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Author: Anne Cassidy

Exposed

Exposed

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Walking early today because it will be too hot to tromp around later, I took a different route out my front door, turning right at the corner instead of left. Then, at the next corner, choosing a path that runs along a four-lane road. 

It’s one of my semi-regular walks, but I hadn’t taken it in a while, so I noticed how pine boughs crowd the sidewalk, how fast cars speed along beside the path, how close together are road and sidewalk. 

How exposed I suddenly felt! For after all, what is a mere walker when confronted with tons of speeding steel? 

(I realize I don’t take too many photos of cars on highways. I’m much more likely to snap bucolic shots like the one above.)

  

Fleeting

Fleeting

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I’d forgotten there were lilies of the valley in the side yard, so running into them last week was a surprise and a delight. There were those delicate, bell-like flowers; there the white against the green.

I marveled, I stooped down and snapped a few photos, then I promptly moved on to something else: weeds to pull, chores to do.

Day before yesterday, I thought I would go and look at the flowers again. Surely they would still be blooming. But no, they were not. 

The day I’d glimpsed them was one of their few on earth. How fleeting was their time here! How glad I am to have caught them when I did. 

A Pencil Post

A Pencil Post

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I’m thinking this morning of the pencil. The pencil I first used as a young school girl. A pencil fat and soft-leaded, a purgatory in which I would need to exist until I graduated to a cartridge pen. 

The humble pencil, which author Wendell Berry uses for correspondence, saying that he no longer has the courage to write unless he can erase. (Berry long ago eschewed the computer, which does pretty well in the erasure department, sometimes when you least expect or want it to.) 

The historical pencil, produced in a factory in Concord, Massachusetts, owned by the father of Henry David Thoreau. 

The mechanical pencil, which is not my writing implement of choice but is a dandy tool for making notes to myself in a calendar, especially if it has a good eraser.

The pencil, in short, has much to recommend itself, and is certainly worth a post—though not, of course, a penciled one. 

Walking Early

Walking Early

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I often have a little debate with myself in the morning: should I walk first or should I write? I’ll do both eventually, of course. They are the warp and woof of my day. Twenty-four hours without them is barely a day at all. 

But there remains the order. To walk early is to give the body precedence when the mind is sharpest. To write early is to miss the coolest and most pleasant hours of the day. 

Today, walking raised its hand, waved it in front of my face. Choose me, choose me, it said. 

And so … I did.

The Rhododendrons

The Rhododendrons

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Every year is some plant’s year to shine. Last year the redbuds stole the show. Or at least the ones I saw were resplendent in their budding show of strength, their pinks and purples peeking out from amidst sprays of dogwood white.

This year, it’s the rhododendrons’ turn to shine. Whether it’s just that I’m noticing them more or that certain meteorological conditions are favoring them I’ll never understand, inexpert gardener that I am. 

All I know is that our own specimen aside (and it has its hands full thriving in the midst of a bamboo patch), other area plants are standing up to rain and wind and alternate blasts of warmth and cold. They are sending us big-fisted flowers that remind us, as do their compatriots, of how much we need spring. 

(I cheated a bit with the photo: it’s from last year’s May trip to Seattle. I know of no Virginia plants that look like this.)

Golden

Golden

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It’s an idea they had for 10 years and it wouldn’t let them go. A trove of family papers they inherited. It’s a question, a notion, a curiosity. 

Over the weekend I hung out with 150 writers. And though I spoke with only a fraction of them, the conversations were all struck through with the same bright threads of humor, determination and yearning. 

We’re a greedy bunch, we writers. If we don’t have an idea, we want one. If we have the idea we must have the time and space to explore it: to research, write and revise. 

Of course, if we have the finished manuscript we need the agent. And if we have the agent, we need the publisher. 

But when the stars align, when we have the idea, the time, the space, the words, the agent, the publisher …. ah, then life is golden indeed. 

The Woodsman

The Woodsman

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Like Johnny Appleseed, Daniel Boone is part legend, and many of the images we have of him are false. He did not wear a coonskin cap, did not discover Cumberland Gap and was not the first settler to arrive in Kentucky. 

But he did guide many through the Gap and he, more than anyone else, helped settle the Bluegrass State. In fact, one of the chief ironies of Boone’s life (1734-1820) is that he, more than anyone else, helped ruin the wilderness he loved. 

The Daniel Boone that emerges from Robert Morgan’s biography is a bright, humble, kind man, a woodsman more at home in the forest than anywhere else and as sympathetic to Native Americans as most any of his generation. 

Often in debt, Boone learned the hard way that his personality was better suited to the edges of civilization than to its midst. But not before he may have had this realization, Morgan writes: 

By 1788 the irony could not have been lost on Boone that he, as much as any other single human being, had helped create the world that was now repugnant to him, so raging and relentless in growth and greed. And he must have seen, perhaps for the first time, the contradiction and conflict at the heart of so much of his effort: to lead white people into the wilderness and make it safe for them was to destroy the very object of his quest.

(Boone’s first view of Kentucky by William Tylee Ranney, 1849, courtesy Wikipedia) 

Dad’s Day

Dad’s Day

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Dad would have been 99 today. It’s not a stretch to imagine such a birthday for him. He was almost 91 when he died. 

I’m not sure he would have cared for what this world has become in the eight years since he’s been gone: harder, meaner, more confusing. And yet, Dad took his joy from family and friends, so I imagine he would have adjusted to the craziness. 

Because what’s important is that he would have seen five granddaughters marry and four become mothers, would have held six (soon to be seven) great-grandchildren in his arms.  He would have relished the new generation, as he relished so much of life. 

But four-score-and-ten is not a shabby lifespan, and he was not complaining at the end. Only grateful for what he had.  As we all were for having him so long. 

(Dad clowning around, as he was wont to do.)

Breathing Space

Breathing Space

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There was, at one point, going to be a window seat here. There still might be. 

There was, at one point, a swag on these windows. And there might be again.

But for now, this is the most precious of spaces. An empty one. Sometimes I sit on the floor here with a pillow at my back and watch the dust motes in the air.  It’s an empty space, a breathing space. 

So for now, there is nothing here. And there might never be.

Unplugged

Unplugged

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While I would like to say I always walk bare-eared, open to the sounds of wind in the pines and birds on the bough, in truth I am usually plugged in, listening to music or a recorded book. 

Yesterday, I started out with one of these in mind, but as I began to amble along a forest path, I realized that I couldn’t pollute my ears. The only sounds that should enter them on such a pristine spring morning should be the sounds the morning itself produced.

It was a calm, quiet, meditative experience. I’m doing it again today.