Boston at night

I walked home from my haircut appointment Saturday about 6PM—it gets dark here before 5 in the winter, so most of the apartments were lit up and many of them had Christmas trees in their windows. In Kansas City, you could see some homes like that but because the homes were almost all single family, you wouldn’t see lots. But in the South End where I live, the apartments are pretty much all converted brownstones (see a short history on the South End here), so each building can have three or four or sometimes five apartments depending on how many floors the building has.

Walking past all the lit up homes always reminds me of one of my favorite Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales, The Little Match Girl. It’s a pretty sad story, but any time I walk in the dark and see homes lit up, I remember the visions she saw as she lit those matches. Even though I’m not a poor little match girl, I feel as though I’m getting a sense of her last moments as she sees the fire, the feast and finally her grandmother.

Lest you think I was a morbid child, I also loved The Princess and the Pea. My mother says that’s only natural since I am as fussy and high maintenance as she was.