A Spider and Her Web

A Spider and Her Web

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I’ve watched her for days, captivated as she weaves her web on the other side of the kitchen window. She disappeared for a while — no doubt hiding in a crack or some other nether region — then returned to lie in wait.

How does she catch anything? The screen must filter out all but the smallest gnats. Maybe gnats are delicacies for her, like a plate of those little won-ton appetizers would be for me, what appeals after nights of dutiful veggies and proteins.

Maybe this spider is running a candy store, eating all her wares. If she is a grass spider, as I think she might be, her days are numbered. She will mate (if I raise the screen and she escapes), lay eggs and perish.

The web she’s woven seems vaguely funnel-like, which is the kind grass spiders weave. It reminds me of stratus clouds in the summer, swirled into fanciful shapes that make a human mind marvel at all the wonders nature holds.

Still Summer

Still Summer

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Fairfax County schools started yesterday. When the girls were younger, the beginning of school marked the end of summer. Over the last week I’ve observed young families return from vacations, kiddos shoot hoops at the end of the cul-de-sac and play flashlight tag after dark, cramming in last-minute bits of fun.

As I watched, I felt in my bones that familiar dread, the pit in the stomach I had as a kid heading back to school, and later as a mom, watching one more summer end. Yes, the children would no longer be underfoot, but I mourned the lack of freedom that entailed.

But yesterday, I was feeling exempt from that dread. This is not to gloat but to celebrate. To revel in the fact that it’s still summer. Cicadas still sing from the trees. Breezes still waft through the (now-open) windows.

I feel so lucky that the beginning of school no longer signals the end of summer. In fact, the warmth often continues through September and into October. Through no meteorological sleight-of-hand, just a shift in perspective, I’ve gained two more months of my favorite season.

Crabgrass Frontier

Crabgrass Frontier

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Many Americans have grown up in the suburban world created after World War II, our once-vaunted frontier of prairies and mountain peaks reduced to a series of 8o x 100-foot lots with a house and a garage. For decades, home-ownership has been an essential part of the American dream, though it’s become inaccessible for many folks these days.

It’s worth considering, then, that this suburban world did not arrive by accident and there are many other ways to live.

“Nowhere in Europe was there the land, the money, or the tradition for single-family home construction,” writes Kenneth T. Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier. Postwar development n Germany, France, Denmark and Spain did not follow this course. Single-family homes are much more of a rarity in Europe.

It was a combination of ample space, low-cost loans and other federal policies that produced American suburbs. And they happened in the blink of an eye.

“By 1961, when President John F. Kennedy proclaimed his New Frontier and challenged Americans to send a man to the moon within the decade, his countrymen had already remade the nation’s metropolitan areas in the short space of sixteen years,” Jackson writes. “From Boston to Los Angeles, vast new subdivisions and virtually new towns sprawled where a generation earlier nature had held sway.”

Such a short time, 16 years, but life in these United States hasn’t been the same since.

Light Show

Light Show

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“Patients report seeing a light show,” the doctor told me yesterday before beginning the first step of cataract surgery, the laser-guided part. He wasn’t wrong. I saw pulsing lights and colors with a bang-up finish like a spectacular fireworks display.

But the real light show is evolving here at home as I get used to a world without cataracts. It’s as if I was living in a dim room, sepia-tinged, and someone just flipped on an overhead light.

Truth to tell, I don’t care for overhead lights. But the real plus here is better vision, especially at night, and that’s the part I’m looking forward to most.

As my right eye gets used to its new lens and my left eye awaits its turn next week, I marvel at the power of science and medicine, which makes miracles happen every day. Yesterday, a miracle happened for me: a light show that keeps on giving.

Super Movers

Super Movers

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It was the most positive health story I’ve read in a long time, discussing a study in the July issue of Neurology which found that people who walk faster than their peers are less likely to experience cognitive decline.

Maybe this makes up for all the crossword puzzles I don’t work, all the chess I don’t play, and all the supplements I don’t take.

The study looked at 5,000 older people and builds on earlier research that studied folks in their 80s who walk at the speed of 50-year-olds. In short,”super movers” age more slowly. They’re healthier and more long-lived.

The article doesn’t discuss the sore muscles and creaky knees that can accompany a faster gait. Are these aches and pains a small price to pay? It depends on how bad one is hurting, I suppose.

But I know where I fall on the issue. I’ll keep walking as fast as I can, for as long as I can.

Wide Open

Wide Open

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We’ve had a stretch of hot, humid weather, but last night it cooled to the 60s and I slept with the windows open. What a delight! I’d forgotten what it’s like to nod off to the sound of insects singing.

Does the body crave fresh air for optimal sleep? I can’t say for sure since mine wasn’t optimal last night. But I do know that when I was awake I heard the crickets and the katydids and felt a kinship with these night creatures.

Wide-open windows confirm a connection with the world at large, the hope that my sleep will be reinforced by all things natural. A girl’s gotta dream, right?

Lesson of the Bridge

Lesson of the Bridge

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Speaking of waters running freely, I had a chance Friday to walk across the Key Bridge, which spans the Potomac River, connecting Georgetown with Roslyn. I was carrying about 25 pounds of books on my back, the bounty of my recent trip to the Lauinger Library.

It was hot, and I was overdressed. It was the end of a long day. But walking Key Bridge is always an adventure, and I was glad to be doing it again.

What I had forgotten — what I always forget — is that walking Key Bridge is scary, especially heading south, without the distraction of the Hilltop looming ahead.

As always on the bridge, cars are zooming toward me and waters are swirling beneath me. There is no way out but forward.

I think, in the end, that’s why I keep walking Key Bridge. It reminds me that putting one foot in front of the other is often all we can do.

(Heading north toward Georgetown on the Key Bridge)

Soggy?

Soggy?

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I wake to an office window splattered by raindrops. The world beyond looks like an impressionist painting. My phone tells me we received .8 inches of rain yesterday.

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, Northern Virginia is no longer in drought. And yet, on a woods walk over the weekend, I noticed that one bellwether creek on my route remains dry.

I’ll believe we’re out of drought when Little Difficult Run flows freely, as it used to do in the old days.

It’s the evidence we see with our own eyes — and feel with our skin — that makes the difference.

(The soggiest photo I could find is one I snapped from a window while touring the Yorkshire Dales last May.)

The Analog World

The Analog World

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A library book has arrived and I will pick it up today. I contemplate the quaintness of this concept. Knowledge between two covers. Information not available online. A book I can’t access digitally but must travel through space to retrieve.

I consider the practicalities. I will tack this onto another errand. I’ll check out other books, too. Why waste a trip on just one tome? I will bring a backpack and an umbrella. I may also stop at a bakery near campus that sells exquisite baguettes made with flour imported from France. I hope to return home with sustenance for mind and body.

The analog world — it used to be all there was. Now it can feel like a sideshow.

(The only surviving original copy of Beowulf, photographed at the British Library in May.)

Now We Are Six

Now We Are Six

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Today, in honor of our grandson’s birthday, I’ll reprint the poem I’ve loved since my own children turned six.

When I was One

I had just begun.

When I was Two

I was barely new.

When I was Three

I was hardly me.

When I was Four

I was not much more.

When I was Five

I was coming alive.

But now I am Six.

I’m as clever as clever.

I think I’ll be six now

Forever and ever.

Poem and art by A. A. Milne