It’s been a while. Perhaps a predictable while, for a blog started with good intentions, but complicated by circumstances, given that it’s a place-based blog. During the year since my last blog post, I was only in Cambridge five scattered months, split up by a month-long trip to New Zealand and a few weeks at home in the US for the holidays, and then cut short by the slapdown so many countless people have experienced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In mid-March, in about the span of a week, I went from anticipating the burgeoning spring, walks on the fen, and concerts in college chapels, to packing up my room, booking a flight home, and leaving Cambridge for the foreseeable future. Although I didn’t know how long I would need to hunker down at home, I had a feeling it would be months. Unlike many of my friends on year-long programs, however, I was fairly confident I would be back, and only had to mourn the probable loss of a season or two in Cambridge.
Now I have a return flight to Cambridge booked for September, almost exactly 6 months from the day I left. Although the future is no more certain than it was when I left, I feel the need to grasp the Cambridge time slipping inexorably by. It won’t be quite the same Cambridge—one of the reasons it didn’t feel impossible to leave in the first place—but the cultural-physical landscape of millennia is still there.
I also feel the need to keep constructing my little word-lenses for what I can still access of that landscape, as well as for what I remember of the pre-COVID Cambridge which never made it onto this blog (some of which is sitting in half-finished posts already). The urge to write that I described in my first post has never gone away–just gotten a little held up in execution. So I’ve made a goal to start posting regularly again, long or short, every two weeks, as of now on Saturdays.
Meanwhile, I thought I’d give a little taste of the places I’ve lavished my place-love on when I haven’t been in Cambridge over the last year.
Today, how about some New Zealand?
