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Author: Anne Cassidy

Escape Route

Escape Route

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For a walk break yesterday I turned left, strolled south down Crystal Drive. The lunchtime bustle buoyed me; I was ready to explore.

It’s a neighborhood of hotels, restaurants and fancy office buildings connected by glossy indoor passageways — not my style, but handy in the rain.

Beyond all of this, I’m convinced, lie real streets with real people picking up dry cleaning, dragging reluctant toddlers, walking the dog. But to find them I first need to discover the connector routes, the roads that will take me under the busy highways that honeycomb the area.

There aren’t many of them. Crystal City is almost an island. But all I need is one escape route. The maps are open. The shoes are new.

Puttering

Puttering

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Woke up this morning after more sleep than usual and immediately started puttering. I emptied the garbage. I watered the plants. I made Celia a pot of coffee.

Then I went outside. I moved the begonias. I caught an errant strand of climbing rose, looped a green wire around it and attached it to a sister branch.

I was about ready to sweep the deck when I realized this wasn’t a Saturday but a weekday, and while I wasn’t planning to go in early today because of after-work plans, I at least had to get there by 9!

So I ran upstairs and started getting ready, but not without a wistful backward glance at all the little chores that can be slowly checked off during a morning of puttering.

A Little Life

A Little Life

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It’s difficult to know just what to say about Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. It’s not a little book, to be sure, and not easy to finish within the three weeks allotted by Fairfax County Library.

At times it was only the fact that I was 400 pages into it that made me keep reading. Not because it wasn’t beautifully written and a page turner in the character-reveal rather than plot-reveal sense of the word — but because the characters must endure the endurable. (And somehow, most of the time, they do.)

The book grapples with big questions, some of the biggest. Why are we here? How do we find meaning? What are the limits of love?

It doesn’t answer any of them, of course, but it makes us ponder them, and it makes us care about the characters who are pondering them. And that, as good fiction always reminds me, is what it’s all about.

Frost Free

Frost Free

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I once heard — and never forgot — that May 15  is our frost-free date in northern Virginia. For that reason, I don’t put annuals in the ground until Mother’s Day or later. This year I was especially careful, given our cool rainy spring.

So it was only last weekend that I bought begonias and impatiens — and even then, I hesitated. I potted the begonias on Saturday, but Sunday night’s temps were expected to drop into the 30s, so I waited till last evening to plant the impatiens. They are tender things, and need the best start in life.

The whole exercise got me thinking about risk and how our acceptance or rejection of it shapes so many choices in life. I’m more conservative as a gardener than I am in other ways. I changed jobs at an age when many others might have stayed put.  I was willing to accept in life what I can’t in horticulture.

Whether this was foolish or wise, I’m not yet sure. But I do know this: In real life, there are no frost-free dates.

Schooling

Schooling

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As part of my new job I’m writing and editing stories about people who have nothing. About school children from South Sudan dressed in tidy uniforms who must sit on rocks or tin cans because their school has no desks.

I think about the white boards and the wired classrooms here — and then remember the school in Toura where Suzanne and Appolinaire taught: the cinderblock walls and wooden desks that you see here.

It’s easy to romanticize learning, to say it happens wherever teachers are gifted and students inspired. But when children are cold or hot, when they cut their legs on the sharp rocks they’ve lugged to the school for seating, when they aren’t even allowed to go to school because they must help their families in the fields — there is no magic there. There can’t be until the basic physical needs are met.

I’m glad I have a chance to be reminded of this now, to write about people who have nothing. Because of the perspective they bring, of course, but most of all because their stories must be told.

Sunshine, Finally

Sunshine, Finally

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A friend who counsels people for a living said the last few weeks have been difficult for her patients. Depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia. People in the mid-Atlantic aren’t used to weeks and weeks of gray, rainy days — especially not in May — and they’ve taken their toll.

They would usually bother me more, but I’ve been caught up in a new job, and not paying as much attention to weather as I usually do.

Still, for a walker in the suburbs who’s been forced to row in the suburbs (on the erg in the basement, which means yet more — ouch! — sitting), it’s cramping my style, to say the least.

So today’s sunshine is more than welcome. It’s gratifying, life-enhancing, healing.

On Dad’s 93rd

On Dad’s 93rd

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Today, on what would have been Dad’s 93rd birthday, I’ll attend a Mass that’s being said for him in my parish church. I reserved this date not long after his passing, had to book it about 20 months in advance. Dad would get a kick out of this. “I guess they give priority to the Catholics,” he’d say. (He was not one!)

Thinking of all the funny things Dad said to me growing up, the gentle religious humor. “Just tell ’em it’s your father’s feast day,” he’d suggest, deadpan, when I didn’t want to go to school.  We always got a holiday on the feast day of our pastor and principal, Father O’Neill.

It was the humor of an agnostic. Only Dad pulled a fast one. At the end of his life he reverted to the Methodism of his youth, went to church most Sundays. When I was in town, I would go with him, reveling in his rich baritone as he belted out the hymns he learned as a kid.

Was he hedging his bets by returning to church? Not Dad. It wasn’t out of fear that he returned, I think, but out of love. He was a deeply grateful man. I imagine he was saying a lot of “thank-you’s.” Today I’ll be doing the same.

Time Warp

Time Warp

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Unseasonable weather creates a time warp.  Are these the first floundering days of March? A rainy patch in October? Or the sort of chilly midsummer I remember being called blackberry winter?

Strawberry winter is more like it.

These are usually our jewel-tone days, the azaleas and iris overlapping, rhododendrons too. They, by the way, are doing well this year; they thrive on moisture. But the others haven’t lived up to promise. They’ve been too busy staying alive.

I gave May a pass until we hit the double digits. But it’s the 11th. Time to get with it, May. We need some warm weather, and we need it now!

The Cake

The Cake

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For the last two Mother’s Day in a row, Claire has whipped up this confection. It’s two layers of feather-light chocolate cake, iced and topped with a thin layer of hazelnut, a cushiony helping of whipped cream and a generous dollop of strawberries.

Five of us consumed half of it last night — and I’m embarrassed at how much I’m looking forward to nibbling on what’s still left in the fridge.

Yesterday, watching the girls in the kitchen together, thinking about all the meals I made when they were young, thinking about one in particular when Claire was just a newborn and I had for some reason decided to make lasagna. She was sitting in her little seat on top of the counter, amidst the ricotta and mushrooms and mozzarella — probably breathing it all into her little brain.

It was one of those times when I probably should have just heated up a frozen pizza. But the cooking and the kids just naturally went together. They still do.

How much of family life takes place in the kitchen, how many joys and sorrows, how many delights. When I think about it now, the cake in its yummy extravagance was the perfect expression of the day, of its bounty, of how much I have to be thankful for.

Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day

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On this Mother’s Day, my first without Mom, I think about a scene I witnessed at the beach and have thought about often since. It was nothing special; in fact it (or something similar) happens all the time. A little girl in pink was running down the shore. She caught my eye because there were precious few people on the beach that day — it was cold! — and also because she seemed young to be on her own.

I had no fear for the child, assumed she was being watched from some distant towel. Instead, I thought about what the world looked like through her eyes. Maybe her first burst of independence. The horizon spreading out before her, endless sand and a squawking gull she wanted to catch.

Then I saw a woman in quick pursuit. “Marina! Marina! Where do you think you’re going?”

The little girl turned, ready to be caught. The woman threw her arms wide open and dashed toward Marina, who was now flying toward her. Soon they came together; the woman gathering the child up in her arms and twirling her around.

It’s the oldest story and the truest story. And it made me think of this passage from Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, which I can never read with a dry eye, especially not today.

I write this at a wide desk in a pine shed as I always do these recent years, in this life I pray will last, while the summer sun closes the sky to Orion and to all the other winter stars over my roof. The young oaks growing just outside my windows wave in the light, so that concentrating, lost in the past, I see the pale leaves wag and think as my blood leaps: Is someone coming?

Is it Mother coming for me, to carry me home? Could it be my own young, my own glorious Mother, coming across the grass for me, the morning light on her skin, to get me and bring me back? Back to where I last knew all I needed, the way to her strong arms?