where I live

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My husband, Ted, and I bought a house in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston in autumn of 2000. What sold us on the house was the beautiful quality of afternoon light, particularly in the kitchen which I have been photographing ever since. Also, we saw potential in the lot out back. With a dilapidated shed being the prominent feature of the long, narrow space, we had our work cut out for us.

That stretch of yard I called the dog run is now the garden in my photos. And the brick patio that replaced the shed is where we have supper and play cards on summer evenings. The bird in the series is none other than Eddie Cantor, named after my beloved great uncle Tom's canary of long ago. The sea of yellow behind him is the evening primrose in its June glory. Those flowers are descendants of the ones my grandmother planted in her garden in Clyde, New York, in the 1920's. Our pole beans have ancestors in the seeds she brought over from Italy when she emigrated to America in 1913.

Had my grandmother been with my grandfather aboard the Carpathia the previous April—on one of his many crossings before leaving the old country for good—she, too, would have long remembered the night "when it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop." The source of that vast silence were the stunned Titanic survivors he'd helped to make room for. Not so when they sailed into New York harbor to the sound of all the boats honking their horns in jubilation.

Carpathia