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Author: Anne Cassidy

Reflections

Reflections

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I just finished reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, a big-hearted book that picks you up and carries you along with it. It took me to the Africa I visited two years ago, to the sights and smells and bribes and chaos of Nigeria, just one country east of Benin.

And it took me to an America where newly arrived immigrants braid hair in low-end salons,  hoping for a break, a toehold — anything to avoid being sent back.

And finally, it took me to the book’s own beginnings.  In the Acknowledgments, Adichie thanks her family and friends, editor and agent. She thanks the latter in particular for “that ongoing feeling of safety.” And then — she thanks a room — a “small office filled with light.”

It’s a twist on Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” but singles out what for me is most important — the light. I type these words in a light-filled space of my own: windows beside and ahead, glass all around, reflections of reflections of reflections.

Speaking of Sprinter

Speaking of Sprinter

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These days, seasons are separated not only by hours but also by miles. Yesterday’s snow squalls left no trace in my work neighborhood, but by the time I reached home it was a wintry world: snowy lawns and decks.

It’s a reminder to me of the slender margin between liquid and solid (just one degree, of course), darkness and light, goodness and evil.

Which makes me think how little separates the winner from the loser, the saint from the sinner. Though I’m not a black-and-white believer — I put my faith in those endless shades of gray — there are lines and there are divisions. And sometimes there is nothing in between.
Sprinter

Sprinter

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Not the kind that pushes off from a block and streaks down a track. The kind of sprinter I have in mind is a season strung between spring and winter, a new hybrid that moves from balmy to brisk in a matter of hours.

Yesterday on my way to work I saw yellow petals on the sidewalk. I imagined a van unloading plants for a catered event, or a landscaping truck with pale forsythias ready for bedding. Surely these petals had no local source. It was February 8, after all, and I work in a concrete jungle!

But something — hopefulness? — made me look up. And there, on top of a Crystal City wall (Crystal City is very good at walls) was a bright yellow jasmine vine spilling over the stone.

Today, a cold, raw wind is blowing, and it’s spitting snow. The jasmine vine is shivering. But no need to worry — by Sunday it will be 70 again. After all, it’s sprinter.

Perpetual Motion

Perpetual Motion

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A walk yesterday to Long Bridge Park, which is a bit of a misnomer since there’s not really a bridge and barely a park. But who’s counting when it’s 70 degrees on February 7?

What Long Bridge is, though, is window on the perpetual motion of a busy American city.

The walk adjoins the train tracks, and yesterday, in just 10 minutes, I saw a freight train, Amtrak and the Virginia Railway Express commuter express all chugging along.

East of the train tracks is the George Washington Parkway, where I would later spend close to an hour inching my way home. But at 1 p.m. the traffic is moving, and the cars are like flies skimming the surface of a pond where stately swans (the trains) hold the eye.

Finally, there are the planes taking off and landing at National Airport, just across the way. The low jets fill the sky as they roar heavenward.

It’s an invigorating stroll. I’m moving, the trains, planes and cars are moving. I try to catch all three in my gaze at the same time, to savor their motion and amplify my own.

Happy Blog Day

Happy Blog Day

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Seven years ago on this day there were several feet of snow on the ground in northern Virginia. I had been housebound for two days, had cleaned closets and made soup, caught up on work and phone calls. So I did something I’d wanted to do for years: I started this blog.

It was a leap of faith and of certainty. It was a grand adventure. Could I post daily? Well yes, I could. Could I post pictures as well? (This shows my lack of technical confidence!) Yes, I could do that, too. Has this become what writers are told they must have now — a platform? Of sorts, I suppose, although being a walker hardly sets me apart!

What the blog is most of all is a continuation of the almost daily writing I’ve done since I was 15. It’s an outlet, one I protect and carve out time for, and it’s a collection, now almost 2,100 posts. I feel motherly toward it. Like my book, the blog is a child to be loved and nurtured.

Sometimes I have nothing much to say here, sometimes I can’t type fast enough. But I keep plugging away at it. And there’s something to that, I guess.

Shhh!

Shhh!

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The groundhog has spoken: We’ll have six more weeks of winter. Which is why I’m doing a lot of shushing these days.

I walk out the front door and hear the birds, their songs sounding suspiciously springlike. I feel the warmth of the sun even as I shiver in my down coat, hat and gloves. I check around the big tree. Good! No signs of life.

Shhhh! I say to the still-dormant earth. Sleep some more, I whisper to the tender shoots-to-be. I feel about them as I did my children as babies, when I would tip-toe to the door to find them still napping.

Sleep tight, daffodil shoots and dogwood buds. The world is not ready for you — and you are not ready for the world.

Mappiness

Mappiness

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In a few minutes I’ll bundle up and take to the streets. It will be my lunch break and I’ll spend it walking in the suburbs. No surprise there. But what is news, at least to me, is how much scientific evidence there is to back up my hobby/exercise/obsession.

In 2010, a British environmental economist named George MacKerron created an app called Mappiness that allowed him to check in with 20,000 volunteers several times a day and ask them what they were doing and how they felt about it.  The data he collected showed that people are significantly happier when they’re outdoors — even when other variables are accounted for.

Great news, right? Unfortunately, he also found that people are indoors or in vehicles 93 percent of the time. So even though we’re happiest outside, we spend most of our time inside.

What to do? Another researcher, Timothy Beatley of the Biophilic Cities Project at the University of Virginia (which I’ve just been reading about and will definitely discuss some day in a separate blog post), says we need daily doses of nature: everything from New York City’s High Line to the little park around the corner. We can’t let the perfect (a hike in Yosemite) be the enemy of the good (a walk around the block).

It’s always tough to parse the value of the walks I take, to figure out how much of their benefit comes from moving through space and how much from the space I’m moving through. All I know is that the woods and trails around my home and the parks I frequent in the city are far more than backdrops; they are mood-enhancing and soul-stirring. They are the stars of the show.


(Thanks to Ellen for sending me the Wall Street Journal article where I learned about this research.)

Framing It

Framing It

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In today’s Washington Post, a column by Margaret Sullivan called “Old Rules of Journalism Don’t Apply” covers the firing of a Marketplace columnist, a transgender man who posted on Medium that journalists, especially minority journalists, must rethink objectivity in the Trump era.

I think the firing was legitimate because the post clearly violated one of Marketplace’s written guidelines, but the columnist raises an important point. We have our jobs and we have our morals. What happens if the two are on a collision course?

This blog is hardly Marketplace or the Washington Post, and it’s almost always apolitical. But I’ve been wrestling with how much to talk about What’s Going On. These are unusual times, so political posts may creep in a little more than they used to.

But I hope not too much. Because as frightening and upending as things have become (at least in the politically super-charged air of the nation’s capital), I still believe that perspective and empathy are our greatest weapons (along with family, friends, humor and chocolate). And perspective and empathy are what I’m after here.

To the Dreamers

To the Dreamers

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On a day that would have been Mom’s 91st birthday, I wear her earrings and a pair of socks with Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

Mom loved that painting, and she loved the name Vincent, even gave it to her parakeet.  She was a creative person, Mom was. A lover of words and ideas. A dreamer. She would bet the house on a dream — and  did several times.

In that way she inoculated her children against risky ventures. None of us will ever start a magazine or a museum. And yet … Mom left her mark. Which is why I found a scene from the new musical La La Land so touching. It was an audition scene, when the character Mia is asked to tell the casting director a story.

Mia sings about her aunt, who lived in Paris and once jumped barefoot into the Seine. “She captured a feeling, the sky with no ceiling, sunset inside a frame.”

… So bring on the rebels, the ripples from pebbles
The painters and poets and plays.
And here’s to the ones who dream …

Here’s to you, Mom.

Letter from Sumba

Letter from Sumba

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A few months ago I traveled around the world — a trip that came together so quickly and with so many appointments and interviews packed in that I have to pinch myself now to believe that it really happened.

I have the photos to prove it, though, and, as of late last week, I also have a story about it on the Winrock website: Letter from Sumba. 

It’s the first of several stories based on reporting from that trip, I hope. And it’s gratifying because it translates the long flights and disorientation into words and photos.

It doesn’t capture everything, of course: how muggy it was that day, how storm clouds rolled in but the rain held off, how the ocean looked on the night drive back to our hotel. But it chronicles some of it. Enough, I hope.