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Author: Anne Cassidy

Labor Day?

Labor Day?

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It’s my first Labor Day without a paid, full-time job to return to the next day. Does it feel different? Strangely enough, not much. I’ve known for a long time that what drives me is more internal than external. 

So there will be no 8 a.m. start time, no Tuesday 1 p.m. meeting — but there will be a to-do list — reading to finish, a class to attend, an appointment. And then there are the everyday tasks, the ones I don’t have to list: writing, walking, posting here. 

It has me thinking — what is labor, anyway?  And what is leisure? 

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do,” said Mark Twain. 

But sometimes a body enjoys what it is obliged to do so much that it doesn’t seem like work. And now that my working life has changed, I realize that to make it full and rich I must insert tasks that I’m not obliged— and am maybe even afraid — to do. Is that labor? Is it leisure? 

On this sunny Labor Day, with a light breeze rifling the papers on my outside “desk” (the glass-topped table) … I say, who cares? 

The Company of Walkers

The Company of Walkers

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Sometimes the solo walker craves the solo trail, to beg off from the world and the bustle. But other times, a peopled path is welcome.  

A few Sundays ago I had one of those days — a mid-morning walk on the Glade Trail filled with dog-walkers and baby strollers, with runners and saunterers, with whole families, too.

And no wonder: it was early enough to be comfortable and late enough to accommodate the Sunday sleepers-in. 

The smiles and nods gladdened my walk, made me feel part of a company of walkers, rag-tag and accidental, but a company just the same. 

Short Season

Short Season

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I had long remembered the essay I’m about to excerpt but didn’t have it at my fingertips until I found it in a battered file folder of clippings a few weeks ago. I can’t credit it to any one author; it was an editorial in the New York Times. But I’ve thought about it often this time of year, during these golden days of just enough warmth and just enough light, days of languid loveliness like the one we have right now, temperature not even 80, humidity no more than 40, cloudless sky.

Labor Day is really the beginning of a short season all its own, an in-between time, a month of not-quite-summer, not-yet-fall. That season, whatever you call it, often feels more like the new year than the New Year itself — new books, new exhibitions, new music, new commitments, and never mind that it has all been in the planning for months.  

The city is full again and no longer in dishabille. The leaves are still green. None of the races, pennant or political, have been run to the wire just yet. Night closes in on both ends of day, and still on fair evenings the light seems to linger. The subways seem to exhale. ….

This is the time we should take off from work — only we never do — to watch summer and fall collide, to feel the sharp nights and the warm days, to walk through a garden that is ripening and dying all at once. In the country, a morning will come soon enough when all the gnats have disappeared, a sign that this short season is over.

Giving Up the Ghost

Giving Up the Ghost

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I just finished Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving Up the Ghost, a powerful story of childhood fears, adult sorrows and the writer’s ability to triumph over them by putting pen to paper. 

Mantel writes that she has a “nervous sort of nostalgia” for any surface she’s written a book on. “I think the words, for better or worse, have sunk into the grain of the wood.” In Mantel’s case, many words. The Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and Mirror and the Light trilogy about Lord Cromwell top out at more than 1,500 pages.

In interviews, Mantel says she had the idea to write about Cromwell even before she was published, which means that it was likely on her mind when she wrote her memoir, too. Perhaps when she wrote these words, some of the most evocative I’ve read describing books not yet written:

“Sometimes, at dawn or dusk, I pick out from the gloom — I think I do — a certain figure, traversing the rutted fields in a hushed and pearly light, picking a way among the treacherous rivulets and the concealed ditches. It is a figure shrouded in a cloak, bearing certain bulky objects wrapped in oilcloth, irregular in shape: not heavy but awkward to carry. This figure is me; these shapes, hidden in their wrappings, are books that, God willing, I am going to write.” 

Write them she did. In an interview with The Guardian in 2020, Mantel says that as soon as she started writing Wolf Hall, she knew it was what she had been working toward. Starting the trilogy was “like at last delivering what’s within you … an enormous shout from a mountaintop.”

I marvel at such surety. I wonder what it would be like to feel it.

(The Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin)

Storm at Night

Storm at Night

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Thunder and lightning woke me up last night — that and the stagnant air that collected after a power loss. It was long-predicted — the remnants of Hurricane Ida heading this way — but no less frightening.

To see a storm brewing on the horizon, to watch as clouds darken and loom, is one thing. To be roused from sleep by a thunderclap is something else altogether. I wondered about the roof, the gutters, the tall trees that cluster around the house.  I felt at the mercy of the elements.  

I told myself that all would hold, the joists and metal and soil. I told myself to enjoy the spectacle of it all. But I couldn’t fall back to sleep until the torrents had slowed, until the heavens turned dark again. 

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Endings and Beginnings

Endings and Beginnings

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August 31 is a big day for endings. It’s the end of the month, the end of the summer — and the end of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. 

But it’s also my first day of class. This evening I officially start the master’s program I enrolled in months ago. 

In a way it’s just a return to the program I began a decade ago when I took a Georgetown class called A Sense of Place: Values and Identity. But it’s been 10 years. The program has changed, and I have, too.

Now I’m enrolled in one of four required foundation classes, Science and Society. To prepare for it I’ve read four chapters of a book on the history of science, taking notes on Bacon and Newton and Tycho Brahe. 

What will it be like to sit in a classroom again, to write papers, to be graded? I don’t know … but I’m about to find out.

(Lamplight on the Georgetown campus)

Harvest Time

Harvest Time

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A day’s drive out, a day’s drive back and three days in my hometown leave me in a state of addled contentment now that I’m back home. Throw in some nostalgia and amazement — from visiting with folks I haven’t seen in 10 or 20 years (numbers we toss around as we used to the single digits) — and you have a lovely way to end the summer.

Or is it ending? It will be 90 again today,  the cicadas are crescendoing and the humidity is creeping up as I write this post on the deck. 

Given the opportunity, I’d probably keep traveling and keep sweltering another month or two, but September is almost here — September with its call to purpose and purchase. It’s time to harvest what I’ve sown. 

(Joe Pye weed in a Jessamine County, Kentucky, field)

Walk Across Kentucky

Walk Across Kentucky

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This morning, I walked across Kentucky. Not the 370 miles from Ashland to Paducah, or the 180 miles from Covington to Williamsburg. But the two miles around the Kentucky Arboretum trail, which promises to compress all seven of the state’s geographical regions into one stroll. 

I saw conifers representing the Appalachian Plateau, dogwood and coffeetree for the Knobs and tall grasses for the Pennyrile Region.

The Bluegrass Region, where Lexington is located,  is the most extensive, with bur and chinquapin oaks, several types of ash tree and outcroppings of shaggy limestone. 

Ambling through the Arboretum warmed me up, wore me out and educated me, too. After just one visit I can tell it will be one of my regular hometown routes. 

Ashland Park

Ashland Park

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There are places I visit so often in my imagination that I need to recharge the memories as you would a battery. I did some recharging today when I strolled through Lexington’s Ashland Park neighborhood.

There was Woodland Park with its baseball diamonds and picnic tables, then my old place on Lafayette, the first of several former houses I would visit today (the others I drove by rather than walked past).

I ambled down South Hanover and Fincastle, letting my mind wander, fantasizing what it would be like to live in some of these places, the grand brick colonials, the charming round-doored tudors.  

Till I reached Ashland itself, the home of 19-century statesman Henry Clay, which stopped my reveries in their tracks. Ashland with its shaded walks and formal garden. Ashland with its historic pedigree and bountiful acreage. Even in fantasy, Ashland is out of my league. 

Corridor H

Corridor H

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The climb started as soon as I exited Interstate 81. The flat land became scarcer, the tree tunnels more abundant. My little car felt the difference but handled it better than I’d hoped. 

The first stretch was road I’ve known and driven for years, Routes 33 and 55, which I wrote about years ago. But instead of chugging through Moorefield and Seneca Rocks, I cruised the top of the ridge along Highway 48, which I learned today is part of the Appalachian Development Highway System’s as yet incomplete Corridor H. (Sounds more like a UFO site than a federal roads project.) 

Incomplete might be seen as a disadvantage, given the two-lane stretches in between the four, but not when it takes you to places like this, a pull-off viewing spot I almost missed since it had no sign or build-up. What I found were mountains beyond mountains, Queen Anne’s lace and bumblebees, the quiet of a land out of time.