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Author: Anne Cassidy

Mothers and Daughters

Mothers and Daughters

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I’ve been missing Mom more than usual lately, not just because it’s Mother’s Day but also because of what I’m reading and thinking, because there is so much to tell her, and most of all because not just one but two of my daughters are soon to be mothers.

It’s a joy and a privilege to watch your child become a parent. It’s role-bending and life-affirming. It’s an excellent counterbalance to a worldwide pandemic. And it’s the sort of experience that makes me wish my parents were still here to share it with (putting aside for the moment that I would be worried sick about them if they were).

So today I will just have to share it virtually, as we do so much these days; share it by saying here how thankful I am to be not just a mother, but a mother of daughters — and of daughters becoming mothers.

An Old-Fashioned Girl

An Old-Fashioned Girl

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First, I re-read Eight Cousins, because I could find it in an old bookcase. Little Women I felt no need to re-plumb, having just enjoyed the movie a few months ago. But there was one Louisa May Alcott book that I’d been dying to read again. It was An Old-Fashioned Girl, one of my favorites.

It’s not in the house — I believe one old-fashioned girl I know is keeping it on her bookshelf now — but I was able to find a free copy for my ancient Kindle, and am now happily ensconced in the joys and sorrows of one Polly Milton, a bright, kind girl who lives alone with a bird and a cat, who fights disappointment by reaching out to help others, and who makes life pleasant for all who know her.

Is it saccharine? Is it treacly? Yes, ma’am, it is. But it’s wonderful to be a part of Polly’s world again!

Summer Shade

Summer Shade

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Accompanying me on yesterday’s walk was my old friend, shade. There’s always a point in the spring when I notice it’s back. It builds gradually, of course, leaf by leaf. But yesterday it announced itself in sharp lines, patches of light and dark, stripes made of shadow.

We don’t yet need the coolness shade gives us, but we can always use the contrast, one of the great, unappreciated gifts of life. It gives us depth and richness. It gives us variety.

Winter gives us shadows, but they are harsh and linear. Summer brings contrast with softer contours, smudged margins. And it brings us more of it. Summer weather is not yet with us, but summer shade is starting to be.

Possible Again?

Possible Again?

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Warmth has been slow to arrive this year, so as I listen to the furnace purr, I’m reliving travels to steamier climes, from the white sand beach of Siesta Key, Florida, to the dark, broad beach at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.

I’m remembering the feeling of sand in my toes and the lap of surf in my ears. I’m dreaming of a world where traveling to these places is possible again.

I must need a vacation or something!

Not Complaining

Not Complaining

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Somehow, there is still moisture in the sky, and rain in the air. It’s falling now in gentle sheets, greening the new leaves and the grass and the weeds, making us feel more hemmed in than we already do.

Not that I’m complaining. There’s a roof over my head, and the basement doesn’t flood every time it rains, only in downpours. There’s electricity so I can turn on lamps in the morning (something I’ve very much needed to do this gray day).

And in the kitchen, just steps away from where I now sit (on a comfy new couch, I might add), there is more food than we know what to do with.

So I will take this rainy day, embrace it and even (in my own way) celebrate it. Because that’s where we are now … or at least it’s where I hope to be.

(Sunrise on the Mekong … from the vault.)

In the News

In the News

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It’s a good day for journalism. The Pulitzer Prizes were just announced (the Washington Post won, as did the Baltimore Sun, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Anchorage Daily News and many others), and it’s also the birthday of Mollie Bly, a journalist who pretended to be mentally ill in order to spend 10 days undercover in the Blackwell’s Island Women’s Lunatic Asylum in New York and document the horrendous conditions she found there.

In 1889 Bly traveled around the world in 72 days, beating the fictional Phineas Fogg’s “Around the World in 80 Days” timetable and becoming famous in the process. She wrote both of these big stories for the New York World, owned by … Joseph Pulitzer.

At a time when the news is often decried and challenged, it’s good to remember all that it does for us, all that it continues to do.

Good Morning

Good Morning

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A morning rinsed and spun-dry, cleansed by thunderstorms in the night and a cool breeze in the morning. Whereas yesterday was about humidity and heavy possibility, today is quick on its feet, ready to move into the month, into this strange new almost-summer that is upon us.

In the garden, the irises are prepping for their appearance, narrow buds on the Siberian ones and plump buds on the others. The inside birds are singing in the brightness, having spent some of yesterday with heads tucked and wings folded. They are like little barometers. You can almost mark the weather by them, so tied are they to the world outside.

As for the mammals in the house, they have slept late, as they are wont to do these days.


(I snapped this photo about 10 days ago, when the dogwood and azaleas were still in their prime.) 

Missing the Derby

Missing the Derby

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For the first time since 1945 there was no Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May. There were no thoroughbreds thundering down the back stretch at Churchill Downs. There were, I hear, some fans — many wearing fancy hats — who couldn’t stay away. They appeared, crowned and masked, to traipse around the track and take photos of vacant betting windows and empty paddocks.

We’ve lost many of our traditional markers this spring. No tournament basketball in March, no first day of baseball in April. And now … no Derby in May — to be followed by no Preakness or Belmont, either, at least for the time being.

Of all the pain, sadness and disruption brought on by this pandemic this is hardly the greatest. But for this transplanted Kentuckian, who has never missed a Derby either live (twice) or televised (every other time), it was a loss indeed.

Book Maps

Book Maps

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I’ve loved maps since I was a child. I grew up with a mother who would eat her lunchtime sandwich and pickle while looking at a map, feeding her body and her soul at the same time. I’ve done the same off and on through the years (minus the pickle).

If I were to write another book, I’ve long hoped it would be the kind of book that would have a map in its frontispiece. I had no idea that so many others felt the same way. Enough to fill an entire book, The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones.

I found this book on my last trip to the library March 15, and since I’ve not yet had to return any of those books, I’ve had plenty of time to savor this one. In it, authors from Philip Pullman to Robert McFarlane wax lyrical about the book maps that inspired them and the books they’ve written because of them.

“A map helps to make an imaginary place real. The more detail you put into your beautiful lie, and the more you base it on things that are true, the more it comes alive: for you and for your readers,” says Cressida Crowell in one of the book’s essays called “First Steps: Our Neverland.”

Crowell sees maps as story starters. “When I draw the map of my imaginary world, it will tell me the direction I want to be going in, even when I don’t yet know it myself.”

I’m starting my own map soon.


(Photo: The Land of Make Believe from The Writer’s Map by Huw Lewis-Jones.)

Brilliant Green

Brilliant Green

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I walked outside today into a world of green, all shades of green. Dark firs, emerald hedges and verdant lawns, lush and mower-striped. Weeds are greening too, but I chose to ignore them this morning.

The lawn is an English invention, and it rains all the time in England. So said a gardening expert we talked to in early March before purchasing lime and seed. The message was, don’t worry too much about your lawn; it will never look good.

But this year the weather has been English and lawns are greening accordingly. Ah, but it does a soul good to see a lawn stretching from house to street — a greensward, a tribute, an invitation to doff shoes and run through it.

I see the point of a cottage garden, of a wild and natural look. But there’s something about a lawn, too. And there especially seemed to be something about it this brilliant green morning.