Keep hoarding books I'll never read

I had an hour in between my two appointments this afternoon, so I spent about forty-five minutes walking around the Charles River. Everything looked small and bright and distinct in the winter sunlight; there were cars and trains on the Longfellow Bridge, but exactly one pedestrian who came up behind me and passed me when I was leaning on the cold cast-iron curlicues of the railing to study what I suddenly realized was the remnants of a drawbridge over Broad Canal that I cannot remember ever seeing raised in my life, but the concrete block of the counterweight is still in place in its mantis-green steel truss frame. I had forgotten or not known that the new footbridge over Storrow Drive is called the Fanny Appleton, after Longfellow's wife, and I had not previously had the chance to observe the quotation from the poet's "To the River Charles" now carved into the low curved granite of the micro-park at the foot of the pepper-pot stairs—Till at length thy rest thou findest, In the bosom of the sea! There was an older man sitting on one of the park benches of the Esplanade, gazing out over the water that looked almost ice-pale when the sun hit right off it. The dead leaves on the verges of the pavement were mixed up with thin little glitters of ice. I walked downriver until I hit the spiked fencing that prevented me from getting into the old lock of the former Charles River Dam where I used to see tugboats tied up when I was a child; I saw a few more people passing, but mostly Canada geese making majestically inelegant splashdowns on the river, ducks preening and overturning, squirrels flackering their tails at one another and completely ignoring me as I cut across the patch of dry grass between them. According to the banner on the side of the Museum of Science, I had just missed an exhibit of model trains. I would have bought the hardcover of Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House (2008) from the sale cart of the West End Branch of the BPL if I had not opened it and discovered it had been underlined in very heavy pencil on almost every page. I did not end the day without books, however: after my second appointment I headed to Harvard to catch what I could of the anti-war protest on Cambridge Common, which turned out to be half an hour of signs, speeches, and chants before I got too cold, fortunately ran into skygiants before she had to catch a bus, and eventually met up with spatch at Raven Used Books, from which I left with Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future (2009) and the Bloomsbury Movie Guide Nigel Andrews on Jaws (1999). We managed to catch a train and a bus home without having to wait half an hour at either station. It didn't make up for the afternoon's taxi, but it was a nice thought.

The inside of my head is not a great place to be at the moment; I am trying to spend more time outside of it. Of course, what I do on long or even short walks is think, but I am happier to have been out in the cold and the wind and the gilt-wash of sunlight than not. Could have used some snow. Could use a lot of other things. My phone remains not designed for photography, but I still like how this picture came out.