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Author: Anne Cassidy

Where We Are Now

Where We Are Now

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The president has just declared a national state of emergency, the schools have closed and grocery store shelves are empty of staples and cleaning supplies. So it might seem a strange time to give my spider plant some TLC. But that’s what I’ve been doing the last hour.

The poor thing has been suffering from scale for years, but it’s been at the office, and even though a colleague with a green thumb gave me his favorite scale-eradication solution recipe, I’ve had no chance to use it … until now.

But now the plants are home with me, along with a monitor, laptop, backup disc and the folders and files I think I might need the next few weeks. Now is a good time to concoct the oily, sudsy solution and wipe off each leaf and stem. I love this plant, have had it for years. I want it to live!

It’s a micro effort in a macro-scary world. It’s where we are now.

(The spider plant in an ironic setting, since my office is not where I am now.)

The Walk There

The Walk There

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From Tuesday through Thursday I attended a retreat/team-building conference held a mile or so from my former place of employment.

Work neighborhoods aren’t the same as home neighborhoods, but over time they make an impression, so the day before yesterday I took a sentimental stroll over there before my day officially began.

The soundtrack was Charlotte Church singing “When at Night I Go to Sleep,” which long ago became associated with this particular walk, especially the eastbound version of it.

It’s big, florid, sweet music, and when I hear it I remember those walks into the rising sun, the freedom I felt before I  entered the office, the fact that it always seems to be summer in my memory, pavement shimmering, folks already dragging in the heat.

I walked east on F Street, down 8th to E, then across the bridge. A major public works project was completed there in the four years since I’ve been gone, so the building looks different, more expansive. But arriving at the place wasn’t the point. It was the walk there.   

Adventure Stories

Adventure Stories

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Maybe it’s because I just read a book about exploring caves and catacombs, but I’m finding myself drawn to adventure stories these days.

Which is why Into Thin Air is on my nightstand and in my backpack. Jon Krakauer’s tale of the 1996 climbing disaster on Mount Everest is nothing if not gripping. Even though I’ve read it before, even though it’s dedicated to the ones who didn’t make it, I’m still pulled along by the power of a good story well told.

Adventure books are good for pandemics, inspiring in their accounts of adversity overcome. Some day, people will be writing stories about this time. They will know by then how the virus behaves, how long it lasts on surfaces and why (thank God) it spares children. They will know how we handled it here in this country, what we did wrong and what we did right. They will know how it all turns out. But for us, right here, right now, the adventure story is still being written.

Counterbalance

Counterbalance

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The coronavirus has arrived along with the crocus and the daffodils, the sweet woodruff and forsythia. It’s arrived along with the balmy breezes and the occasional rumble of thunder.

I’m wondering if there’s a connection between the two, the virus and the early spring, and have decided that only in the most general, humans-messing-things-up kind of way. That and how they both heighten the disjointedness I’m feeling these days, a sense that the world is out of kilter.

Still, the one can be a balm for the other. Pulling into my driveway last night, I glimpsed the blossoms that popped during the 70-degree day and felt all tingly and alive again. Yes, I still rushed in to wash my hands — but then I rushed back out again to snap this photo.

In the CIty

In the CIty

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It wasn’t where I thought I would be when I climbed up the Metro stairs, but it was close enough. It was the city, the city where I worked for 10 years and don’t work anymore.

It was the city where sidewalks would gleam with water sprayed from hoses in the hot summer sun.

It was the city where I would traipse home at the end of a long day.

It was the city that now, surprisingly, welcomed me home.

Late Light

Late Light

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After a late light evening, a late dark morning. The drive I normally do in full daylight I did today in the gloaming, with the glow of an almost-full moon to guide me.

It’s no matter. I’ve experienced this enough by now to expect the shift and roll with it. The missing hour of sleep is another issue. In my experience once you lose it you seldom get it back. The long catch-up snoozes do little to erase the deficit.

Nevertheless, I look forward to acclimating soon. I want to be awake and alert to enjoy the endless afternoons, the dusks that go on forever, the sense of possibility that late light can bring.

ISO Hand Sanitizer

ISO Hand Sanitizer

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I’ve read enough psychology to understand when my actions are simply seeking a little control over a situation that’s beyond any. And for me, these last few days, it all boils down to hand sanitizer.

No matter that I’ve been washing my hands like a fiend. I want hand sanitizer to carry in my purse and backpack. I want to know I can slip a glob of it in my hands when soap and water aren’t available.

Of course, as anyone who’s been shopping knows, there’s no hand sanitizer to be found. Not in pharmacies or grocery stores or anywhere else. When I enter a store and find no hand sanitizer, I buy paper towels or bleach or something else. This is getting expensive!

Which is why I’m glad to hear you can make the stuff. Combine two-thirds cup alcohol with one-third cup aloe vera gel. Of course, you must have aloe vera gel, which strangely enough, I do. It was buried in a bag in the garage where I keep sunscreen and insect repellent.

I still feel out of control … but not quite so much.


(Photo chosen for serenity enhancement)

Requiem for a Tree

Requiem for a Tree

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It comes down today, this mighty oak, the tallest in the yard, once a noble specimen but now a victim of drought, development and Lord knows what else. It bravely endured the amputation of its leeward half, a move that was meant to save it or at least forestall its end.  While that gave it a few more years, it was not enough. The executioners arrive in an hour to cut it down.

I’ve lost track of how many trees we’ve lost through the years, ones blown down by strong winds after soaking rains; ones felled before that can happen; and one that was cabled for years to keep it upright only to have it plunge to earth on a warm and still May morning.

I went out early this morning to say goodbye to the tree, patting its great hoary trunk, mossy and lichened. I thought of the games the children played at its feet, recalled the haphazard forsythia hedge that used to grow in front of it, the playhouse and sandbox that were there. I thought about its role in Suzanne and Appolinaire’s wedding, when, decorated with a fern, it was witness to their vows.

Once it was one of a number; now, it’s the last of its breed. There are no more 100-footers. They have died and gone away.

I know this is the right thing to do. The tree is rotting and weakened. If left to its own devices it could fall down, taking other trees and the neighbor’s shed with it. But I will miss its shade in summer and its bare branches in winter. I will miss its salute to the sky.

Blank Slate

Blank Slate

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It’s the first time I’ve been home in the morning light since I pruned the rose bush, and I sit at the kitchen table looking at the results. There are fewer branches, to be sure, and there is a clarity, the beginnings of new growth.

How I wish I could bring that clarity to other tasks at hand: to the boxes and shelves and hidden corners of my house. To the jumble of ideas in my brain.

What’s required is the kind of careful, methodical approach I used last Sunday. That requires time … and space. Long afternoons, mornings without appointments. The blank slate of an empty room.

Underland

Underland

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Like the underworlds Robert Macfarlane plumbs in his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey, there is much going on beneath the surface in this marvelous new offering by one of my favorite authors. 

And there would have to be to combine prehistoric cave art, Parisian catacombs, the “wood wide web” (the fungal and rooted connectedness of trees in the forest), underground rivers, sweating icebergs and burial sites for nuclear waste — all in one book.

One theme that ties them together, besides Macfarlane’s exploration of them (no one is better than he at describing fear) is a growing recognition of the Anthropocene, the geologic age that experts have come to accept we are living through, one defined by human influence on the environment.

To comprehend the enormity of this designation, Macfarlane brings many tools to bear — literature, myth, science, philosophy and language, always language. “Words are world-makers — and language is one of the great geologic forces of the Anthropocene,” Macfarlane writes. But of the many terms for this “ugly epoch,” only one seems right with Macfarlane — “species loneliness, the intense solitude that we are fashioning for ourselves as we strip the Earth of the other life with which we share it.” 


“If there is human meaning to be made of the wood wide web,” he continues, “it is surely that what might save us as we move forwards into the precarious, unsettled centuries ahead is collaboration: mutualism, symbiosis, the inclusive human work of collective decision-making extended to more-than-human communities.”


And so the image at the heart of these pages, he explains, is that of an opened hand — extended in greeting, compassion, art — the prehistoric hand prints in ancient cave paintings and the touch of his young son’s hand. 


I know I will write more about this wonderful book; this is a start.