view in hot sunshine. I love my family, I love my friends, and I hate, I absolutely hate, the cold. I hate snow, I hate slush, I hate the way wind drives through my clothes, I hate how my nose and chin turn red and my ears numb, and I hate how all of my body’s mucus gathers flows out of every bodily orifice every time I go outside. I’ll survive, I know, I always do. Probably by holing up with books, my usual method.