Alan Ilagan

One of the supreme joys of summer is the BLT. When it’s made by your husband, and served with iced tea, there’s no better way to spend the lunch hour.

On a gloriously sunny afternoon, Andy picked up a prize piece of swordfish from Two Cousins, and I stopped at Price Chopper to get the ingredients for a mango salsa. A few mangoes, a red pepper, a jalapeno pepper, a red onion, and a few scallions were chopped and mixed for the salsa.

Next time I’ll do a rougher chop – less fine – as the salsa was a little too watery for my liking. I’ll also add a bit of fresh cilantro (which I forgot at the market). That meant the lime cilantro Basmati rice was a pale comparison to the fresh version – dried cilantro is pointless.

Andy was in charge of the grilling – on our new grill, which he loves. Last week he made a perfect batch of hamburgers and hot dogs, and he worked similar magic on the swordfish.

The finished product was a sight to see, and something scrumptious to taste. With Andy’s grilled fish and my mango salsa and Basmati rice, we made quite the nice dinner together.

There’s always room for improvement, but this was a great first-fish-on-the-new-grill attempt, and it will only get better.

Up for tomorrow: some fresh salmon…

A pair of finches made a home in one of our hanging ferns. Andy thought that was what they were up to, and once it was confirmed we had to be very careful with the way we watered. We had a happy compromise – the mother would fly away to the dogwood or the pine tree while we insured the plant got its water, then return when we were done. I captured a few photos as well, careful not to disturb or get any human scent near the nest. Birds have been known to abandon nests where they detect foreign smells.

For a week or two we watched the mother guard her nest, and a couple of days ago the eggs finally hatched.

They were so tiny, so helpless, so utterly at the risk of the world. The heartbreaking fragility of life. There were so many things that could hurt them, they had but a precious scant chance to reach their full potential – yet here they were, standing in the face of all reason that such small creatures couldn’t survive. They gave me hope.

When we returned home yesterday, Andy said the finches hadn’t been around all day, which he found strange. As he approached the nest, there was no sound – no screeching mouths of fuzzy babies – and no warning cries of vigilant parents. The birds were gone. They just disappeared.

An empty nest is surely one of the saddest sights to behold. Andy suspected the catbirds he had seen in the area, or possibly one of the neighborhood cats. I didn’t want to entertain those ideas. I took one last photo of the forlorn nest, holding back and forcing myself not to dwell on the Mother’s work, the Father’s guard, and the cries of those tiny birds.

It may seem odd that when celebrating our anniversary I should want some alone time in the Garden, but it’s sort of a tradition. On the day Andy and I were married, there was a brief window of time after the ceremony and Wedding Lunch where the guests and the newly-betrothed had some down-time before dinner.

A year ago I made my way back into the Garden, walking the perimeter of the pond and watching the pair of swans. On this day, a year later, I returned to the park alone, and found them again.

Before I left the Garden, the swans swam to each other under the walking bridge. They met and nuzzled their heads, then swam off together.

The next morning we made our way to the SoWa Market. It opened for the season just a couple weeks ago, and was just an enchanting as it was on my last visit back in the Fall. This time there were flowering cherries lining our way, and a trio of magenta redbuds on a side street leading to the market.

There are magical objects found in every corner of the market, beautiful things that only reveal themselves when you seemingly stop looking. It’s the way a store opens up after a while. You can browse with a head intent on buying, but if you force it too much it proves elusive.

We had a quick brunch at Mohr & McPherson, then traversed the wares at the Market, before walking back towards the condo. A Japanese store along the way held more whimsical secrets, including a gorgeous collection of kimono, both intact and repurposed into various accessories.

Andy returned to the condo for his afternoon siesta, while I foraged Newbury Street for a man clutch, which I found and held for dear life as we walked back into the South End for cocktails at The Gallows and Dinner at Stella.

The afternoon threatened but did not deliver rain. Though the inside of The Gallows was cozy and warm enough to stave off any raging storm.

A pair of cocktails didn’t hurt things either.

Dinner at Stella was delicious, if a bit noisy thanks to a large table in the center of the dining room (complete with a number of rowdy children). But once they left it quieted and turned into a lovely dinner. Our time in Boston – and our first anniversary – was coming to a close. As always, I didn’t want it to end.

We arrived at midnight on Friday, so we could wake up as we did on our wedding day and walk over to the Boston Public Garden.

The day dawned with a burst of sunshine. We had had a restless sleep, as storms had moved in during the night, and the sound of dripping rain on the air conditioner kept us both up.

By Saturday morning, however, there were a few brief hours of sun-filled glory, and we made our way to the Garden where it had happened a year ago.

On the way, we stopped at Shreve, Crump & Low to have our wedding rings cleaned. The gentleman who originally sold them to us was there behind the counter, and he shook our hands and offered congratulations before taking them into the back and cleaning them. After a half-hearted attempt at offering Andy a peek at the $10,000 watches, he let us continue on our journey.

The park was almost exactly as it was last year. The flowering trees were different – this year the Kwanzan cherries were in full bloom (they had already finished last year at this time) and the wedding cake tree (Viburnum) was not even in bud. The rest of the city had blossomed for the weekend – apples and crabapples and cherries all lent their colorful blooms and sweet fragrance everywhere we went. It is the best time of the year to be in Boston.

We sat on a bench reminiscing about the wedding and taking in the beautiful day, but storm-clouds were closing in, so we walked back towards the condo. Along the way, we stopped at the Taj, where their peonies were once again on display as they were last year. Unfortunately, we did not have a suite to return to, heading instead to Copley.

Andy bought a bouquet of peonies from the flower shop, and then it was time for me to pick out my anniversary gift. I went easy on him and chose the new Jack Black fragrance at Neiman Marcus (hey, when the other contenders were Tom Ford and Creed, Jack Black is a veritable bargain).

The rain had started falling by that time, so we slowly meandered through Copley Place, peeking into Burberry and Barney’s, but only buying a pair of shorts at Benetton. Champagne taste on a beer budget, is that the saying? No matter, I love the shorts. One last wistful glance at the Tiffany windows, and we were back at the condo preparing for the evening.

For Andy’s anniversary present, I surprised him with tickets to ‘The Drowsy Chaperone’, followed by reservations at Noche. The rain started up again, and by the time we got close to the theater it was coming down pretty hard. Instead of trying 28 Degrees, we ducked into Sibling Rivalry, where we found two open seats at the bar as the Kentucky Derby played on a big flat screen across from us.

They had an interesting cocktail menu, and a genius or two behind the bar, and soon I was on my third Evergreen – a glorious gin and chartreuse-based concoction that went down quite smoothly.

‘The Drowsy Chaperone’, as presented by the SpeakEasy Stage Company, was just as entertaining and satisfying a romp as when we first saw it a few years ago, and Andy enjoyed every moment. We were a little early for our Noche reservation, so the corner table they originally offered for our anniversary dinner was not yet ready, but we were too hungry to wait, so we sat at the first available spot, which ended up being just as intimate. Not that intimacy mattered – both of us were too consumed with the culinary creations to care much about anything else. Some restaurants do food really well, some sacrifice that for style – Noche delivered both, and with an attentive and gracious staff who went out of their way to make our dinner a special event.

By the time we walked back along the blossom-lined way home, the rain had stopped. The enchantment of a Spring twilight in Boston was upon us.

Everything about our wedding weekend came perfectly together, as if the whole world pitched in to bring about a little jewel of time that would forever-after be cherished. Easily one of the best weekends of my life, for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons, it will be remembered as a life-long dream come true – of finding a partner, of being in a gorgeous place, of having a sunny day in May and the summer laid out before us.

As a little boy, and later as a young man, there were certain moments where I felt I had glimpsed the sublime – a walk in the fern-carpeted woods before school let out for the summer, a solitary stream-side revelry in Ireland, a rainbow-covered drive one August afternoon.

The idea of the sublime was a romantic notion, an obscure literary term, for those moments when one feels so overcome by beauty or sensory rapture that the heart bursts with joy and happiness, overflowing with a love of life, of being alive at that one moment. This was one of those times – only now I was sharing it with someone I loved.