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Author: Anne Cassidy

Chesapeake Steamboats

Chesapeake Steamboats

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One of the reason I love to travel is that it opens up worlds you’d never know if you didn’t leave home. It’s not just seeing the sights and meeting the people. It’s imbibing the history and culture.

Things like the Chesapeake steamboat culture, for instance, which flourished from the 19th century into the 20th.  Boats plied the rivers, creeks and inlets of this watery world, picking up tobacco, produce, seafood — and people — and taking them to Baltimore or Norfolk. Neighbors would gather at the wharf when the boats made their return trip to retrieve the tools, lumber or lace they’d ordered from the big city.

Steamboats served as buses, ambulances, bars (you could get a drink on one during Prohibition) — and stages. The musical “Showboat” was based on an Edna Ferber story she wrote after spending time on the James Adams Floating Theater, which mostly plied the Chesapeake.  These floating stages might be the only live entertainment a family could count on all year long. It was a big deal when the Floating Theater came to town.

Chesapeake steamboats — until this afternoon, I never knew they existed.

(This is the pilots cabin from the steamer Potomac, which is being restored in the Irvington Steamboat Museum.)

Virginia Tidewater

Virginia Tidewater

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This is a land of inlets and bridges, of boats and buoys. It’s the Virginia Tidewater, home of three peninsulas — the Eastern Shore, the Northern Neck and the Middle Peninsula.

It’s a place of fringed coastlines, of oat grass waving in a stiff breeze off the Chesapeake. There are beaches here, but they are small and riverine. And the water is salt, fresh and brackish.

As if to mimic this variety, the landscape holds colonial churches, ancestral estates, boardwalks for bird-watching — and even an oyster academy.

It’s not a matter of what to do … but of how much we can cram in.

ROVA

ROVA

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It’s the morning of a four-day weekend and we’re off soon to Virginia’s Northern Neck, a spit of land that lies between the Potomac and the Rappahannock.

It’s a land of marsh and water fowl, of water vistas and sailing ships. Known for its oysters and wineries — also the birthplace of five early presidents.

I know far too little of this state that I call home. To be a resident of Northern Virginia (NOVA) is often to be far less familiar than one should be with the Rest of Virginia (ROVA).

Today we put that at least partially to rights.

Still Green

Still Green

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An evening walk after rain, fir trees dripping, sky a mottled blue with pink around the edges.  I take my time, and Copper wants to saunter, too.

It’s slightly cool and very moist. The sound of gurgling from the neighbor’s fountain matches the general wetness, though I notice that our driveway seems much damper than the street.

Two doors down I spot a bluebird flitting from branch to branch, flashing its bright plumage in the dusk.  A few steps away a giant arborvitae towers over a small culvert that is fenced off with split rails and a tough vine that sports purple flowers earlier in the season. In the meadow, a soft mist is gathering in the twilight.

Copper and I turn around under the large maple that will be flaming scarlet in a month or so. But for now … it’s still green.

Shock Absorbers

Shock Absorbers

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As a walker in the suburbs I do a fair share of pavement-pounding. But as a homeowner in the suburbs I do a fair share of driving, too.

Today I pick up a car that was in one shop and now must go to another. It’s an — ahem! — older vehicle, a tad finicky, and has lately begun swaying like a covered wagon on the Oregon Trail. Faulty shock absorbers are the culprit. 
This has me thinking about shock absorbers in general, and how nice it would be to have them for the daily irritants of life, some sort of invisible bubble wrap that would protect us from missed trains and long waits at the doctor’s office. 
I know they exist — they’re called prayer and meditation and the active practice of gratitude. But sometimes I’d like an easier, more self-indulgent solution. 
Fallophoboia

Fallophoboia

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You won’t find this condition in the DSM. It’s real, though. It’s the fear of falling leaves, nips in the air and all the other harbingers of autumn that put a skip in other people’s steps.

I won’t deny that I’ve enjoyed the last few low-humidity days, the blue skies of Sunday, the white puffy clouds, sleeping under a light cover with the windows thrown open to the evening air.

But brown leaves on pavement give me a fright, as do quieter nights, crickets only, no katydids.

I love summer, that’s all there is to it. And while I console myself with the knowledge that spring will be here again before we know it, the truth of the matter is that we must trudge through fall and winter to get there. And sometimes that seems like a tall order.

Saving Papers

Saving Papers

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It turns out that the torrential rains that plagued us the last couple of weeks seeped into our basement (usually dry) and had their way with a few boxes. Since these boxes contained paper (as oh so many of them do), this was not a welcome development.

Of course, it’s never a welcome development when your basement is even partially flooded … and let’s just say that not everything in my house is tidily placed on shelves and ensconced in plastic tubs. Which means there were some waterlogged files. Nothing terribly vital, but material that I had saved, and at one point had some utility.

In the general vicinity were two large boxes of newspapers. Saving newspapers is something I come by honestly — Mom was a pro — and I’m no slouch myself. This was soon made abundantly clear. Some of the saved newspapers contained articles or op-eds I wrote. Fair enough. But do I need to save the entire newspaper? No! That was an easy one.

More difficult was deciding which of the historical newspapers to keep. I settled on 9/11, Clinton Elected, Clinton Impeached, Bush Elected and … somewhere there’s an Obama Elected one too but it must be in a different box.

And then there were newspapers for the day of each daughter’s birth. I’d forgotten I did this. These papers will, I hope, mean something to each of them someday. But what they mean to me now — especially since two of the girls were born on Sunday — is that I have just that much more heavy newsprint in of my house.

Simple Gift

Simple Gift

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One of the simple gifts, a gift that doesn’t always seem like a gift but sometimes a drudgery, is waking up every morning. The weekend wake-ups are best, of course, unforced and un-alarmed as they are. But even the weekday ones, rushed and bolt-upright, are proof we wake to live another day.

A good thing? It doesn’t always seem that way. But mornings are the exception even when there’s general gloominess afoot. There is something about a morning, and especially this crystalline one I’m experiencing right now, that makes me glad to be alive.

I’m not going to analyze this too much — or second-guess myself for being a soppy optimist.

I’m just going to enjoy it.

(Morning light in the garden, late June. Alas, the coneflowers aren’t looking this good now.) 

Silence

Silence

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I just finished reading Jane Brox’s lovely new book Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives. Brox plumbs her topic by comparing the silence of solitary confinement with the silence of the cloister, an interesting approach that gives her a chance to examine the trials of silence as well as its gifts.

She draws often from Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who lived much of his life in the cloistered Abbey of Gethsemani but whose writings gave him a worldwide audience. Here she quotes from Merton’s Asian Journal: “Our real journey in life is interior. It is a matter of growth, deepening, and an ever-greater surrender to the creative action of grace and love in our hearts.”

Brox notes the creative power of silence, and its necessity. She concludes with this thought:

Silence can seem like a luxury. Or the fraught world has labeled it that way. But from what I know of it, I would argue that silence is as necessary as the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, which we so carefully guard and endlessly ponder, for it affirms the meaning of speech even as it provides a path to inner life, to beauty, observation and appreciation. It presents the opportunity for a true reckoning with the self, with external obligation, and with power.

Sweet Little Liriope

Sweet Little Liriope

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I know few plants by their proper names. I only accidentally learned the name liriope when a friend, an avid gardener, admired it in the yard. I acted like I knew what she was talking about: “Oh yes, the liriope. I like it too.”

In truth I didn’t know what it was, and I certainly didn’t know that it flowered. I thought it was a grass-like ground cover that never bloomed. But I’ve learned to appreciate its sweet lavender blossom, its hardiness. Like the crepe myrtle, it brings color to the late-summer garden.

It’s also demure, and I’ve come to realize that I admire that in a plant. Something that doesn’t call attention to itself, that improves on second glance, that brightens the dreariest corner.

And that would be … liriope.