Browsed by
Author: Anne Cassidy

When Minutes Fly

When Minutes Fly

Comments 0 Comment

I’ve had many commutes in my life. The easiest was a stroll down the hall. The most inspiring was a walk through Central Park from the Upper West Side to Midtown Manhattan.

The one I have now involves a drive, Metro trip, bus ride and walk. I might be in as many as four vehicles on the way home, since I switch from one line to the other to avoid being squeezed in what is known here as the “Orange Crush” (for the Orange Line to Vienna, where I park my car).

All of which is to say, I have a disjointed commute. What’s consistent about it is that, unless I’m standing up and it’s too crowded to breathe, I have a book, journal or newspaper in hand. What stitches together the minutes and hours is … ( no surprise!) … the written word.

It’s amazing how quickly this makes time pass, how easy it is to miss my stop. So today I’m grateful for the words that make the minutes fly. Don’t know what I’d do without them.

A Dogwood’s Year

A Dogwood’s Year

Comments 0 Comment

After an early bloom and an untimely freeze, I didn’t expect much of Spring this year. But it has surprised me. The hyacinths are wafting, the lilacs are trying (I have three blooms this year, up one from last year) and the dogwood, well, it’s something else entirely.

I remember when we would have four or five flowers on this tree. And now, it has burst into life and threatens to overcome the mailbox if there isn’t some judicious pruning.

Until there is, here’s the shaggy, unruly tree in all its gleaming,white 2017 glory.

Monday at Work

Monday at Work

Comments 0 Comment

In many parts of the world today is an official holiday, schools and offices are closed. So when I arrived at the office before 8 in a spitting rain, I had the distinct feeling that I shouldn’t be here, that I should be working on an essay at home with a second cup of tea.

Instead, I have a few minutes for a few words. And I’m giving them to the poet Mary Oliver, from her book of essays Upstream:

It is 6 a.m., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. … There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it it neither power nor time.

Thank you, Mary Oliver. I hear you.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter!

Comments 0 Comment

The trees are at their loveliest. “Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold.” The azaleas shine out in their jewel tones, and there are buds on the rose bush by the deck stairs.


The refrigerator is stuffed with au gratin potatoes, deviled eggs, ambrosia salad, baked turkey — and asparagus and lamb that will be roasted today. Behind me, the smell of chocolate wafts from filled Easter baskets.

Soon it will be time to navigate the parking lot at church in hopes of scoring a seat at the 9:15 mass, to hear the words of that old story that is sometimes hard to believe but today seems completely possible. Soon it will be time to greet the family and friends coming here for an afternoon feast. 
But for now, for these quiet early moments, I have Easter all to myself.

(Mission San Xavier del Bac, Tucson, Arizona, built in 1797)
Work of Redemption

Work of Redemption

Comments 0 Comment

Trotting down the road this morning I looked to my right, at the trees just greening in the forest. Little leaves still so young, so tender. They were shining with the effort and the touch of early light.

Maybe it was the music playing in my ears at that moment, a string trio by Mendelssohn, or maybe it was the release of a work week’s tension, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by the bravery of those leaves, by the work of redemption they perform every spring.

Of course, there’s a biological explanation for what they do. I vaguely remember it from high school biology class.

But for me, the biological becomes the metaphorical, just as the walk becomes the lodestone, the anchor of a day.

View from a Ramada

View from a Ramada

Comments 0 Comment

Driving from Tombstone to Bisbee last week the wideness of the West really hit me. Not the wildness but the wideness. The openness. It’s what I crave when I’m here in Virginia.

But when I was there, I felt exposed. Where were the trees, the hollows; where could I sit quietly and take in all this grandeur?

If shade does not come naturally, then it must be created. And so it is. At the Desert Museum I learned a new meaning for the word “ramada.” In the Southwest, a ramada is a open shelter, a roof with no walls. Made of reeds or brush or wood, it is the native way of putting a layer between one’s self and the sun.

I snapped this shot from a ramada in Tucson. It gave me a frame, a vantage point — a cool, sequestered way to take in the day.

 

 

The Art of Memoir

The Art of Memoir

Comments 0 Comment

At a gathering last week I was asked if I write memoir. It was a congenial group of bird-watchers at the Ramsey Canyon, and the discussion had veered from the black-crested titmouse to medicine and writing and the screen habits of young children.

No, I said. I’m a private person, and we live in a confessional age. What I didn’t say was that I devour memoirs, I share memoir-ish details in this blog — and right now I’m reading Mary Karr’s book The Art of Memoir.

Karr, the author of bestselling memoirs The Liar’s Club and Lit, has mastered the form and has much to share. Here she is on voice:

Voice grows from the nature of a writer’s talent, which stems from innate character. Just as a memoirist’s nature bestows her magic powers on the page, we also wind up seeing how selfish or mean-spirited or divisive she is or was. … So the best voices include a writer’s insides.

And here she is on sharing internal agonies:

Unless you confess your own emotional stakes in a project, why should a reader have any? A writer sets personal reasons for the text at hand, and her struggling psyche fuels the tale.  

These wise observations plus a list of titles I now want to read — Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life — have made this book worth chalking up a few days worth of late fees from the library.

Sky Islands

Sky Islands

Comments 0 Comment

A sea of grass and plain. A valley of succulents. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, a mountain. And not just any mountain, not a rolling hill like those in the East, but a pointy-topped peak that shouts its difference from the surrounding terrain.

I’m still absorbing the sights of a week in the geological region known as Basin and Ridge, an area that takes in all of Nevada, much of Arizona and parts of Utah, New Mexico and California. It’s caused by tectonic plates sidling rather than colliding — or at least that’s what I can remember from Tom Clancy’s explanation (not Tom Clancy the novelist but Tom Clancy the Ramsey Canyon tour guide).

What matters now are the memories I have of those sky islands, the panoramic view off the ridge of Geronimo Pass in Coronado National Memorial or the piney forests of Mount Lemmon, forests made of trees that could not survive if they were plopped two thousand feet down at the same latitude.

It’s a lesson both expansive and tender, that we need what is immediately at hand but also what is far away, beyond the valley, where the next peak rises.

Altitude

Altitude

Comments 0 Comment

Attitude is everything, the self-help books tell us, and in many ways they’re right. But in the West, altitude is everything.

On Saturday, we drove to the top of Mount Lemmon, 9,200 feet. From a start in the Sonoran Desert, all prickly pears and Saguaro cactus, we ended up in a cool pine forest, with a few dead tree trunks thrown in from the Aspen fire, which happened more than a decade ago.

Every 1,000 feet gained is like traveling 300 miles north, said the helpful sign at the top of the trail. By that reckoning, we were somewhere near Banff, Alberta, Canada.

Not bad for a morning’s drive.

Desert in Bloom

Desert in Bloom

Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday at the Desert Museum, I saw more beauty than I could imagine: macro beauty and micro beauty. Should I go for the long shot or the short one? Simple: I go for both!

I shot pictures of javelinas (sleeping under the bridge), a bobcat, a Mexican jay — and every kind of cactus under the sun. And a powerful sun, too by the way, which makes its presence felt in every frame.

I have to leave the desert today, the desert in bloom. But I have hundreds of photographs and a few ideas riding home with me.