The candy is stockpiled, the pumpkin is ready for carving. All we need are the little ghosts and goblins. They will be knocking on the door in less than 12 hours.
Meanwhile, nature has conjured up an eerie day. A brisk wind bends the bamboo fronds till they tap against the side of the house. My office bears the brunt of this breeze and the screechy, scratchy bamboo. The house creaks and groans in response.
This same wind rattles acorns down on the roof. I jump when they hit the gutters and roll down to the ground.
If this wind continues, the Dulles-bound jets may use an alternate runway, which sends them roaring directly over my house. That brings its own terror.
It promises to be a day of spooky sounds. I’m ready for them.
(Ghostly sounds deserve weird and colorful pumpkins.)
I walked yesterday through a late-fall forest. The yellows a little more subtle. Still a riot of color, not yet a monochromatic woodland, but enough bare branches to see the direction we are heading. A feel of rain but not yet rain in reality.
I snapped this photo right before the little hill on my route. I was ready for the ascent, not thinking much about how the warmth is ending. I was generating my own heat at that point.
I knew that a deluge was in the forecast, much needed, though not drought-ending. It will take far more than a day’s worth of moisture to do that. But still, I knew I might not walk outside today. So I memorized the passing scenery. The bridge before the rise. The fat fox who scampered across the path. The walker who saw the animal and mouthed the word “fox” to me as she passed.
All these impressions are here today for me to savor. Even if wet weather keeps me home, I have yesterday’s walk to imagine and relive.
I’m reading The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street, a book I noted with interest when it was published earlier this year and whose author I’ve booked for a writers conference I help to plan. The subject is climate change, told not just from a global point of view but from a local one, too.
In the last few years, Mike Tidwell reports, the giant oaks in his Takoma Park neighborhood have been buffeted by heat, drought and, in 2018, an atmospheric river of moisture. Stressed by years of extreme weather, the trees developed Phytophthora root rot and were infested by the ambrosia beetle. First, they dropped large branches, then whole trees perished.
Takoma Park is a leafy suburb north of D.C. Trees are so important there that many of its streets are named for them. (Note Willow Avenue.) Generations have flourished under the canopies of its magnificent oaks. But in a two-year period, this small city lost 1,000 trees.
Looking at a plot of these downed giants reveals that they weren’t lost in wind storms or other catastrophic events. “Trees were dying evenly on almost every block, a perfect distribution,” Tidwell writes, a pattern that led Daryl Braithwaite, the city’s director of public works, to say it’s systemic. “That doesn’t look like weather, it looks like climate,” Braithwaite told Tidwell.
Reading about these trees last night, I had my own aha moment. The oaks in my neighborhood have been dying, too, including the oaks in my own yard. We’ve lost several giants, including a spectacular red oak that was the yard’s “signature tree.” I mourn it still.
Climate change is not just about melting glaciers and rising seas. It’s about all the trees we love and lose, including the trees of Willow Avenue.
The Brahms Intermezzo in A Major Opus 118 No. 2 asks questions with no answers. It’s a wistful, nostalgic piece, one I’ve played for years. Several passages feature what I’ve always called “two against three,” but which I’ve learned is also called a polyrhythm.
I’ve been playing this rhythmical pattern so long that I don’t think much about it, but it was difficult at first. It’s a little like rubbing your stomach while patting your head. In the intermezzo, it’s playing four eighth notes with the right hand as the left attempts a ripple of six triplets. “Attempts” is the operative word. My fingers are too short to ripple out notes that range across the keyboard as Brahms’ do.
Still, I try. And as I do, I ponder all the feelings the notes contain, how the right hand holds back as the left hand rushes forward. Some of the highest notes of the piece, the A, the C sharp, are played in this configuration. There is a reaching, a yearning, a sense of never quite attaining one’s heart’s desire. And in fact, Brahms dedicated these pieces to Clara Schumann, the woman he loved but could never marry.
To play these particular eighth notes against these particular triplets is to hold two truths at once: the head, the heart; the will, the reality. It is the story of life, in a handful of notes.
We’re still six days away from Standard Time, but Europeans “fell back” over the weekend. This means that Europe is one hour closer than it was last week — or will be next. I’ll take that hour and savor it, let it remind me of all I saw and hope to see in the future.
One hour closer to Amsterdam’s canals and flower market and bicycles and bustle.
One hour closer to Paris’s boulevards and cafes and museums and monuments.
One hour closer to Alsatian villages, vineyards, steeples and hills.
I write to the slow whirr of the furnace. It’s cold enough outside that the heat is on, and I’m grateful for it as I write my post in the early hours. I imagine warm air pulsing through the ducts, rising through the registers, making this house comfortable.
The trees are touched by cold, too, the green palette of early October giving way to the russets, golds and oranges of autumn. Orange too are the pumpkins by the door, better preserved in this current chill. Hedges are thinning. Small birds must burrow deeper inside them for warmth.
Soon it will be time to move the plants indoors, to air out the woolens, to make soup. Mornings are dark and evenings are early. The great earth tilts. All we can do is hang on for the ride.
For the last few days I’ve been living on the edge. The edge of memory capabilities, the edge of “Storage Full.” My dear little phone, which has been with me for nine years, is striving mightily to keep up with the flow of bits and bytes I throw its way … but it is losing the battle.
I’ve added storage, deleted all but the most necessary apps, even purged some conversations. It’s still teetering on immobility. This morning, afraid the thing would stop working entirely, I began to delete videos. This led me into a strange netherworld of old footage from a 2016 work trip to Myanmar.
I must have flipped on some strange setting back then because many of the still photos I thought I took were actually three-second videos — not “live” shots but actual videos. Sorting through them has taken me back to that warm-hearted and wondrous country, a place transformed since the 2021 coup.
There was the ginger farmer we interviewed, the walk I took from my hotel into the village of Kalaw and its market, poinsettias blooming, motorcycles zooming. All was hustle-bustle in preparation for the Fire Tower Festival and parade that evening. A moment in time, captured in data.
I enjoy a clever headline, so when I saw “The Gaitkeeper” in yesterday’s Washington Post (with a Gen Z headline in the online edition) I had to read it. Oh, and it was about walking, too.
The story profiled 21-year-old Cameron Roh, who has 1.4 million followers rating pedestrians on TikTok. I’ve been rating pedestrians all my life but have no followers to show for it. Probably because I rate them only in my head, as in “why are those people taking up the entire sidewalk?!” or “why don’t those escalator riders stand on the right?!”
Roh gives high marks to walkers who are aware of their surroundings and navigate crowds with ease. He criticizes those who walk blindly into passersby while glued to their phone screens.
I’m glad that Roh and others are raising the issue of walking etiquette. It doesn’t matter much to walkers in the suburbs — but it certainly does to walkers in the city.
When I lived and worked in Manhattan I’d try to match my pace to the lights of the cross streets. If I was up to speed I would catch “Walk” signs at each one. To do this required sidestepping and passing and thinking ahead. It was part stroll, part sport. It was gaitkeeping, for sure.
Usually when I stick with a book I’m originally not sure I’ll finish it’s because I like the author’s voice. In this case, the voice belonged to Wendy McClure, who recounts her obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series in her funny, tender, offbeat book The Wilder Life.
I read Laura Ingalls Wilder books as a girl — some of them, at least. The one I remember best is On the Banks of Plum Creek, with its Garth Williams illustrations. (I can thank McClure for that tidbit.) My main memory of that book is dropping it in a puddle on the way home from the bus stop in fourth grade. It was a prized library book! How could I let that happen?
But the pages dried, and I continued to immerse myself in the stories of a sod house, a girl in a bonnet, a cloud of grasshoppers and other prairie adventures.
But back to authorial voice. In this case, I liken it to the writer’s grabbing me by the hand and pulling me in a direction I had no intention of going. I wasn’t sure I wanted to learn much more about Laura Ingalls Wilder than I already knew, but darned if I didn’t learn it anyway.
Thank you, Wendy McClure — or something like that.
A mild autumn Sunday, an open afternoon, and a walk along a Reston path to the Washington and Old Dominion rails-to-trails line. Cyclists whizzed past as they do in these days of e-bikes. So I hatched a plan: return not the way we came but along a road I’ve only driven, never walked.
It was a gamble. I wasn’t sure of the distance and was concerned about the traffic. Hunter Station is an older road that has retained its charm and its lack of shoulders. Striding along it required some hopscotch maneuvers, sometimes jumping over to the other side of the road for visibility’s sake.
But the road was worth it: a cathedral of trees and hills with acorns crunching beneath our feet and the sharp scent of turning leaves. Every so often a lane would wind off to the left or right, inviting further exploration.
A walk down a road I’ve only driven before is like stepping through the looking glass. There were the familiar landmarks — the single-lane bridge, the curved hill — only in slow motion instead of fast. I could take my time, get a true sense of where I was. Which, at least yesterday, seemed like paradise.
