Paperwhites on Charles Street

There’s nothing quite like Boston’s Charles Street to take you back in time, especially in these so-short days of early winter. Charles Street operates on a human scale: the shops are small and warmly lit and quirky, and often it is the equally quirky shop owner who greets you. Making its way up Beacon Hill, Charles Street is dotted with corner cafes, bakeries, gift and antique shops, a hardware store, a green grocer, and a small hotel or two tucked into brick townhouses.

Charles Street and Beacon Hill on a December early evening with the snow falling hard and the wind picking up is the stuff of fairy tale and poetry. To trudge up Pinckney Street, just off Charles, in the six o’clock darkness with all that white silence drifting down and to see the golden lights spilling from the old windows is to know wonder.

Every December, my sister and one of our dearest childhood friends take the “T” into town to see the lights and the Newbury windows, to indulge in a hefty sandwich at the Parish Cafe, and to laugh and remember those long ago days when we lived for snow, tumbled in it, slid down it, shaped it into forts and into horses we could ride on. Growing up together on West Main Street in Honeoye Falls, New York meant being outside a lot in every season.

So that day when the snow was like the swirling flurry in those old-fashioned glass globes, we were undeterred and pulled on hats and tugged up collars and set forth. By the time we made it down Arlington to Beacon to Charles, we were pretty much unrecognizable. The snow drifted round our shoulders and into the folds of our hats, sifted down our necks, and made its way into our pockets.

All of this felt quite familiar, as if the years too had been silenced by the snow, and the three of us were seven or eight again. We knew, in spite of the discomfort, there was magic about, and no one turns her back on magic…ever. When I started to complain about my damp shoulders, my friend, Dine, gave me a look from under her snow-caked hood, and I understood that complaining was breaking the code.

And that night, standing at the iron gates of Louisburg Square, in a blur of whiteness and wind, I saw in one window, a single candle. It flickered in the darkness as the snow whirled down, and I thought of home and making one’s way there after a day at work or a season of heartbreak or a lifetime of adventures. I thought of Charles Street and its human proportions, and I thought that all it really takes to guide each of us home is a single candle, a single kind word, one smile. Powerful magic indeed.