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Author: Anne Cassidy

Clean House

Clean House

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Some days start slowly and quietly, sipping tea while writing a post. Others start with a  brisk walk, or an early getaway to the office to beat the crowds on Metro.

Most days don’t start with three strangers scouring my bathroom.

But that’s how the day has started. Little time for rumination. It’s all about action now, and not forgetting what I was doing before I went to add an item to the master list for hundredth time.

Still, it’s a wonderful thing, having other people clean your house. I could get used to it.

Making Waves

Making Waves

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These are crazy days. Buying cases of wine at 9 p.m. Forgetting my lunch.  Making lists of lists.

Still, the mind observes. Even when in crazy mode, the mind is active, laughing at its own craziness and finding the world an interesting place to be.

This morning on the radio, I heard a segment on artificial waves, how a company has been perfecting them, will sell its technology to indoor wave pools, the estates of sheikhs. Few details of this report have remained in my brain, but one phrase did. “We’re carving water,” said the wave creator.

The poetry of that sets the mind to spinning.  An ultimately futile task, one would think. And yet someone makes a living from it.

What do you do? I make waves.

Summer, Still

Summer, Still

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These are the bonus days of summer. Every warm afternoon, every sliver moon peeping through the trees as it rises in the sultry August sky. Every thin crescent moon that sees us through till morning.

Summer has been hot this year, and I haven’t minded. It’s warmed my bones, and if it keeps warming them a few more weeks, I won’t complain.

It hasn’t been the most relaxing summer. Creating a backyard wedding venue has taken care of that. But it has been rich in people and in feeling and will not be easily forgotten.

The day lilies are drooping now, the cone flowers are fading. There are a dozen mum plants cooling their heels in the house. They’ll be planted when the temperature dips below 90.

Until then, until next Tuesday for sure, it is still gloriously, indisputably … summer.

Darkness Into Day

Darkness Into Day

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Took a pre-dawn walk the other day, so I started with a flashlight, swinging with my stride. A visual metronome, light marker. Its circle of light is paltry, just enough to see the way. But it flows with me, and is comforting.

All around are the sounds of nighttime, crickets chirping. A bat flits through the sky. I think nighttime thoughts, am tuned to every forest sound.

By the time I round the corner toward home, though, I no longer need the flashlight. Without knowing it I’ve been walking from darkness into day.

Happy Centennial!

Happy Centennial!

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They are a ridge-top trail along an old mountain. A path winding perilously down a near-sheer canyon wall. A hot walk through the hoodoos in Bryce.

These are just some of the strolls I’ve taken in national parks, which celebrate their one hundredth birthday today.

While it’s wonderful enough just to glimpse the Grand Canyon or Zion or Yellowstone, it’s even better to walk through these places. To inhale the piney air and feel the sting in your calves from trudging up an incline.

National park hikes are some of the most treasured walks I’ve ever taken. And today I think of them, and of all the protected natural beauty that makes them possible. Happy National Parks Centennial!

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Burma* Buzz

Burma* Buzz

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I’m a tea drinker, but yesterday was all about coffee — and the debut of Burmese specialty coffee on the world stage. I was too busy to sip the stuff, but I sampled some the day before. It’s “complex,” as they say. A more savvy taster described it this way: hints of chocolate, cranberry and nutmeg.

It was a work function filled with government officials, a former ambassador, and coffee growers from Myanmar.  An odd mix, to be sure, but one that worked. At its root, a simple principle: to connect poor farmers with the flush and fully caffeinated, a feel-good way to spread some wealth.

And it worked. I bought a bag of expensive beans, and so did many others. The coffee sold out.  And the farmers who grew, dried and processed the beans will have more food on the table, more money for their children’s school and more to invest in next year’s crop. So a lot of buzz, but good buzz.

(*For “Seinfeld” fans: “They call it Myanmar, but it will always be Burma to me.”)

Wood Smoke

Wood Smoke

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I took a walk last night as the light was fading, the smell of wood smoke in the air. At first I thought I was imagining it. The acrid scent went along well with the slight nip in the air. Was it real? Or was I was so accustomed to the two together that I made it up.

But no, there actually was wood smoke in the air. Neighbors were burning brush in their fire pit — something frowned upon by the home owners association, though you won’t catch me telling.

The smell of wood smoke is the aroma of autumn. The only scent more autumnal is the smell of tobacco wafting from the drying barns on Angliana Avenue in Lexington. Barns that have been gone for decades, I believe, along with the tobacco that used to fill them.

Still, wood smoke is an evocative aroma, and one I was happy to get a whiff of last night. It was calming, redolent of campfires and coziness not danger and destruction.

Clouds

Clouds

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Looked up from the page I was working on Friday to see these clouds. They looked vaguely Sistine-Chapel-like, with the wispy upper-right-corner one the pointing finger of God and the fluffy white left corner one Adam reclining in his new human splendor.

An exaggeration, of course, and hard to reclaim that Friday feeling on this Monday morning.

But if nothing else it’s a reminder of the summer sky, its blue-beyond-blueness, its white clouds shining.

Invasive

Invasive

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One of my tasks today is to be a poison ivy spotter. Not a poison ivy eradicator; I’m too allergic to the stuff. But I do have an eye for it. I can spot it glistening in the myrtle or spreading beneath a sea of stilt grass.

Poison ivy vines are another matter. They hide everywhere, including underground, and it’s hard to imagine complete eradication. Still, I’m all for trying.

So I’ve spent a lot of time this morning bending and crouching, looking for three leaves rather than the five, seeing the poison plant as a shark underwater, the spiky leaves the fish’s fearsome teeth.

The Venue

The Venue

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Today the wood chips were unloaded. Tomorrow they will be spread and smoothed. There will also be touch-up painting, massive cleaning, planting, you name it.

I just moved my shell collection, a row of whelks atop the deck railing. People may want to set their drinks on the deck railing — although, now that I look at it, the deck railing is warped. Another item for the to-do list, the endless wedding to-do list.

Back in the winter a backyard wedding seemed a lovely idea. The yard was in pretty good shape, I told myself.  (Of course, it was hidden under two feet of snow.) We would just have to take down a few dead trees, be liberal with the mulch and a bit more attentive to the garden and — voila! — instant venue.

Now the wedding is two weeks away and the instant venue is looking pretty shabby. This despite countless hours of yard work, poison ivy eradication, weed-pulling and garden spraying.

One thing I know from meeting countless work and home deadlines, though, is that it will be ready. Somehow, some way, it will cease to be a backyard and become … a venue.