Browsed by
Author: Anne Cassidy

Dutch Wave

Dutch Wave

Comments 0 Comment

The headline caught my eye yesterday. “An inspiring green space in the concrete jungle.” Could it be the High Line? And yes, it was.

Gardening columnist Adrian Higgins wrote about the verdancy of New York City’s linear park, its stunning perennials and the way the wildlings (I love that word) mimic the flowers and weeds that flourished on the abandoned train line before it became an urban rooftop garden.

Higgins focuses on the plants themselves and the style of their plantings, as well as the man behind the beauty. Landscape designer Piet Oudolf is a leader of the “Dutch Wave” school of gardening, which is heavy on perennials and herbs and pollinators.

It’s nice to have a name for the pleasing combination of shaggy grasses and delicate flowers. Not that I will try to create it at home but so I can roll it around in my mind as I stroll, recreating the walks I’ve taken on the High Line, a place where plants and people come together so admirably.

(The perennials in my garden are not Dutch Wave.)

Brian Doyle: An Appreciation

Brian Doyle: An Appreciation

Comments 0 Comment

I learned last night of the passing of Brian Doyle, a writer I admired for years, who I read too little of, who leaves behind a body of work that nourishes us all.

Doyle was the editor of Portland Magazine, the alumni magazine of the University of Portland. But that was just his day job. He also wrote novels (Mink River), short stories, prayers (how many writers pen prayers these days?) and essays (which is how I know him best). Doyle’s essays sing and probe and exalt. They make moments matter.

Accessible, joyful, torrential — those are words that describe Doyle’s prose. His sentences, by his own admission, begin on Tuesday and end on Saturday. He’s one of those writers who, when I read him, loosens up something in my own tightly coiled style.

Consider the conclusion to Joyas Voladoras, an essay I discovered in an anthology, wrote about and used to teach the form, an essay that’s yet to leave me with dry eyes. Read this and think a kind thought for its author, dead at age 60 but living on through his words:

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Testing, Testing

Testing, Testing

Comments 0 Comment

It’s July 5, and last night’s revels seem far away. It’s a day of sodden flags, old watermelon rinds, the burnt casings of a bottle rocket. The smoke has cleared but we’ve lost our brilliant reds and greens.

Last night at the block party in Suzanne’s Arlington neighborhood where we watched the fireworks, a man in a tricornered hat read aloud the Declaration of Independence. The mic he was using kept fading in and out, so that he was forced to pepper his recitation with the words “testing, testing.”

It was an interesting interjection as we “test, test” our resolve to become a more perfect union and we’re “tested, tested” by a divisiveness unknown in my lifetime.

Now that I think of it, “testing, testing” isn’t a bad motto to have as we strive to make ourselves heard, to make ourselves whole. Our nation is a work in progress, always “testing, testing.” Seeing it that way is a good way to celebrate July 5.

More Unum

More Unum

Comments 0 Comment

The trip from Lexington to my house can seem long, especially when mired in West Virginia, but it is in fact less than one-tenth of the way across the country. And it’s the width of the country that’s on my mind this morning: the roundabouts and the rodeos, the skyscrapers and the silos, the breadth and depth.

I like to think that our strength lies in our breadth, in our differences and how we’ve been able to assimilate them. E pluribus unum — from the many, one. Not just from many states one nation, but from many states of mind one body politic.

We used to have a knack for it. But lately, our differences threaten to overcome us. Lately, we have too much e pluribus and not enough unum. So that is what I wish for our country on its 241st birthday: more unum.

The Basement

The Basement

Comments 0 Comment

I’ve spent the last three days in a basement going through my parents things. By the end of the day yesterday, Ellen, Phillip and I had loaded one car with boxes to save and another car with boxes to discard. One car is bound for Virginia and Maryland, the other car for the county dump.

There’s a lot of Cassidy history in those two cars, and I’m bleary-eyed from going through it all. So many thoughts about the messiness of life and the tidiness of death. Thoughts amplified when Ellen and I drove to the cemetery late yesterday and I saw the clean sweep of grass and stone.

I dash off this post on a beautiful summer morning, window open to crescendo of cicadas and the low hum of a neighbor’s air-conditioning. My parents are gone, but we are still living. I could have called this post “The Cemetery.” But I called it “The Basement” instead.

Suspended

Suspended

Comments 0 Comment

When I traveled to Kentucky regularly I’d hit the road early and be in Lexington by mid-afternoon. But now when Ellen and I drive together we leave late on a workday, drive partway and stay overnight. Traveling becomes less a duty and more a road trip.

Last night we pulled off in Fairmont, West Virginia, and are now cosseted in a roadside hostelry. How sumptuous these places have become! A gym to die for. Bowls of fruit and raspberry tea. Soft lighting. High-thread-count sheets. This is not your grandfather’s no-tell motel!

A funny feeling takes over in these places. You are not quite here, not quite there. You are comfortable, You are just off the road or about to hit it. You are … suspended.

Place without People

Place without People

Comments 0 Comment

It’s been 14 months since I visited Lexington. I’ve never been away longer. To the other bewilderments of these days I add this one: that I’ve been gone so long from my hometown.

There’s much to recommend the trip I’m making there this weekend: It’s summertime and it’s with my sister. But I approach it tentatively, much as a dental patient probes the tender spot where a tooth has been.

What’s missing from Lexington now is why I ever was in Lexington in the first place — and why I returned so often through the years. What kind of place is Lexington without Mom and Dad?

When people are gone, place remains. But what is place without the people who created it?

Porch Light

Porch Light

Comments 0 Comment

An early walk this crisp morning as the day took hold and porch lights still were burning. What a cozy beacon is a porch light, what ease and relief it promises. A welcome to the late arrival. A comfort to the sleeping suburbanite.

Yet it also says, this is our place, this cone of brightness our bulwark. Come closer if you dare, but only if you know us. And if you know us, show your face.

Otherwise, slap your newspaper on our driveway, stuff mail into the box. We do not reveal ourselves to everyone. Only to the those for whom the light burns.

More for Less

More for Less

Comments 0 Comment

Two days ago Metro raised its fares and its parking rates. I now shell out an extra 30 cents for the worst ride in town. Why pay more for less? Why not find another way to get to work?

Truth is, I have. I’ve shrunk the Metro portion of my trip as much as I can, catching a bus six stops earlier than I used to get off, trudging up an escalator and spending the last 10 minutes of my commute above ground.

I could give up Metro entirely, but that would mean either full-time telework (not likely!) or driving every day. And as much as I dread the “Orange Crush” (a fizzy moniker for what happens on the Orange Line from 5-6 p.m.) at least I can read or write when I have a seat.

In commuting, as in life, compromises are made. I like the passive voice there. It suits the situation.

(Besides, I would miss the architecture.)

Power of Love

Power of Love

Comments 0 Comment

A few weeks ago Celia finally convinced me to give the Harry Potter series a try. Last night I started Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book. This morning I learned that the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, was published 20 years ago today.

By now we know the story, how Rowling, a single mother down on her luck, was sitting on a delayed train from Manchester to London when she imagined a young wizard with a scar on his forehead. The scar, he was told, was from a car accident, the same one that killed his parents.

By the end of Book One Harry has learned that the scar isn’t from a car accident. It’s from a encounter with Lord Voldemort, “he who must not be named,” the darkest of dark wizards whose evil ways were no match for the one magic power all of us have at our disposal:

If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign … to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin.

Three books in, here’s what I take from the series so far: the power of imagination, the power of love.