Today’s rain will bring down many leaves. I feel as I always do in late autumn — sad to see the foliage go but grateful for the show it’s put on in the process.
This year I’ve seen three brilliant bursts of color: in New England last month, on the drive to and while in Kentucky last week, and finally, the swirls of yellows and oranges that greeted me here in Virginia when I returned on Monday.
Three autumns in one year.
Not to make too much of the election results — because this blog is anything but political — but I’ve been heartened by the lighter moods of those around me. Even the air yesterday felt more buoyant.
At book group last night, the mood was celebratory. Earlier in the day, a friend texted just three words: Hope is alive. A realtor we know is eagerly waiting an uptick in the real estate market. All around the country, people were waking up and cheering.
There will be two months of a lame-duck Congress and two years of a lame-duck presidency, but it’s hard not to see this as the beginning of the end of a national nightmare.
You hear the phrase more often in past perfect tense: the people have spoken. Last night, as I watched election coverage, I felt the present-tense power of the moment. As the numbers came in, as red states turned blue, the people were speaking.
There were speaking here, where early voting allowed us to make our choices weeks in advance.
They were speaking in Kentucky, where many of the folks whose yard signs I saw on my walks around town are newly elected judges or city council members.
They were speaking in Texas and Ohio and Maine and Kansas. They were speaking in Georgia and the Carolinas, too. They were speaking in Virginia, where new amendments will be added to the constitution.
Today, we can say “the people have spoken.” But yesterday and throughout these last few weeks, they have been raising their voices, calling for cheaper groceries and gasoline, calling for civility. I hope today’s results will start to heal our troubled land.
I’m back in Virginia after a drive home that was shorter than it used to be. For many years, the mileage was 525 miles door to door. These were the years when Mom and Dad were in and out of the hospital and I would think nothing of jumping in the car and coming to their aid.
I’ve made fewer trips to Lexington the last 10 years, and haven’t checked the mileage. When I did this morning, I learned why the trip seemed easier: It’s 498 miles.
This must be unique in the annals of recent automotive locomotion. With the exception of the pricey express lanes (which I’m too cheap to use) most driving trips are longer than they used to be. There are more cars on the road and more roads under construction.
But the route I take to Lexington has gotten more direct thanks to the mountain throughway known as Corridor H, Eleven miles of new pavement opened in June with four more due to open in 2028. The scenery is stunning, the road is empty, and the mileage is lower than it’s ever been: under 500! That’s a number I appreciate.
I say their names like a mantra, like a litany: Cooper, Cochran, Duke, Romany, Colony, Providence, Chinoe, Lakewood, Hart, Woodland, Euclid, Ashland.
I want to remember these streets, really remember them. Know which ones are parallel and which are perpendicular, which are curved and which are straight.
I’ve always known the names, but I had forgotten which was which. On this trip, I’ve committed them to memory.
These are the streets of my youth, where I pedaled my blue Schwinn bicycle, hung out with friends, sauntered home from school. Later, these were the first streets I drove on my own, where I tried (and often failed) to parallel park.
I had all the time in the world then. Did I know it?
I do now.
“Halloween decorations are so scary now,” a friend of mine said last week. I know what she means.
This month, both in Virginia and in Kentucky, I’ve seen skeletons, monsters, spiders and other elaborate displays of seasonal fright. More than usual, it seems. Decoration inflation for sure, and maybe something else? Faux anxiety masking the real thing?
Back home, there’s a werewolf on Fox Mill Road that steps menacingly out of the woods. The first time I drove by him, years ago, I almost jumped out of my skin. Now I’ve come to expect him. But I wouldn’t want to bump into him on a dark forest stroll.
Just next door to me here in Lexington is an entire skeleton family, including two adults carrying a casket with a baby skeleton inside. I’ve seen faux graveyards, spider webs, and inflatable creatures of all types, including Jack the pumpkin from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
One of the most fearful sights I’ve seen this season is this nun zombie I passed on a walk in Reston. Maybe it’s the eight years of parochial education I endured … but for some reason I find her the scariest of all.
I look out the window at a maple tree. Some of its red leaves are falling gently to earth; others are landing on the greenhouse roof. The maple shares the backyard with a number of overgrown bushes, fruit of my father’s retirement.
Dad relished his final years. He built a small gazebo in the backyard, a lean-to shed with lattice-work on the sides. He crowned it with a homemade Cassidy coat of arms that I rescued later and is now safely stored with other family treasures under my bed.
He surrounded the gazebo with shrubs I don’t recognize. Are they spirea? viburnum? laurel?
Years later, it’s obvious that Dad didn’t understand (or care to learn?) how tall and wide these shrubs would grow. They’ve now subsumed a quarter of the ample yard — a rookie gardening error he didn’t have time to correct.
Places shape people, and people shape places. Years after his passing, I see Dad in these overgrown bushes: his enthusiasm, his lack of planning, his bounteous love for us all.
You’ll have to imagine these jack o’lanterns all lit up, because the best time for me to see them was midafternoon, not night. But I did see them — and I was impressed.
Pumpkin Mania, sponsored by Transylvania University, is now in its 15th year. Anyone can carve one of the free pumpkin provided, as long as they reserve it ahead of time. (The event has become so popular that it appeared on national television.)
Carvers who return after dark will see their jack o’lantern glowing with its mates on the steps of Old Morrison Hall, a National Historic Landmark.
It’s a vision in orange, set in one of Lexington’s most historic neighborhoods, Gratz Park. It’s the kind of event that didn’t exist when I lived here, though there were plenty of events that did.
As I walked around the neighborhood, I remembered immersing myself in books in the old public library, and meeting with other Lexington Children’s Theater “veterans” in a small building on the park.
The outskirts of Lexington have stretched and grown, but its urban core (minus Main Street redevelopment) has remained as I remember it. I’m glad I had the time to amble through it yesterday.
Today I’m thinking how lucky I am that my brother bought the house that was once my parents’. Now when I visit Lexington, I stay where they lived their last years.
It doesn’t look the same. Phillip is slowly turning it into a midcentury-modern showcase. But there are enough traces — I’m looking right now at the old set of World Book encyclopedias, for instance — that it resonates, touches me deeply every time I’m here.
Places matter, houses especially. They become our second skin.
(The room where I’m sitting as I write this post, though it’s been remodeled since this photo was taken.)
Yesterday’s walk took me around Lexington’s Woodland Park, where I met friends to swim in the old days. Many years later, I brought my children to the park so they could run and swing and burn off energy when they visited their grandparents.
The park is a place of layers, too, as is the neighborhood around it, where I lived for the two years I spent back in Lexington in my 20s. I parked in front of my old duplex, meandered down Lafayette to High Street, then through the park to Central Avenue and across to Main, past the Wellington Arms.
The weather was perfect. I tied my sweater round my waist, pushed up my sleeves. I could have walked all day.