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Author: Anne Cassidy

Supermoon Bounce

Supermoon Bounce

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I missed the lunar eclipse, which began here just as the sun was rising. But I did catch the bright rays of the almost-supermoon as it shone through the trees last night in the backyard.

It was bitter cold and blustery, wind chill in the teens, but I needed to move. So I bundled up and bounced on the trampoline for a few minutes.

I made it through two Gabrieli fanfares and a bit of Respighi before the cold and the sound of snapping branches drove me inside. But those few minutes with the supermoon were highly memorable. It was nature “without her diadem.” Powerful, able to wound or kill, but beautiful just the same.

I was cheating, of course, because warmth and comfort were only a few steps away. But I was feeling the power of the universe — which always provides perspective — just the same.

A Walker in Afghanistan

A Walker in Afghanistan

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If I lived in a war zone I would probably walk, crunch and use the elliptical. The stress relief would be worth the tedium, or even the danger.  So I get why people wear their fitbits when they’re in harm’s way, especially if they’re gadget geeks who want to measure their workouts.

But I don’t get why they share their data with a fitness sharing app called Strava, which then posted the whereabouts and movements of their customers in a heat map available for all to see. So by clicking on a route called Sniper Alley outside the American base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, you could find the names and hometowns of those who use it. Combine this with some basic Googling and you have a trove of information.

I first read about this oversight yesterday, how it was discovered almost by accident by a college student in Australia. Why didn’t someone realize sooner that this technology could be used to reveal troop movements, the identifies of agents and so much more sensitive information?

Sharing data is a way to personalize technology, to humanize it.  But whatever is shared can be abused.

I hate to admit it, but in a world of smart cars, smart appliances and smart houses … we’re going to have to start reading, really reading, those privacy statements. And companies who collect sensitive data must do a better job of telling us how and when they use it.

Otherwise we may find ourselves walking in Afghanistan — with sniper guns trained on us.

(Photo: Washington Post)

A Walker at Pemberley

A Walker at Pemberley

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Over the weekend I watched one of my mainstays, the Pride and Prejudice miniseries that debuted in 1995 and never grows old.

What struck me this time around is how much time Miss Elizabeth Bennett spends traipsing around the countryside. She walks in all weathers and all terrains. She walks in the cold and the rain. She dirties her petticoat and muddies her shoes. She walks around the estate at Pemberley, where she runs into its owner, Mr. Darcy, fresh out of the lake and dripping wet.  It’s a scene to thrill every female English major’s heart!

Later, in dry clothes, Darcy escorts Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle around the estate, along crushed stone paths, through copses of trees. This all could have been mine, Elizabeth said to herself on an earlier tour of the house, having second thoughts about spurning Darcy’s proposal as she reevaluates his character — and his property!

But the quiet walk the couple shares bodes well for the future. And as the camera pans out, we see the placid beauty of the English countryside. I saved the last two episodes for another night. But I know this: One day Miss Elizabeth Bennett will be a walker at Pemberley.

(Lyme Park, Cheshire, where the lake scene was filmed.)

The Byline

The Byline

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In my full-time freelancing days my byline appeared frequently in national publications. My name in the big slick magazines, something I never dreamed could happen when I was growing up in Lexington, Kentucky.

But the byline lost its luster through the years. What mattered was the story — not the glory.

Still, I kept signing my name to pieces through my university publishing career: articles on hovercraft and soul craft and the Affordable Care Act.

Now, I work for an institution whose work I believe in and admire. I’m happy to put their story into words. They pay me well for those words, which are almost exclusively without byline.

Yesterday, for the first time in several years, “by Anne Cassidy” appeared on an article outside my institution. It might seem like a small thing — in many ways, it is. But when I saw it there at the end of the story (which makes it technically a tagline!), I realized how much I’d missed seeing it. Guess I’ll have to do something about that.

(On assignment in Bangladesh last summer, notebook in hand.)

Frosted Fields

Frosted Fields

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Woke up this morning to whitened grass and blue birds flocking to the feeder, to the black-and-white-striped, red-headed downy woodpecker pecking at the suet block. It’s not walking weather, not yet.

A few more hours so the temperature rises past 19, so my breath won’t blind me. A few hours of mental exercise before the physical.

In the meantime I sit here in the dining alcove, as close to the backyard as I can be and not yet in it, itching to be outside.

Ursula Le Guin 1929-2018

Ursula Le Guin 1929-2018

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Ever since I heard the news this morning of Ursula Le Guin’s passing on January 22, I’ve been searching for a book of her essays. Having not yet found it, with the day ticking away, I’ll do the best I can without the hard copy.

I came to Le Guin’s work not through her science fiction but through her essays. One in particular sticks with me, “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” which is about women writing.

“Where does a woman write? What does she look like writing?” is the question Le Guin poses, after beginning with an image from Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Strangely enough, it was through a Google Doodle of Virginia Woolf (in honor of her 136th birthday), that I happened upon Le Guin’s obituary.

Woolf, of course, famously said that a woman needs a room of her own to be a writer. But Le Guin, a mother of three, writes here of women who produce great works of art without so much as a broom closet to call their own. One of them was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote her husband a letter saying, “If I am to write, I must have a room of my own,” but who then went on to write most of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from her kitchen table.

There is much more to say here, but I’m sitting at my kitchen table — and, though I no longer have young children clamoring for attention, have a paying job that does just the same.

To be continued …

Just My Line

Just My Line

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You can have your lefts and rights, your ups and downs, your diameters and perimeters. Give me the diagonal every time.

There’s nothing like a diagonal route for cutting corners, for shaving minutes off a stroll. Even these birds like it — though they hardly need it, seeing as they can get anywhere they want as the crow flies.
I was thinking of diagonals today as I walked to work, how I hold the destination in my mind and figure out ways to make it closer, as if I could leap there in a few steps instead of a hundred. 
It’s an impatient line, the diagonal is. That’s why it’s perfect for me.
New Walk, Continued

New Walk, Continued

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The new walk is becoming a habit, the perfect way to unwind at the end of the day. I jump off the bus at one Metro stop, but walk two more stops up the road before boarding a train. The key word is “up.”

It’s about a mile from Rosslyn Metro to Clarendon Metro, but that doesn’t include the elevation gain, a number I’ve yet to locate but which feels mighty big when you’re hoofing it with a laptop at the end of a long workday.

One might be tempted to lag behind, like this little guy. But this little guy does not realize that Le Pain Quotidien is only a few blocks away — and that their crusty baguettes can be gone by 5:45. Nothing like a little French bread to put a skip in your step.

Though I fantasize about townhouses I pass along the way (so cute, so close in!), my walk leads not to a quaint bungalow — but a subway platform.  Not always as crowded as this one, I’m happy to say. But a subway platform just the same.

Just a Spoonful

Just a Spoonful

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Last month, the Washington Post health section ran an article on sugar’s addictive quality.  Convincing, but poorly timed. Who wants to read that right before the holidays? Still, it left an impression, and I thought about it again this morning as I shoveled far too much sugar into my tea.

For the most part, I’m a healthy eater. Lots of vegetables and fruit, not much meat, trying for more calcium these days. Where I fall apart, though, is in the sweets department. I know too much sugar is bad for me. But tea doesn’t taste like tea unless it’s milky and sweet.

I sometimes fantasize that I could cut down my usage one grain at a time. Would I never notice it that way? Or would there come a point, the proverbial straw, that would halt my experiment and send me screaming back to the heaping teaspoons?

At this point I’ll never know … because I’m not about to try it.  My tea is already decaffeinated; it can’t be de-sweetened, too.

The Shutdown Walk

The Shutdown Walk

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It’s hard to live in our nation’s capital without drinking our nation’s Kool-Aid. And right now, the flavor is shutdown. The will-it-happen, won’t-it-happen discussion has given way to talk of how it will happen. Shutting down the government is not unlike steering a huge ocean liner. One doesn’t start or stop quickly.

Since there’s one government employee and one dependent-on-government employee in this house — to say nothing of a government-employee daughter a few miles away — this matters in an immediate way.

During the last shutdown, in 2013, Congress authorized back pay for furloughed workers. We might not be as lucky this time. In addition to lapsed income, there’s also the uncertainty of the situation, the disruption.

Time for some perspective, which for me means … a stroll. I’m calling it the Shutdown Walk.