Browsed by
Author: Anne Cassidy

Supermoon

Supermoon

Comments 0 Comment

The supermoon woke me at 3:37 a.m., poured its rays into
the room, feigning daylight. No wonder my stay-asleep mechanism was
overwhelmed. Nothing to do with the fact that this is my first day back in the office since December 21. 
I read a while, ignored the moonbeams and drifted back. All the while this meteorological marvel, what astronomers call the perigee syzygy, was beaming down on the frigid landscape. It was lighting up the salt crystals on the road and the little patches of snow still left from last week’s dusting.
By the time I left for work, it was low in the sky, just above the treetops, and I quickly snapped the shot above.  (Quickly, because it was 7 degrees outside and I was anxious to put my gloves on.)
We’re closer to the moon during a perigee syzygy than we are otherwise. And tomorrow is the perihelion, the point in earth’s orbit when we’re closest to the sun. Thanks to these heavenly bodies for lighting our way, and for making the dark, cold hours so much more bearable. 
This supermoon is from November 14, 2016. I saw it glinting on the Java Sea from the island of Sumba, Indonesia. Photo:  Wikipedia
Sweet Start

Sweet Start

Comments 0 Comment

There was dancing last night to ring in the new year, and so many desserts that I was forced to take a bite of each one. Woke up this morning to a bright new year and a temperature of six (6)!

Weather like this requires a roaring fire, a bit of the bubbly … and dancing, all of which were in ample supply at last night’s gathering.

Add some sparkle and glitz … and it’s not a bad way to enter the new year.

I Wonder as I Wander

I Wonder as I Wander

Comments 0 Comment

The Christmas music season is drawing to a close. My favorite classical station stopped the carols cold-turkey on December 26, though we’ll be singing holiday hymns at church for another couple of weeks. Time to give a nod to a song I’ve heard often this season, a relatively new entry to the Christmas canon, “I Wonder as I Wander.”

It’s a haunting melody in a minor key, more “We Three Kings” than “Joy to the World.” But it is lovely and soft, a light snowfall on a still night. And … it was written by a Kentuckian, John Jacob Niles, a noted balladeer who collected Appalachian tunes later popularized by folk singers in the 1950s and ’60s.

I met John Jacob Niles several times at a Christmas Eve gathering hosted annually by my kindergarten teacher, Grace Cramer Webber, who became a friend of my mother’s. Like Niles, Webber was both behind and ahead of her time.

It isn’t easy to have your carol enter the Christmas canon — but Niles’ song has done just that.  As I listen I wonder, too. Not just about the birth of the baby Jesus, but about the power of music to take us places we otherwise couldn’t go.

Paper Courage

Paper Courage

Comments 0 Comment

Here at the short end of 2017, I awake as always with writing on my mind. I have my mentors, my sages, ones whose words lead the way. So this morning as I struggle with the words on my screen, I turn to words already set down by another. Words that reach across time and distance to encourage me, to set me straight.

No one has yet made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more like to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge. 

Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. 

Mary Oliver, “Of Power and Time” from Upstream 

Time Travel

Time Travel

Comments 0 Comment
Pale Blue Dot (Earth from Voyager 1, 1990) Courtesy NASA

As mentioned below, yesterday I posted in the past. Though it was strange for me, for time travelers it was just another day in the space-time continuum. That would be those who zip to ancient Babylon in a wormhole, or who believe in the Many Worlds theory, which posits that everything that ever could happen actually has — in another universe.

“We have achieved a temporal sentience that our ancestors lacked,” writes James Gleick in Time Travel, a book he penned in his past, my (then) future. “No one bothered with the future in 1516.” In fact, time awareness was dim until the 19th century, and the phrase “turn of the century” wasn’t used until the 20th.

But once we had temporal sentience we could have time travel: H.G. Well’s Time Machine and Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life — and scads of other books and films, including “Dr. Who,” the original of which debuted shortly after Time Machine was made into a movie.

What was most fascinating (but difficult to understand) was the physics behind the yarns, the fact that time travel, though it remains science fiction, cannot be totally ruled out according to some interpretations of the universe. Or, as Einstein said, “People like us who believe in physics known that the
distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

One might wonder why we need time travel in an age of cyberspace.  “All answers come down to one,” says Gleick. “To elude death.”

(This entry was posted in … the future.)

Auto Pilot

Auto Pilot

Comments 0 Comment

It’s below freezing here with a sky that means business (snow business). Birds flit from feeder to roost, keeping warm, I imagine. That’s what I’d do if I were a bird.

Instead, I sit in a warm room observing my feathered friends, trying to work up the enthusiasm for a morning walk. Will the temperature rise past 32? That might trigger some movement on my part. Otherwise, I may have to sit a while longer, have another cup of tea.
Absent from the blogosphere for two days, I notice that the entry I thought I’d posted on Christmas Eve never published. Because I scheduled it for December 24, though, its time stamp makes it appear as if I published it on that day.
It’s a vote against auto-pilot … but a vote in favor of time travel. About which more will be said … in the future. 
Appreciation

Appreciation

Comments 0 Comment
Once again the days have passed, the splendid ones and the trying ones. Once again we’ve come back to this point, which is for me, and for many, the great pause. Christmas Eve. Christmas Day. Soon to be followed by New Year’s Day and the delicious week in between. Once again I’ll re-run this blog post, one I wrote in 2011. Merry Christmas!


12/24/11

Our old house has seen better days. The siding is dented, the walkway is cracked, the yard is muddy and tracked with Copper’s paw prints. Inside is one of the fullest and most aromatic trees we’ve ever chopped down. Cards line the mantel, the fridge is so full it takes ten minutes to find the cream cheese. Which is to say we are as ready as we will ever be. The family is gathering. I need to make one more trip to the grocery store.

This morning I thought about a scene from one of my favorite Christmas movies, one I hope we’ll have time to watch in the next few days. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Jimmy Stewart has just learned he faces bank fraud and prison, and as he comes home beside himself with worry, he grabs the knob of the banister in his old house — and it comes off in his hand. He is exasperated at this; it seems to represent his failures and shortcomings.

By the end of the movie, after he’s been visited by an angel, after his family and friends have rallied around him in an unprecedented way, after he’s had a chance to see what the world would have been like without him — he grabs the banister knob again. And once again, it comes off in his hand. But this time, he kisses it. The house is still cold and drafty and in need of repair. But it has been sanctified by friendship and love and solidarity.

Christmas doesn’t take away our problems. But it counters them with joy. It reminds us to appreciate the humble, familiar things that surround us every day, and to draw strength from the people we love. And surely there is a bit of the miraculous in that.

Photo: Flow TV


Shopping Local

Shopping Local

Comments 0 Comment

Let empty boxes collect at curbsides, let the men in brown dash from truck to stoop. But last-minute shoppers unwilling to pay for overnight shipping (or maybe just people like me, who enjoy a bit of the hustle bustle) were out full force yesterday at the mall.

It felt good to be jostling with other shoppers, to be part of the public square. I’ve been worrying about the public square lately, wondering if its day has passed. Many of the young folks I know shop solely online, and recent forays to the mall have only confirmed the threatened condition of old-time getting and spending.

But yesterday drew out the folks who only shop this time of year: dazed men wandering with shopping bags; the very young and the very old; working folk who seem more at home behind a desk than checking out spatulas in Williams and Sonoma; parents jostling toddlers in the line to see Santa.

All of this in a glorious cacophony of squeaking toys, shouting kids and the nth rendition of “I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus.”

I didn’t have to go to the mall yesterday; I was buying a few extra gifts that everyone could live without. But I’m glad I came.

The News

The News

Comments 0 Comment

For most of the year I grab the Washington Post from the driveway and read it on the way to work. Now I’m reading a different kind of news.

Friends from Groton, Massachusetts, have downsized to Bonita Beach, Florida. Family from South Carolina has met family from Sweden. There have been travels to Italy and Kenya and North Carolina. Children have grown, dogs have been photographed in Santa hats and people I love have lived another year.

Time is always passing, but this is when and how we mark it. Not with rue or agitation. But with joy and gratitude.

Season’s Savoring

Season’s Savoring

Comments 0 Comment

Recent rushed mornings have meant no chance to do what I’m doing now — to sit in front of the Christmas tree, typing on this machine and taking in this colorful scene.

This year, a bonus: I’ve wrapped enough presents ahead of time to put them under the tree — rather than transporting them directly from the wrapping station to the car, on their way to Ellen’s house, where we’ve spent Christmas these last few years.

The goal now is to savor, not to rush or worry or strive for that one last gift. Gone are the days when someone begged for a retired beanie baby available only from eBay auction or a Playmobil dollhouse requiring hours of assembly.  People will be happy with what they receive.

I plan to do a lot more savoring in the next few days.