This year for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch's birthday, we furthered our explorations of the local waterways by venturing out just before sunset to the Mystic Dam. We had been seeing it from Route 16 for years. We had hoped to be able to walk across it, but instead—on account of all the signs and fences—admired the soft red brick of the gatehouse between the luminous greys of the clouds and the water and wandered the opposite direction through the ice and branches of the trail beside the river. At the point where the light had ebbed to a definite dusk and our faces were freezing, we extricated ourselves from Jötunheim and reclaimed the car. The dam and the curve of the lake were full of reflecting lights, industrial bioluminescence. Our route home took us circuitously and fortuitously through Winchester, where we discovered that our beloved Frozen Hoagies, which we had regularly visited in its original brick-and-mortar location on Powderhouse Circle, had not after all closed in the first year of the pandemic but apparently relocated, which took care of all questions of dessert. Dinner came courtesy of Sheger in North Cambridge, which furnished us with a two-person combo of collards and cabbage and three kinds of lentils and stews of beef and lamb and chicken with a hard-boiled egg on top and more injera than we could actually eat in a sitting, and Vincent's supplied Rob with a hot buttered rum and me with my first cocktail in more than three years, a compound of mezcal, vermouth, elderflower, and gentian called a Catrina Negroni; it was colorless except for a float of lemon peel and tasted like herbal smoke. Because I had ordered it almost a month in advance, I was able to present Rob with the second volume of the collected lost radio scripts of Jack Benny. We are watching screwballs and musicals off TCM. It is nice to have a visiting river again.
spatch's birthday, we furthered our explorations of the local waterways by venturing out just before sunset to the Mystic Dam. We had been seeing it from Route 16 for years. We had hoped to be able to walk across it, but instead—on account of all the signs and fences—admired the soft red brick of the gatehouse between the luminous greys of the clouds and the water and wandered the opposite direction through the ice and branches of the trail beside the river. At the point where the light had ebbed to a definite dusk and our faces were freezing, we extricated ourselves from Jötunheim and reclaimed the car. The dam and the curve of the lake were full of reflecting lights, industrial bioluminescence. Our route home took us circuitously and fortuitously through Winchester, where we discovered that our beloved Frozen Hoagies, which we had regularly visited in its original brick-and-mortar location on Powderhouse Circle, had not after all closed in the first year of the pandemic but apparently relocated, which took care of all questions of dessert. Dinner came courtesy of Sheger in North Cambridge, which furnished us with a two-person combo of collards and cabbage and three kinds of lentils and stews of beef and lamb and chicken with a hard-boiled egg on top and more injera than we could actually eat in a sitting, and Vincent's supplied Rob with a hot buttered rum and me with my first cocktail in more than three years, a compound of mezcal, vermouth, elderflower, and gentian called a Catrina Negroni; it was colorless except for a float of lemon peel and tasted like herbal smoke. Because I had ordered it almost a month in advance, I was able to present Rob with the second volume of the collected lost radio scripts of Jack Benny. We are watching screwballs and musicals off TCM. It is nice to have a visiting river again. 
