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Author: Anne Cassidy

Fifteen Years

Fifteen Years

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Today A Walker in the Suburbs turns 15, its first birthday on the new site. This checks a box I’ve meant to check for years, moving the blog to an address that is completely its own. It’s the evolution of a project that began when I started this blog during Snowmaggedon, a massive snowstorm that shut down ordinary life and gave me the time I needed to bring this concept to life.

Since then, I’ve written plenty about walking in the suburbs, which you might expect, but I’ve also covered music, light, books, travel, writing and the joys of having little people in the house again.

If you have a few minutes, explore some of the 4,544 posts on this site and leave a comment on one (a feature newly added in the blog’s redesign). But most of all, just enjoy the breathing space. And thank you, as always, for reading.

Multiple Choice

Multiple Choice

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When I browsed through electives last fall, looking for a spring semester class, my eyes glossed over an important detail about the one I chose. Progress would be assessed by discussion, papers, and tests.

Yes … tests. Another class I took a couple years ago advertised a final exam, but that turned out to be a paper with a shorter due date. Maybe these tests would be the same.

It was a dangerous assumption. This was a test, full stop: multiple choice, multiple answer, true and false. Forty-five questions, 45 minutes. It covered Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics, no slouch subjects.

I can’t remember the last time I took a multiple-choice test. I must have been an undergraduate in college, but even then I was assessed mostly by essay exam. I’d forgotten how much a person who thinks too much can deliberate on a single question, even when she’s studied for hours.

When the appointed time arrived I tried to still the butterflies in my stomach by doing some deep breathing. The butterflies kept fluttering, and they fluttered for every one of those 45 minutes. They’re fluttering still because now I need to check my score.

Apart from personal angst, though, what struck me about this examination is that I really needed to know my stuff. The professor is old school, and he wants to make sure we’re reading the material. I am, but the old noggin’ ain’t as sharp as it used to be. It’s a humbling exercise. But that’s the point: it is an exercise, and I’m glad to be doing it. At least in general. We’ll have another test in five weeks — and the butterflies will be fluttering again.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Respite

Respite

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The owls were calling, “Who-who, who-who.” I heard them as I hiked the Glade Trail and when I returned home, too.

Had a flock of visitors moved into the area? Was it the morning’s warmer temperatures? Because by the time I was out, in late afternoon, the wind had picked up and the day had grown cooler. I’ve heard owls before at this time of year, so it may be cyclical, a brief glimpse of the spring we’ve “learned” is still six weeks away.

Whatever the explanation, the owls soothed me, reminded me of all the wild things who live among us and operate on older, more essential rhythms. Their conversation enveloped me in sound, just as the woods enveloped me in beauty. Together, they produced an hour of respite from a world gone mad.

All of Us

All of Us

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The five years I worked for Winrock International were some of the most adventurous and fulfilling of my career. I was part of a team tasked to tell the story of this wonderful organization, founded to help those at home and abroad, and I jumped in feet first.

Winrock implements USAID contracts, which do everything from countering human trafficking to helping set up a fleet of electric vehicles in one of the more polluted cities of the world, Kathmandu. I interviewed trafficking survivors, I rode around in the back of a small electric bus driven by a pathbreaking group of women in Nepal. I saw firsthand the good that USAID projects accomplish.

I’ll never forget my first trip for Winrock, glimpsing on the side of a truck the words that would from then on never fail to move me. “USAID from the American People.” The work I was doing with Winrock allowed me to see the work that was happening around the world in my name, in the names of all of us.

For less than 1 percent of the U.S. budget, the United States Agency for International Development sows a tremendous amount of goodwill. It’s evidence of our values, yes, but it’s also part of the soft power on which the world runs.

Yesterday the Agency for International Development was closed and its website shut down. Employees were told to work from home. The president has said he would like to shutter USAID as an independent agency. The head of the new Department of Government Efficiency called it a “criminal organization.”

The crime is what’s happening now, both to this agency and to the people who depend on it. And have no doubt: In the end, those people are all of us.

Back on Earth

Back on Earth

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The soil was packed and pocked. With temperatures in the 20s yesterday morning, it was anything but springy, but I could tell it had been malleable enough the day before to cast a boot print or two.

Mud quick frozen and crunchy beneath the feet. A living thing, expandable and contractable. Not just a surface but a presence.

For weeks I’ve been hoofing it on pavement, sticking to the sides of paved roads, dodging snow piles and black ice. But yesterday, for a few minutes, I pounded a dirt trail. It felt good to walk on earth again.

Earliest Memory

Earliest Memory

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Mom would have been 99 today. Today I cede this space to the person who inspired me first, and inspires me still. In this “guest post,” Mom muses on her earliest memory.

Where do I start to tell the story of my life? Do I start with the beginning? But what is the beginning? Is that cold early February morning when I was born, only minutes after midnight? But to write of those moments and the moments that followed would be only hearsay. So do I start with my own first memory? I think that would be the honest way.

My first real memory is of sunlight streaming through a window near the little chair where I sat. It was a rocking chair, red maybe, and I must have been fascinated with the way the light seemed to jump through the windowpanes and dance around until it chose to fall right at my feet.

Did I laugh at its playfulness? Did I try to catch it and hold onto it? Did I sit very still and wonder where it came from and where it would go when it left? Or did I just enjoy it while it stayed close to me?

Snow to Go

Snow to Go

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Today we say farewell to January — and the snowpack. Even though we’ve had daytime temperatures in the 50s, the nights have been cold enough and the snow deep enough that at my house we’ve had some form of white stuff on the ground since January 5th.

But now the rain has moved in and the yard is a mottled mess, saturated soil with snow stripes like cirrus clouds. Somehow, though, the section where the snow was deepest still shows faint sled tracks from when the kiddos were here.

We mark the landscape in ways we cannot fathom, not just in the practices that give us firestorms and mudslides and summer nights without fireflies. But also with subtle signatures: the breaking of a twig and the harrowing of a track. This truth is more obvious when snow is on the ground. In that sense, snow keeps us honest. I’ll be sad to see it go.

Grieving in D.C.

Grieving in D.C.

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It was a rare early turn-in for me last night. I had one daughter flying to England so first thing this morning I checked to see if her flight had landed. I was grateful to learn that it had, as I always am when a loved one is traveling.

Then I saw the headline. At 8:57 p.m. an American Airlines flight collided midair with a Blackhawk helicopter just outside Reagan National Airport. All passengers and crew are feared dead.

For years I worked next door to National Airport. I walked beside it, looked out the windows of our building to see jets taking off and landing. On long strolls I went to Gravelly Point, where planes sweep in long and low on their way down from the sky. It wasn’t exactly fear I felt I felt watching them, more like awe. But the idea of danger was never far away.

From what I can tell, the collision occurred not far from Gravelly Point. Rescue crews are gathered at the crash scene now, pulling bodies from the wreckage. Across the country and the world, anguished relatives are grieving. My heart goes out to them in a special way. This crash happened in our backyard. For me and for millions, it feels personal.

Here’s the thing about flying. We all know it’s statistically safer than driving a car, something most of us do every day. Yet the fear of flying is real, and always will be. This morning reminds us why.

Riding the Elephant

Riding the Elephant

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Today I’m thinking about the two minds with which most of us navigate the world. One of them is rational and cool; it checks facts and weighs options. The other is emotional and warm-blooded; facts slip through its fingers. There are different ways of describing these entities: reasoning and intuition, higher brain and lower brain, the elephant and the rider.

It’s the last one that sticks in my mind. I first learned about the elephant and rider in Jonathan Haidt’s The RIghteous Mind, which did more to explain our political polarization than any book I’ve read.

Yesterday, I was riding the elephant. I climbed aboard midday and didn’t dismount for several hours. It’s tempting now to second-guess every action I took during that fraught time, but I will try to avoid that trap. I’ll focus instead on the perils of elephant riding. Today, I promise to keep my feet on the ground.

(Photo: A bull elephant in Kruger National Park. Rob Hooft, Wikimedia Commons)

Mostly Mozart

Mostly Mozart

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His birthday was yesterday, but my mind was elsewhere when I wrote Monday’s post — mostly in the clouds, I guess.

But Mozart was in the air all day, courtesy of my local classical station. I heard symphonies and sonatas and divertimentos. I caught the entire 21st Piano Concerto and for fun pulled out my music and followed along. There in pencil were my teacher’s notes: “Play softer!” “No pedal!” I still can’t believe that I was able to memorize and play the first movement of this piece with my high school orchestra. But apparently I did, and I have the music to prove it!

Mozart was with me then and in the months and years leading up to that concert. And he was with me yesterday, wafting through the airwaves, pulsing through my earbuds during a late-day walk. My day may not have been totally Mozart, but it mostly was.

(Photo: Musikverein in Vienna. Title: With apologies to Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, recently renamed.)