Picture Perfect: Selkirk

Boston, Massachusetts
April 29, 2006

I’m at a museum conference in Boston, with free time on a lovely spring day. So I ride the Green Line to Brighton to visit a memory-haunted house.

I hop off the trolley at Sutherland and walk uphill to Selkirk Road. The old Victorian still looks as I remember—better, actually, than when I last stepped inside 25 years ago. New owners have repainted it and added a cheerful green awning over the front door. It looks more like a B&B now, than the group house I lived in with six or more others for three years when I left home after college and moved to Boston.

You could blindfold me and I could lead you through it room by room. I could point out each fireplace, describe the stained glass over the parlor window, show you the bookcases curving along the walls of the library, note the corbels—of Bacchus and Hercules, my landlord and friend Ken told me—guarding the upstairs hall.

I could walk you up the staircase to my room above the front door. You could gaze through that broad window, as I used to do, and imagine me sitting there at my desk for untold evenings over a dozen seasons, trying to puzzle out who I was, writing poems by candlelight, agonizing over whether I was a real writer.

I approach the woman working in the front yard. I lived here in the late ’70s, I tell her. The house looks really great. She thanks me and asks if I’d like to look around inside, after her husband comes home. But I decline her kind offer. I’m glad that I feel happy seeing Selkirk again. But there are ghosts in there I don’t want to waken.

Picture Perfect is a series of occasional short posts, each focused on a single image that captures a memory from travels past.

David Romanowski, 2022