I wonder if it will ever fade? The sudden lurch of my heart and pause in breath when I look up and see the shimmering belly of a low flying 757 as it passes just above the buildings here on Summer Street. Logan Airport is just North East across a short span of the harbor so on any given day the air traffic follows flight patterns directly over the city. It got me thinking about this time last year when we were burdened with an unusually harsh Winter coupled with the seemingly endless Orange Terror Alert. People were buying up rolls of plastic sheeting and duct tape, some were storing rations of food in their basements just in case.
I'd just begun working in Boston last December and Jeff encouraged me to carry a bottle of water and a couple Power Bars in my back pack. "En casa de una emergencia!" we'd laugh a bit nervously. We both ride the commuter rail into work every morning, what would we do if some thing happened? It's a challenge to get out of the city when there's a bad snow storm, how would we respond to an event that brought panic to the 1.2 million people who lived and worked there every day? Where would we go? Home is twenty-two miles West of the city but there is no route to walk the distance. After some discussion we agreed if the shit hit the fan he'd meet me on the East side of the Fort Point Channel outside my office and we would walk the six miles to my mother's house in Dorchester.
It seems a lifetime ago ~ it seems like just yesterday.