In the fall of 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, Libby DeLana was out for a walk on Plum Island with her son and a few friends when, on a whim, they decided to go in the water. Afterwards, on the beach, they looked at each other and couldn’t stop laughing — they hadn’t felt so alive or so free since lockdown began. She left the beach that day with no inkling that it would become a habit. But 24 hours later, she and her “pod” returned to Plum Island, and did it again.
Now, Delana — who grew up hating the cold — dips five or six times a week. It’s become an essential part of her day, no different than making her bed or brushing her teeth.
“I thought getting in freezing cold water would be miserable and hard, and it was. But after a while, it became a near-daily exercise in defining myself,” she writes. “The longer I kept getting in the water the less it was about the cold and the more it was about exposure. The physical challenge stripped everyhting away: false narratives, fear, grief and anger.”
She almost always dips with a group of women — sometimes two, sometimes 50. “We show up as we are. We laugh. We yelp. We can hardly believe that we’re hacking through the ice,” she explains.
“A lot of people ask how long I stay in. My answer is always that I stay in until I get calm. When I submerge, I exhale, I relax and invite myself to ‘calm.’ Once I’m there, I can decide when to get out,” she says. “Staying in isn’t better or braver or stronger. Just getting in is all of those things.”
Read Libby Delana’s full essay at the link in our bio.
Video: Robin Lubbock
Producers: Cloe Axelson and Robin Lubbock
Fred Hewett has lived within a mile of the Charles River for more than 40 years. When he first moved to Boston, in the early 1970s, the river was noxious and latte-colored – the stuff of “dirty water.” But over time, as the health of the river improved, so did Fred’s relationship to it. It has profoundly shaped his experience of the city.
“As you spend more time around Boston, the Charles River infuses your consciousness,” he writes.
“I found myself drawn to the river not only for recreation but also because I felt a connection. It became both a place for a walk with a new friend and a refuge for solitary contemplation in difficult times,” he explains. “It became my reference point, the physical and cultural locus through which I understood my adopted hometown.”
This weekend, Boston hosts the Head of the Charles — the world’s largest three-day regatta. Thousands of athletes and spectators will make their way to the river’s banks. But for Fred, the river is the real attraction: “The Charles is the shining centerpiece around which the racing revolves.”
This piece is part of WBUR’S Field Guide to Boston. Read and listen to Fred’s essay at the link in our bio.
Video: Robin Lubbock
Producers: Cloe Axelson and Robin Lubbock
There are rites of passage as a Boston sports fan: Fenway Park on a 56-degree day in June. Watching the Patriots at a dive bar. The electricity of the city on Marathon Monday.
In this behind-the-essay video, Cog’s senior editor, Cloe Axelson, explains that she wasn’t born loving Boston teams: Her dad’s from Chicago — and by birthright she roots for the Cubs.
She became a Boston sports fan when she moved here for college more than two decades ago. And now she can link milestones in her life with big Boston games she remembers.
The 1999 ALCS, when the Red Sox lost to the Yankees 4 to 1? She watched it with her college roommates. The “Snowbowl” in 2002, when the Pats beat the Raiders in a blizzard? She lived in NYC then, and watched the game at a bar in the East Village. The night the Celtics retired Kevin Garnett’s number? She was with her dad at the TD Garden to see it happen.
“There is an impermanence to sports, just as there is in life. Players get traded, luck changes, team dynamics are a complex alchemy that’s impossible to replicate,” Cloe writes. “But that constant of change ensures hope at the beginning of every season.”
This piece is part of WBUR’s Field Guide to Boston. Read and listen to the full essay the link in bio.
Tatyana McFadden
Tatyana McFadden is widely considered the fastest and most formidable wheelchair racer of all time. She’s a 20-time Paralympic medalist and has won two dozen major marathons, including Boston five times.
She lined up in Hopkinton again on Monday, less than 24 hours after winning the Chicago Marathon for the ninth time.
McFadden told us that she’s on a mission to podium in five major marathons this fall. “Whatever I’m determined to do, I will do it,” she says. “There’s no turning back.”
As ‘9/11 Kids,' We Only Have The Stories Other People Tell Us About Our Dad
Sophia and Lindsay Cook lost their dad on 9/11.
"I feel like I've dealt with it internally, on my own time, and I've been figuring out what it means to miss somebody who you never knew," Lindsay says.
Story: https://wbur.fm/3yU4Nre
My Mother, The Doctor. She's Still Inside There Someplace
"To have once been someone so at the center of things, only to end life shuffled to the side," the novelist Julia Claiborne Johnson writes of her mother. "It kills me just to think about it."
Full story: https://wbur.fm/3pFcheF
A Love Letter To The TV Shows That Got Me Through The Pandemic
Writer Sara Shukla looks back over a year of the pandemic, when her emergency room doctor husband went to live on a boat for 10 weeks as he worked treating the first surge of COVID-19 patients.
At night, Sara turned to her television to manage the stress of those days. "My TV let me feel like a person for a few hours each night, enough to be able to get up and do it all again the next day," she writes.
Full story: https://wbur.fm/3vrmEVA
I Know The Water Is Coming. But I Can't Bear To Sell My Family's Cottage
WBUR senior editor Barbara Moran writes about the beach cottage in Queens, New York her grandfather bought in 1934 for $750.
Climate change threatens the bungalow, but "It feels right to stay," she says, "and take my chances with the sea."
(See her essay here: https://wbur.fm/3wC8PUs)
School's Back! Now Can We Please Keep Some Lessons From Hybrid Learning?
“I can’t be the only one who misses some aspects of hybrid life,” says Joanna Weiss: https://wbur.fm/3eEbdmd
A Daughter Remembers Her Father
As the country mourns more than half a million dead from COVID, we're remembering just one life lost.
Salman Wasti was a professor, a cook, a lover of plants and a collector of things.
His daughter, Noreen Wasti, shared her father's story with us. Watch excerpts below; read and listen to the full piece at the link: https://wbur.fm/3uf4V3m
Swift
Jane M. Swift, the former Mass. governor, has three daughters dealing with COVID-college, a time-consuming small farm, a recently-widowed mother, a job she loves (that has become more demanding and less financially secure in the last year), and a husband who is enduring a health crisis.
That's enough to make anybody occasionally sob in the shower. Swift argues there are simple ways to keep women in the workforce.
Read and listen to her full essay: https://wbur.fm/37liVPt
The Uncertainty Around Back-To-School
July 4th Is Different This Year, And Also The Same
I Am A Future Doctor. And I Am Also An Undocumented American: Behind The Essay
When Climate Change Comes Home: Behind The Essay
When Climate Change Comes Home: Behind The Essay
When Climate Change Comes Home: Behind The Essay
Tom Kiefer Turns Items Confiscated At The Border Into Art
3 Reasons Why People Steal Art
