Yesterday I ventured out to walk beyond the neighborhood. The big snow was more than a week ago, so I felt confident that most icy patches would be gone.
I was wrong. Icy patches were plentiful on the walk I took around Lake Anne, snow packed and hardened into slickness. But there was plenty of pavement, too, enough to make me continue.
Enter the mincing step. This is when you walk so slowly and gingerly that an observer might think you weren’t moving at all. This is when you throw caution aside and hobble unabashedly like a little old lady.
This is what I did yesterday, did it several times in fact. On the minus side, I walked so slowly that my toes felt like lumps of ice. On the plus side, I didn’t fall. An excellent tradeoff, I think.
This time of year a walk through my neighborhood has two distinct contours. When I leave the house well-bundled against the cold, I think at first that it’s not bad — not exactly warm but not bitter, either.
That feeling quickly vanishes at the midpoint of my stroll, when I turn to trudge back the way I came. It’s those prevailing westerlies, you see, and all the frosty air they bring with them this time of year.
The air makes a mockery of the headband I wear over my ears. It blusters right into my hood, almost blowing it off my head. It makes me ball up my fingers inside my gloves. Most of all, it makes me pick up my pace. It’s no surprise that I run part of the way home.
I could always turn right instead of left at the end of my street and reverse the temperature and tempo of my hikes. But it makes more sense to warm up first. The only way around this reality is to take another route, but given the unplowed status of most nearby trails, that won’t happen anytime soon.
So for the next few days, at least, these two-temp walks are what I have. At least they keep things interesting.
I’ve broken through a reluctance to write in my books, scribbling happily in review copies and textbooks. But last night I felt similarly compelled to mark up a magazine article. There were just too many passages I wanted to ponder, so I pulled out a pen.
The article was “The Anti-Social Century” in the February Atlantic, which discusses how Americans are spending more time alone than ever before. Riffing on the famous “Bowling Alone” work of Robert Putnam, the article explores the effect of social media, ordering takeout and the lingering effects of the pandemic, among other causes of isolation.
Like any writing that offers aha moments, this article hits on truths I’ve experienced in my own life. For instance, when I enrolled in a graduate program I wanted only to meet in person. But many classes met online. At first I actively avoided them, but now I seek them out. I choose what’s easiest in the short-term rather than what’s better in the long-term. (Though I may complain about the traffic, I enjoy in-person classes the most.)
But it’s the way author Derek Thompson explores the topic that made me highlight sentences and paragraphs. What we’re missing, he says, is not the inner ring of companionship — we are in closer touch with family and friends than ever before, given our technological tethers — or the outer ring of social media contacts —which connect us to our tribe. What’s missing is the middle zone, the village, our neighbors and acquaintances. “Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance.”
Social isolation has a price, and we are paying it, as Thompson explains. According to one analysis a “five-percentage-point increase in alone time was associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10 percent lower household income.”
With journalism like this it’s no wonder that the Atlantic has returned to 12-month-a-year print circulation after 20 years of a reduced schedule. It’s the rare print success story, and good news for “printophiles” like me. Now I have two more issues a year to mark and underline.
A crisp blue sky today but I keep my eyes on the ground, on the ghostly traces of slurried salt, the feeble fist we shake against winter. Today is cold but clear, snow contained but not yet melted. It feels as if we might win this battle.
But I look closer, see the rimed crust of last week’s skirmishes, recall the slick side streets. We’re only where we are because the weather has cooperated.
What struck me on this morning’s walk was the beauty of whitened cracks in the pavement, what’s left from last week’s treated roads. The residue is most visible along the shoulders and in crevices once hidden, now outlined in white. It ought to be ugly, but is not. It reminds me of the vulnerability of the modern world, of how, despite our bluster, we fumble and we fail. And there is beauty in the failure.
This morning I was up before daybreak preparing a crockpot dish for dinner tonight. It wasn’t like I had to rake the coals and start the fire, but the recipe did require a prodigious amount of chopping, and given the attention it gave to a meal hours away, I did feel a bit like a pioneer woman.
This is veering dangerously close to an earlier post about the habits of cookery. But it also brings to mind the fact that time spent in the kitchen is often time spent in one’s own head.
I don’t mind spending time in my head, depending upon what’s rolling around in there. This morning it was mostly thoughts of how I was making dinner before I even had breakfast. Luckily, donuts have arrived, so all is well.
Here in the mid-Atlantic snow usually falls and melts within days. This year we have the frigid temperatures to keep white stuff on the ground a little longer. Long enough for reinforcements to arrive, in other words.
Last night we received a fresh coat of snow. Once again, tree branches are outlined in white, ghostly arms reaching toward the sky. Once again, holly leaves hang heavy with their burden.
Once again, there is shoveling to do (though I’ve largely escaped the duty this year), paths to carve, steps to sweep.
Once again our wan gray world is made new again, if only for a few hours.
Last night I stepped out of the cold and into a gallery, from the elements into the elemental. It was one of the chilliest nights we’ve had for a long time, and I was beginning to question the wisdom of taking a bus and a Metro into D.C. then walking for blocks in the subfreezing windchill.
But once we stepped into the gallery, all hesitations vanished. Here were portraits and landscapes, collages and sculptures. Here was a thoughtful still life, the surprise of two metal hands hanging from the ceiling, a tiny macramé-like canvas of punctured threads. Here was the human imagination in all its weirdness and glory.
It wasn’t just the art that banished the cold. It was the warmth of visiting with a friend I hadn’t seen in years, and finding her just the same except, I think, more content. And that was the loveliest sight of all.
A new semester has begun, sooner than I thought it would and undeniably here. I have readings to do, notes to study and a syllabus to consult. But after the first class last evening, I also have new thoughts to think, which is why I’ve gone back to school in the first place.
So far, the professor seems to be asking the big questions. One idea that stuck with me from last night’s lecture is learning about what some call the Axial Age, a period of incredible intellectual growth and curiosity that lasted from the 8th to the 3rd centuries BCE. As the professor said, “People kind of woke up and started questioning and looking for answers about almost everything in a very rational way.”
It was a parallel awakening of consciousness across civilizations that’s hard to explain, and it resulted in the development of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, and Taoism, among other religions and philosophies.
The Axial Age gave us the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Homer, Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, and the prophets Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah. It was a paradigm-shifting age. No one one is exactly sure why it happened, but we live in its amazing wake.
(“A Reading from Homer” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1885, courtesy Wikipedia.)
With a new year and the pace of life picking up, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for weeks: I made granola. Nothing earth-shattering about this except the way I felt when I was making it, which was hungry. Very hungry.
It dawned on me as I stirred the oats, nuts, flaked coconut and other ingredients, that if I lived even 100 years ago, certainly 150, I would usually have had to bake, boil or toast my breakfast. There would have been no instant oatmeal, no cold cereals to pour into a bowl with a splash of milk (or not), no containers of yogurt at the ready. I would often have been hungry while preparing a meal.
As it stands now, much of my food is “fast food,” since I often get by with salads assembled or leftovers reheated. And if I’m preparing a meal and already starving, I just dip into the cupboard for a handful of almonds and the pangs are staved off until hot food is on the table.
What struck me this morning is how instantly gratified I am in the kitchen and how rare this condition is throughout human history. It’s an awareness I’d like to keep in mind. And I will … once I dig into the granola.
It took months to figure it out, but once I did, it was a constant marvel. The Crystal City Underground was a part of my life for five years, and now it will be no more, at least in its funky, mom-and-pop style.
When I worked across the street from one of its entrances, I would dash into the underground to mail a package, pick up lunch or check out a library book. The maze of tunnels also came in handy on rainy or snowy days, when I could walk warm and dry from Metro to within feet of my office.
But now, I’ve learned, no leases will be renewed in the buildings that comprised the underground (though most of it is above ground, it does give off a subterranean vibe). It’s been likened to a futuristic invention, but to me it always seemed more like the past, a place where you could get your shoes repaired and chat with the cobbler while it was happening.
Amazon has moved into the neighborhood and may have plans for the underground’s future. All I know is that, for now, one more bit of real, hands-on life is disappearing from view.
