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Author: Anne Cassidy

Eight Candles

Eight Candles

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Today A Walker in the Suburbs celebrates its eighth birthday. This is hard to imagine — that for eight years I’ve been writing posts at least every weekday and often more. But I need no better reminder than the one starting this weekend. The blog’s beginnings are entwined with the vast snowfall we had that winter and watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics on the TV in the basement (when there was still a futon down there).

I’ve been reading some of my earlier birthday posts and thinking about how important it is to keep things fresh. A blog facelift is definitely in the works (at least in my own mind if not yet in code) and the writing itself can always be liberated.

How easy it is to get boxed in, both in life and in blogging, and if there’s one thing I don’t want for A Walker, it’s limitations.

Eight-year-olds are full of life — skinned knees and messy projects. And so I hope it is for this eight-year-old. And with that, I raise a glass (actually a cup of tea) to say, “Happy Birthday, Blog!”

(Photo: notonthehighstreet.com)

Shades of Gray

Shades of Gray

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With apologies to those expecting a more salacious post … this one’s about my wardrobe. It’s about the gray skirts and the gray pants, the gray dress and the gray sweater.  It’s about the sweatshirts, all three of them, all gray.

And then there are there are the gray turtlenecks; I have a few of those, too, one dark, one light, one striped and one emblazoned with “U.K.” Dad sent the latter one to Claire in hopes she would go to the University of Kentucky for college. She went to George Mason instead — and I kept the turtleneck.

I like the color gray; it’s soft and neutral,  a worthy alternative to black. But I’m starting to feel … a little grayed out.  Pinks and purples and fuchsias are looking good these days.

Maybe it’s a midwinter thing, or a midlife thing. … But I could use some color!

Phantom Snow

Phantom Snow

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Sometimes I think we know too much about the weather, about European and North American Mesoscale (NAM) models, about high pressures and cold air damming. After all, we’re not meteorologists; at best our knowledge is a touching glance.

But then I learn just enough to gain a vision.

Take yesterday’s “mixed precipitation” event, which produced coated boughs and slick sidewalks. I’d heard that due to low dew points, it would be snowing up in the atmosphere before it touched earth. In my highly unscientific understanding of this I imagine the air cooling, filling with moisture, to give passage to the first flakes, to pave the way.

It’s an amateur’s view of the universe: phantom snow falling on fluffy clouds, a shower of white that no one can see. A poetic description that cannot possibly be true, but I like to think of it that way.

Clarity at Clarendon

Clarity at Clarendon

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It’s been a strange winter — cold scouring winds that hurl sticks and limbs onto frozen ground followed by one-day warm-ups that leave us longing for spring.

When the weather cooperates, as it did yesterday, I take my new walk through Arlington on the way home.

And last night, for the first time, I found my way with no backtracking. This seems like something I should have been able to do first time around, but after Clarendon, three streets come together in a strange intersection, and the middle of the three, the one I needed to find, looks more like a parking lot than an avenue. There are plenty of directional errors waiting to happen in that neighborhood — even with phone directions in tow — and each time I got turned around I would make a new mistake.

But yesterday, it was light enough that I found the street I needed. And it was as I had imagined it: the way that had been muddled was suddenly made clear. I love it when that happens.

The Irish in Her

The Irish in Her

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When I was 24 and Mom was 51 we took a long trip together. We visited England, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy — “the tour.” And of course,  Ireland.

“Everyone looks familiar here,” Mom said as soon as we stepped off the ferry at Dun Laoghaire. And in fact they did. You could round up the pedestrians in a Dublin block, plop them down in the pews of St. Peters on Barr Street in Lexington, and you’d hardly know the difference. There would be more tweed and piety, worse teeth, but the dark hair would be the same, and the wide smiles.

“All of my people are Irish,” Mom said, proudly. She meant the Longs and the Scotts and the Donnellys and the Concannons. But she came to realize through the years that their union would compound the immigrant’s distrust and fear. Turns out, her family would not quite survive its Irishness. Now there’s only one Concannon girl left, my aunt of 94. She and Mom barely spoke at the end.

Mom would have been 92 this February 1. I don’t have her Irishness, but I miss it — and her — especially today.

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.