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Author: Anne Cassidy

Good News

Good News

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Good news from the heartland: A nephew and cousin — a young father battling cancer — has just learned that he is cancer-free. After months of grueling treatments and countless prayers to spare him, he has received the best news anyone can — that he is healthy, that he will live.

Now he can get back to his new wife and baby son, to his plans and dreams. He can get on, too, with the petty problems of life, which are now seen for what they are, no more than sticks and pebbles along the way, nothing like the chasm, the void, he has just traversed.

And for a while his experience will be a beacon to us all — until once again the sticks and pebbles seem like boulders and logs, and we let them bog us down; until the next time the world tilts crazily and we see that what we thought was important isn’t and what we seldom think about is all that really matters.

Half Hidden

Half Hidden

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This is a good year for ornamental cabbage, its creamy centers unblemished by frost spots or drought. I noticed a stand of these plants on my walk yesterday. Light pink shading to ivory, edged by sage green.

I stared hard at them as I passed, lost myself momentarily in their spiky beauty so that I could re-create them on the page this morning. A type of stillness in their leafy flower. “A violet by a mossy stone, half hidden from the eye,” in Wordsworth’s style.

Later I would stroll past the Capitol and the Supreme Court, philosophies etched in stone, all the grandeur of official Washington.

But what stayed in mind were the cabbage plants, their quiet beauty, their brave salute to winter.

Mind Travel

Mind Travel

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I whiled away some Metro wait time this morning staring at a map in the station. This is one for Reston-Wiehle, the current (but I hope not forever) western terminus of the Silver Line. I fixate on the southern exit,  how I could cross Sunrise Valley Drive at Commerce to Wethersfield then cut through the golf course to Durand and Purple Beech.

From there I’d take Soapstone all the way to Lawyers, Steeplechase and home.

It’s a walker’s fantasy. An hour-long walk at best. It would involve the kind of time I don’t have anymore.

For me, for now, the route is for mind travel only. A way to let the walker’s imagination wander while the walker’s body is doing what it has to do.

Remembering

Remembering

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A lunchtime walk on Monday, heading south on First to the Mall, then turning back north at Seventh only to find myself at the Navy Memorial …  at noon … on Pearl Harbor Day.

There was a brass band, a color guard, music, salutes and a bugler to play Taps. So I stayed a while, listened to the invocation, put my hand on my heart for the National Anthem.

I had forgotten. And it is important to remember.

The Archaeology of Grief

The Archaeology of Grief

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“The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten.”

I’m more than halfway through Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and the dogeared pages are growing. More and more often I find myself holding her phrases in mind, turning them over, searching for the invisible strings that tether them to the page, so light are they, so deft at plumbing the dusky chambers of the human heart.

This one today came after a description of a dying rabbit and how adept Macdonald became at the coup de grace, at putting the bunnies her hawk, Mabel, killed out of their misery. “The serious, everything puzzle that was death and going away.”

Macdonald was grieving her father’s abrupt passing as she tamed her hawk; she was learning to be a participant in life rather than just an observer. That’s what gave her the “momentary shouldering of responsibility” that allowed her to kill the rabbit.

And she was ruminating, always ruminating. She didn’t feel regret for the killing but for the animal itself. “It wasn’t a promising sorrow,” she says. “It was the sorrow of all deaths.”

I bought this book because I thought it would be a companion in grief. It has become just that. It is  the spade, but it is also the salve.

Foggy Start

Foggy Start

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A foggy start to this December morning. Moisture beaded up on the car windows, so I took extra care backing down the drive. From such cautious beginnings come slower, less urgently paced days.

Today’s Metro ride on the Silver Line took me through bands of gray clouds with neon signs flashing: “Walmart,” “Exxon.” Tyson’s Corners were softened by the mist.

Clouds had engulfed the city, too, graying the red-brick Building Museum and hiding the pockmarked steps at Judiciary Square.

I hurried to the office, energized by the anonymity, seeking the quiet that comes with still weather, a place to sit down, open the book, call up the screen — and write.

Fulfillment

Fulfillment

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Advent is the season of waiting, of ancient chants and plainsong. It is the season of patience and hope and muted gladness, a glimpse of distant mountains, the lure of the promised land.

Advent is, therefore, a good time for new beginnings, for celebrations of all kinds, planned and unplanned.

I write today on one of the latter. Unless you count the two years in a dusty African village, the nine months awaiting a visa, the long years before that.

It is, for my family, a day of fulfillment and rejoicing. To which we all say “Amen.”

Sunsets in Arlington

Sunsets in Arlington

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Yesterday I saw the house where Suzanne and Appolinaire will live. It sits on a ridge in Arlington where, on a wintry day when the house across the street has been torn down and the new, big one not yet built in its place, you can almost see the Capitol dome and the red light atop the Washington Monument.

It’s an amazing situation, made possible by the generosity and hard work of two dear friends (who live next door). And the more of the place Suzanne and Appolinaire saw yesterday, the wider their eyes became.

This is not your typical one-bedroom apartment in the boonies or crowded share in Columbia Heights. This is kismet — perhaps what you get after living for years without electricity or running water.

Whatever the reason, come January, the happy couple will move in and inherit not only an enviable, close-in location but also an untrammeled view of the western sky.  A bank of kitchen windows will see to it that they end each day with views like this. And if I know them as well as I think they do, they will end each day feeling as blessed as they do now.

Book Group P.S.

Book Group P.S.

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Last night in the course of emailing about our new list my book group friends and I discovered that one of the books, Confederacy of Dunces, was on the list in 2012. It was our August pick and sometimes we skip August, so that might have been the reason.

But this brings up another advantage of hanging with the same bunch of people for years. You are growing old and forgetful together. You can tell each other that, yes, you were well into the last mystery before you realized … I’ve read this one before.

You can admit that not only must you now keep a list of all the books you read, but you must also annotate the list, add some quick phrase or note that will help you recall what each book was about.

Because the books, they come faster than the years.

A New Chapter

A New Chapter

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My book group met night before last, only four of us this time out of a dwindling number of eight. It was our annual book picking — but we decided to add new members, too.

We did not come to this decision lightly. We’ve taken in no new members for eight years. But what’s eight years when you’ve been together 25?

The children we were birthing when the group formed are now marrying and settling down. It won’t be long before there’s a grandchild or two. But what time and busyness couldn’t derail, major life changes have. Two of us left and came back years later. But the recent departures will be permanent. People are retiring and moving away. We want to keep a quorum of sorts. We want to keep gathering on the first Wednesday of the month (more or less) to chat about Lila, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace and anything else that crosses our minds.

So in January we add a new chapter. We become a slightly altered group — but this time altered by addition rather than subtraction.