A Different Boston

I spent Sunday in Boston with my sister. She is making a career switch from pediatric occupational therapist, a wonderful one who is quite positive she’s never ever going to write one more report about a child, to an interior designer. She’s taking an online course from KLC in London. I saw the course materials and was quite impressed: it looks like fun, too. It seems in the US the options were either 4-year degree or “interior decorator,” neither of which quite matched her means or aptitude, so she’s a British student. Again. Brava, say I.

Since one of her ongoing assignments is to visit houses from earlier eras, sketch them, and compare period decoration, we visited the Paul Revere House in the North End (late Tudor, sparse but not spartan furnishings); the Pierce house next door (early Georgian, fascinating black line running from the fireplace to border sections of the room), and the Otis house just across Cambridge Street from Beacon Hill, plush Federal.

I lived in Boston for eight years and never went in any of these places. It was interesting to return and see them through this new lens, sketching fireplaces and chairs and wondering how they managed to keep warm through all those freezing winters.

Mostly it was such a treat to spend a WHOLE DAY with my sister, just the two of us. This happens so rarely nowadays. I always return to Davis after having seen her thinking about ways to reinvent ourselves so we could move to some hilltop ramshackle farmstead in the frozen north…