ISO Momentum

ISO Momentum

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I’m wondering how to keep moving through a day that began with a 3:40 a.m. run to Dulles International Airport. I was okay after returning home to sleep three more hours, energetic enough to tackle a yoga class and a warm walk around Lake Anne. But now lunch is over and my head feels stuffed with cotton.

I’m in search of momentum. By all rights I should be cleaning closets or pulling weeds, tasks that would keep me awake, but here I sit, laptop in lap, ready to do some online research.

Let’s see if it’s scintillating enough to keep me vertical.

(The scintillating stairway at the Tate Gallery in London.)

Summer Shade

Summer Shade

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I’m a sun-lover for sure, but when summer arrives I become a shade connoisseur. There is the deep shade of an old oak, generous and all-encompassing. There is the dappled shade of a new-growth forest, light patches like beacons in the darkness.

When walking in the city, I seek the shady side of the street, only slightly cooler than its opposite, but when temperatures soar, every degree counts.

In our backyard, the shade that was once a given is no longer. The black gum tree has failed to leaf. Though its trunk still stands sentinel, its shade is gone — and soon it will be, too.

Which underlines the fact that shade is a gift, nature’s balm for summer heat.

(In London’s Greenwich Park, some seek the sunlight, others the shade.)

Green Screen

Green Screen

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Yesterday, as I walked on one of my favorite Reston trails, I was struck by the shades and the depth of the green. The foliage was shockingly, gloriously green. The forest was a green screen onto which I could project all my sylvan dreams.

What is it about green that soothes and enchants? Is it something in the mechanisms of our eyes and skin that harken to this color? Did it represent the safety of the enclosure to our ancient kin? Is that why it seems so safe a hue?

Or does green work its magic because it’s the perfect contrast to the blueness of the sky?

No matter the reason, whether it’s biochemical or poetical. In early June, at least this early June, all the world seems a green screen.

Sleeping Weather

Sleeping Weather

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We’ve been treated to a series of perfect-weather days lately: bright sun, low humidity. No air-conditioning needed, no fans either. The temperature rises slowly during the day, then just as gently falls, a long exhale.

Good sleeping weather, we say, when we’ve had a string of these 75-degree days followed by 50-degree nights. A light blanket suffices.

June is starting off well so far. We’ve only had nine hours of it, but all of them have been perfect for sleeping.

(From a 2024 trip to Arches National Park, Moab, Utah, a climate that often features good sleeping weather.)

Backward Glance

Backward Glance

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One more backward glance before I move forward. This was one of the last sights I saw in London, a view of Picadilly Circus just as the lights were coming on.

It doesn’t get dark till almost 10 there, and we were trying to make our way back to the Victoria Station neighborhood before dark. It was not to be. Too many twists and turns. We jumped in a cab instead. I’m finally solvent enough that I can do that. For most of my traveling life, I’ve had to walk or take public transport (impractical in this case) no matter what the situation.

I love the energy in this photo: the people strolling, the puddles evaporating, the marquee twinkling. The evening was just coming alive. I hated to leave. I always do.

New World

New World

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We flew back in time yesterday, shedding the hours we took three weeks earlier and landing back where we started — in the New World.

We left the Roman walls and the castle keep built by William the Conqueror. We left the narrow alleys of York and its magnificent minster. We left the locks on the River Wey — and thank God we left them intact.

We left the trains and the Tube and the half-timbered wall, the tea and the Thames and the Marks and Spencer Food Halls. If someone offered me a ticket back tonight, I would take it. But I don’t want to be greedy. I live in the New World with all its space and energy and eye-popping green. (Virginia must have had as much rain as Britain has these last few weeks.)

We’re back in the New World, yes, but today I’m wishing I was back in the old one.

Time to Leave

Time to Leave

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There’s never a perfect time to leave England, but the day after a trip to the Greenwich Observatory may be as good a time as any.

Visiting this place taught me about the struggle to calculate longitude, made me think about time and time-keeping, about journeys great and small.

At one point yesterday, I had one foot in the eastern hemisphere and one foot in the western. Traveling allows for such straddling, for slipping out of one life and inhabiting another.

Today we’ll be in one hemisphere only. And today, all being well, we will be home.

Under the Clock

Under the Clock

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We’re back in London before our Wednesday flight home, staying in the Victoria Station neighborhood. It was where I arrived as a wide-eyed 20-year-old, fresh off the channel ferry, and where I met Mom on another trip a few years later.

Mom and I had flown different airlines to London and had decided to meet at Victoria. Not just anyplace in the cavernous station but under the clock. Dad had suggested it. He met his dates there when he visited the city from his air base in East Anglia.

Now the clock is perfectly positioned above the ladies’ loo. Not the most dignified spot for the old clock. But time marches on, something I’m acutely aware of visiting this bustling city, which has grown tremendously since I last visited in 2003.

But the old places have a gravitational pull. Which is why I feel at home in the shadow of Victoria Station. Not exactly under the clock — but close to it.

Evensong

Evensong

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Such a beautiful word, evensong. Beautiful as it is, though, it doesn’t capture the experience of a York Minster late afternoon service. Last night was our seventh and final night in York and our third and most spectacular choral evensong.

It was Pentecost Sunday, and the clergy processed in on a cloud of incense. The choir boys and adults wore red cassocks, and the adults wore white surplices over them. But as with previous services, we heard the voices before we saw the singers.

After they took their place in the quire, they began with the introit, then moved on to the responses and the psalm. Their voices rose in harmony and counterpoint as they sang anthems by Stainer, Palestrina and Rooney. The organ thundered behind them.

Because it was Sunday the service included a sermon and a hymn, which the congregation joined. This was not like the singing back home; it was robust and full.

As we prepared to leave, a shaft of sunlight pierced the west window and lit up the gothic pillars in the quire. It was a fitting farewell to this beautiful city.

Byland Abbey

Byland Abbey

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A bonus today: a visit to a place I didn’t even know was on our itinerary: Byland Abbey. This is one of the structures destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry VIII’s power grab. The king wanted to remove all vestiges of Catholicism from the country, but first he snatched from the monasteries anything of value: gold chalices and monstrances, even the lead from the stained glass windows.

Earlier in the week we toured St. Mary’s Abbey in York, another pilfered monastery. But Byland was better preserved and in a more stunning locale — appearing like an apparition in the North York Moors.

We saw the church, library, warming room, kitchen and refectory. It was uncharacteristically sunny and warm, making it easy to linger on the grass and admire the tiles and the stones.

I tried to imagine what the place was like in the 12th century, hundreds of years before it was destroyed. Another world, of which we have only the vestiges, but enough to set the mind spinning.