Hometown

In a haze this week of excitement and hope: a beautiful house stands by the river in Newton, with a greenhouse and just the right yard, the bedrooms I always hoped to find at the top of staircase, a sunroom, wooded conservation land, the right street. No garage and no shower. Promptly decided we couldn't afford it, but then I couldn't sleep that night deciding in fact this is exactly what we should invest in and take risks for, so we put our own home on the market and got a full-price offer within 48 hours. Which led to another nearly sleepless night. But this time tentatively joyous. No signatures, but contracts in the hands of attorneys.

Anyway, there will be more time later to blog about a bat house, a river boat, a bike trail, a place where I can write my heart out and raise my children. Something else has been drifting up through the ether, though, through the blissful run of projects at work, my baby and her loving caretakers, trying to remember if we fed the cat, midnight nursings, and it's actually outside of all this. It's the Globe. Yeah, the precarious life of the Globe, close to death, revived for the moment, but having bled out all these years, and it makes me really sad. In college I read the Globe as much as I could, but when I moved to Boston I started reading the Times instead. It seemed more substantial. And it was, in fact, because the Times ate bought the Globe and made it a series of reprints and ads. But even though I stopped reading it, I didn't stop mourning it.

A community paper with smart writers (so, sigh, that excludes the Herald) is so valuable. In the wake of the Globe, who will keep the Meninos of our time honest? Who hunts down wrongdoing and makes it transparent? Where does transparency live at all, in fact? Bloggers? Fine, but which one relaces the Globe? Because I still get all my news from nytimes online and let me tell you, I never read about Boston.