New Life in Massachusetts
It's been almost a month since we moved to Quincy, MA. Our moving date was May 22nd, 2026, I am only now coming back to the blog. I needed time for my mind to settle, to feel as though all of my needs (e.g., home, food, clothing, routines) were being consistently met before I could engage in higher order thoughts and reflections.
There are things I acutely miss from Bay Ridge. I won't make a comprehensive list, but the things and places I miss the most are the ones that formed the tapestry of my daily life. I miss Cream, my local coffee shop on 3rd Ave. I miss the iced coffee--COFFEE, medium roast, not cold brew--and the little bear financier that I would order after my weekend long runs. There isn't a coffee shop within walking distance of our new apartment that's of an equivalent caliber; no, I am not going to Starbucks. I also strongly miss my old yoga studio, the yoga teacher Erica G, and the community I had there.
I did my best to try to replicate my life in its exact structure as it was in Bay Ridge. I tried a well-reviewed yoga studio in Quincy by attending Saturday morning vinyasa. Simple. It's a yoga studio in a converted New England clapboard home. There were only three other students there and it felt...antiseptic, rather cold, compared to the warmth and laughter that filled all of my yoga sessions at Owl's Head Yoga. It made me melancholic during the yoga session--so much so that I couldn't focus on aligning breath to movement and I was in my head the whole time. I didn't go back for another class at that studio.
There are, however, many plus-sides to living in Quincy. Our new apartment is incredibly spacious. I have a patio, with a garden. See these photos for some new additions to my garden family.
Lemon Verbena
Lemon Balm
Unfortunately, one of the trade-offs I had to make to live in NYC on a budget was to forego gardening. It was a dramatic change from my prior life in Napa Valley, with our gigantic rosemary bush, our porch patio with various herbs, and the zucchini and kale that grew in abundance during the summer. I rarely had to purchase herbs because our garden had nearly everything. Now, I wake up excited to say hello to my plants both indoors and on the patio. I gingerly sip my homemade coffee (see the above complaint about the lack of a good coffee shop) and quietly wish my plants good morning. Every. Single. Morning. It's grounding and it's inwardly fulfilling to care for things outside of yourself. I really don't enjoy growing flowers for aesthetic purposes--unless they're native pollinators! I am only interested in growing things I can use, a lot of which at this point are herbs.
One other positive aspect about living in Quincy is that we now have a car, which I can now use to drive to various trails and points of interest throughout Boston and the greater New England region. I've started trail running again. My first trail run was this past Sunday morning in Concord, MA at Walden Pond. The inner bookworm in me loved it and I was thrilled by the prospect of traversing the same trails Henry David Thoreau walked many years ago. Unlike him, I enjoy and wouldn't want to give up my "cosmopolitan" lifestyle. I love being in and of the world. However, I do think it's necessary to take moments out of your day, week, year, to turn inward and seek solace in nature, in the "Universal Oversoul," as the transcendentalists would put it.
View from the shore of Walden Pond
Another pond we stopped at along the route, which I liked for the waterlilies floating on the surface
I'm so sensitive. It's one of my favorite qualities about myself yet I find it quite draining to be this sensitive to the world. I spend so much of my time thinking about what does it mean to live a meaningful life, what is meaningful to me, within the confines of my life as it's constructed now how do I become closer to the person I want to be? These questions are at the forefront of my mind. I don't want to wake up at 65 and realize that I've been asleep all these decades, slowly watching life drift by in a haze of work I don't care about and attempts to spark joy in the few off-hours I find. To that end, I've pushed myself to read again, learn about the plants I'm growing, and pick at the keyboard again. I set those activities aside in the move and am now at the place where I want to work towards my own personal development goals. These philosophical questions I've mentioned feel even more relevant with the advent of AI and the prospect of widespread job-losses and layoffs. Whole swathes of the American--nay, the global--populace can face threats to their livelihoods, the sheer ability to feed and house themselves. On the pragmatic note when considering the financial ramifications of more widespread usage of AI, I am fearful. I don't have faith in the state nor federal government to be proactive and make this new technology work for humans. We're already seeing this with the expansion of data centers in communities that are facing water shortages. On a more intellectual level, I am afraid of what AI means for us as humans, as people who create, feel, write, read, consider, learn, re-read. Will humans feel a diminished desire to create? Less freedom or space to make art? Will people even read literature anymore? I already have a poignant sense of my own isolation when I am very enthralled by a piece of classic literature. I want to talk about books with someone, yet it often can feel as though no one else reads books that are intellectually demanding.
Wow. I didn't realize that this post would take the turn it did. I'll leave that there, as apparently I had these feelings inside of me and they wanted to come out.