Enee hymself ane zow was blak of fleece
Brytnit with his swerd in sacrifice ful hie
Unto the moder of the furies thre.

                                 

Around one in the afternoon I decided to take a look at the beach.  It was high tide and a strong wind was blowing out of the northeast.  An icy wind-driven rain was my escort over the bridge.  The surf was strong, up almost to the snow fence before the dunes.  It was too cold to stay long so I just snapped this picture.  When I got back to my truck, I was soaked to the skin.

                                    

Here are some old photos I took as a boy in my neighborhood in Watertown.This is a picture of my mother and my two oldest sisters, Janice on the left and Nancy in the middle, in our car in 1964 when our Dad was running for state representative.

This is a picture of my three sisters, Judy in front, Nancy behind on the left, Janice behind on the right.  In the middle, are Bobby and Patricia D'amico who lived across the street.  In the distant background you can see the smokestack for Lewandos by the Charles river.

This is a picture of Nancy, Bobby, Janice, Patricia and on the right Peter D'amico all are standing in front of the house directly across from ours at the head of Dana Terrace.  An old woman lived here who was over one hundred years old.  She used to sit on this front porch in a rocking chair.   Her son continued to live there for some time after she died.  There last name was Ferris.

There are bees in this wall.' He struck the clapboards, fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivioted.
                                          R Frost

This house still stands behind the police station in Watertown.  It is magnificent but beyond repair.  When I was a boy, there was a row of victorians here one to the right and one to the left of this one.  I had friends who lived in both of those houses.  I remember playing in their yards and homes.  Even then, in the sixties, they were pretty much beyond repair.  Saltonstall park had been ringed by such houses.   They had been built within walking distance to the railroad station and in the center of town; this was once a choice location to live before the automobile made it possible for high income earners to move farther out into the suburbs.  To the right of the house pictured above is the corner of a red brick apartment building.  The economics or the architecture of the sixties seemed to demand that every time an ornate victorian home was torn down it would be replaced by a square apartment building.

I sat for an hour in Watertown Savings Bank looking out at the Square while a customer service rep named Rachel transferred my dad's account balances into an estate account. On the wall to my right is an old painting of the very scene the window looked out on, now facing directly on the Armenian museum.  In the picture, the spot is occupied by a large federal style building with steps coming down front.  I believe this was the old town hall.   I remarked to Rachel that my dad remembered sitting on those long-gone steps as a child.  I did not say but I remembered sitting in a nearby pine tree, now twice as tall and watching the old victorian train station also in the painting behind the town hall burn to the ground.  And behind that in the picture was the top of the old wooden church torn down in the seventies. I could have told her I remembered sneeking into that church and climbing up into the bell tower and onto the roof.  On the other side of the street facing our window was the old Federal Savings Bank building I remembered that being built in the early sixties.  And I could have told her that my dad used to send me down to Mum's doughnuts on Sunday mornings to get a dozen doughnuts; it was a little shop directly across the street briefly occupying the space before the Armenian museum was built.   By the way, the Armenian museum building was originally built for Watertown Savings Bank and I had my first bank account there.