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Author: Anne Cassidy

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.

Layered

Layered

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An early walk this morning before the true heat sets in. I think about how well I know this place, my regular route, my neighborhood.

I remember when four sycamores were planted in the yard of the yellow house. It seemed such an extravagance at the time, trees already past the spindly stage.

The homeowner has since moved out, but I can see him there at the edge of the yard, surveying the work, his lanky frame not unlike the tall sycamores.

It is what one hopes for in a neighborhood, that it be layered with memories and associations, so much more than a suburban streetscape. A living, breathing record of life.

Reading for Life

Reading for Life

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An article in this morning’s newspaper reports on a study that shows that people who read books survive almost two years longer than people who don’t.

Intriguing, to say the least. Do readers stay sharper, calmer, more engaged in life? Or do they simply conserve energy by all that sitting and reading?

The study was conducted by Yale University researchers and published in a journal called Social Science & Medicine. The 3,635 subjects, all older than 50, were surveyed for their reading habits and divided into three categories: those who never read, those who read up to three-and-a-half hours a week and those who read three and a half hours or more.

The conclusion: After accounting for education, income and health, book reading still confers a “significant survival advantage.”

I didn’t need an excuse, but it’s good to have one, just the same.

Triple Digit

Triple Digit

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After three triple-digit temperature days in a row (that’s real temperature, not heat index, which was more like 110), we’re having a cold snap today (“only” 95).

I know I should hate it, should be hunkering down indoors with a cool drink and the AC ratcheted to 72, but it’s summer, after all, and I think about how cold our winters have been lately and how really, truly, sweatily alive I feel when pulling weeds in a buggy backyard with the sun beating down on my back.

Weird, to be true, but something I dream about when the cold winds blow. Which they will … soon enough.

(What’s blowing these grasses isn’t a cold wind but a hot breeze.)