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Author: Anne Cassidy

Tale of Two Temperatures

Tale of Two Temperatures

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It’s 90 degrees today in Cotonou, Benin. It was 40 degrees when I woke up in Oak Hill, Virginia. Fifty degrees of separation — that’s a lot for a person who’s never experienced winter.This is just one of the many adjustments we’ll be witnessing in a few days.

I’ve been pulling for one of those warm winters that can sometimes grace these parts, especially when there’s an El Nino pattern. But the next few days promise brisk winds and seasonable temps, and my purple (excuse me, aubergine) wool coat has already been pressed into service.

Nothing to do but go with the flow, whether it’s warm or cold. Nothing to do now but hold on for the ride!


(Rush hour in Cotonou from the back of a zemidjan.)

Neigh!

Neigh!

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Though I live in the suburbs, there are rural aspects to my neighborhood. Septic systems rather than sewers. A stubborn attachment to winding two-lane roads. And then there are the farms behind the houses across the street.

These are not big operations with silos and combines. These are not even the “gentleman farms” I got to know in New England. (Now those are my kind of spreads — picturesque orchards run by retired heads of English Departments.)

These are four-acre parcels with houses of varying value. Some still have the original ranches and split-foyers, but most have large multi-gabled mansions that were built after the originals were torn down.

Sometimes I walk on the trails that wind through this neighborhood. I imagine the kind of place I’d like to have — herbs, flowers, chickens, a writing cabin in the back — nothing profitable, of course. I while away time moseying and fantasizing.

But usually, before I get home, something has brought me up short. Maybe it’s a prickle-bush barring entry to a favorite cut-through. Or a pile of manure I notice too late. Some bit of rural reality that intrudes on my fantasies. “Neigh,” say the horses in the pasture.

Nay, indeed.

Springtime Color

Springtime Color

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I see it from the back of the yard, a bright spot of color in the autumn garden. In a land of browns and russets this pinkish rosey purple stands out.

It’s just a mum that I transplanted in the summer, a potted plant left to root in the hodgepodge end of the flower bed. Truth be told I had forgotten about it. But now it’s reminding me of all the springtime colors that await us.

Only four more months till Easter.

Four Walls

Four Walls

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It was a weekend to clean and organize. Dust was flying — so much so that I thought for a while I must be catching a cold. No, I was catching a house. A house that had been languishing for lack of attention lately, but a house looking much better after a few days of vacuuming and polishing.

I’ve been in the house a lot less lately and so have been appreciating it more. I love the way afternoon sun slants in the kitchen this time of year. It reminds me of the old days when the kids were young and playing underfoot there. One of them in the play kitchen that was tucked under the counter, another in the playpen parked in the living room in front of the hutch and the other stirring suds in the sink.

Oh, I was harried, I’m sure. I had a magazine deadline of some sort — I always did.  My mind was probably filled with the interviews I had to do and the errands I needed to run for the girls — new shoes or hair cuts.

But I have those days inside of me now, and the girls do, too. And soon  — God willing, a week from today! — we will all be reunited in that kitchen, as Suzanne returns after three and a half years in Africa. Returns not alone but with a Beninese fiance, Appolinaire Abo, soon to be our son- and brother-in-law!

So much has happened within these four walls, so much more will.

Darkness and Light

Darkness and Light

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Today I’m thinking about Paris, about my dear friend Kay who has made it her home for decades. I’m thinking about the beauty of the place, the bridges and buttresses, the way the windows catch the setting sun.

I’m thinking about the forces of civilization and the forces of darkness and how their struggle is playing out across a world stage. And I’m thinking about our cities here, especially the one I now call home: the broad avenues and crisp flags flying. This city and all cities vulnerable.

Last night, watching the dazed survivors being carried to ambulances, listening to those who witnessed the horror first hand, it seemed that all was darkness, that morning would never come. Now the morning has come, but the horror is still with us. The sunlight has an edge to it and the clouds seem lower than before.

Landscapes of Childhood

Landscapes of Childhood

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“We think it essential that a 5-year-old learn to read, but perhaps it is as important for a child to learn to read a landscape,” says Washington Post columnist Adrian Higgins in his article “The British Forest That Gave Life to Pooh.”

Higgins is the Post‘s gardening columnist, and he came to this topic after reading The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh, a new book by Kathryn Aalto. Aalto is a garden designer who spent time in the places where A.A. Milne lived with his wife and young son Christopher Robin. Milne drew on these landscapes to create his fictional world. There was the walnut tree that housed Pooh, and Owl’s aerie in an ancient beech. There was the real Five Hundred Acre Wood.

The beauty of the English landscape — and Milne’s memories of his own childhood decades earlier — made its way into the stories, and as such stands as a testimony not only to the power of topography but also to how important it is in the life of the imagination.

“As important as the Pooh stories remain, they speak to something of greater value, the importance of landscapes to children, places they return to, places they own, places to stage their own dramas, and places that imprint themselves on the mind,” Higgins writes.

I found these landscapes in the broad bluegrass meadows of central Kentucky, my children found them in the yards and woods of suburban Virginia. It doesn’t take a 500-acre wood; sometimes just an empty lot will do.

Two Cities

Two Cities

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There are some advantages to living in a company town. One of them occurs on Veteran’s Day, when most of the government workforce is at home padding around in slippers and the city (or most of it) is left to the rest of us.

Yesterday First Street was almost empty as I fast-walked down to Constitution and then to Third. No one was picking up a salad at Phillip’s Sandwich Shop. No one taking a smoke break at the Hyatt service entrance.

And then … I reached the Mall.

While the rest of the city was in Sunday shut-down mode, the museum-and-monument district was bustling with life. There were babies in strollers and (seemingly a new trend) dogs in strollers. There were selfie-takers striving for just the right photograph with the Washington Monument. There were joggers and cyclists and pedicabs and double-decker buses, all in a glorious jumble. The carousel was doing a brisk business, too.

There are always two cites here, the one the tourists see and the other, workaday one. But today the boundaries between those two cities were etched in high relief.

Walkers Awake

Walkers Awake

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Yesterday I walked to Metro in an almost rain that required almost an umbrella — but you could get away without one. It was  refreshing.

A misty gloaming, the end of a deluge, meant that those who were fed up with the pelting had given up on any barrier between them and the sky.

And then you had people like me, people cooped up in an office all day and glad for the feel of the elements, any elements.

So I walked quickly, thinking I could dodge the occasional fat drop or two. In my ears the Bach cantata “Sleepers Awake.” Trumpet soaring; organ chords giving me a rhythm for footfall, a walking bass line. I let the contrapuntal melody move me forward.

It took three and a half plays of “Sleepers Awake” to reach Metro Center. I was a little damp but no worse for the wear.

Stark Days

Stark Days

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Sunday morning, out early in a new day, I felt the difference immediately. The road was lighter, the woods yawning open to the left and right. 

It wasn’t a cheerful lightness. It was a vacancy. Something was missing.

It took me a minute to realize what had happened, that the hard rains of Saturday had flushed most of the leaves from the trees, that we had, overnight, slipped from autumn into winter. That the stark days had begun.

Running up the Rocky Steps

Running up the Rocky Steps

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I saved a Philadelphia memory to start the week. The destination of my Friday afternoon walk was the Philadelphia Art Museum steps. I wanted to see the Rocky statue and the view of downtown from that perch. I wanted to run up the steps.

My route wound in from the river, so I started at the top of the plaza with the tourists, those who’d already run the stairs and were pumping their arms above their heads with the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and City Hall spread out behind them.

I knew that there was a Rocky Balboa statue at the foot of the steps so I made my way to it and snapped a few shots. As I turned to do the stair climb myself, a little reluctantly — I was tired! — I saw a gaggle of high-schoolers, at least 30 or more, spring from a bus. They were moving so fast  they were a blur. But there was no mistaking it: They were racing — not running but racing — up the 72 stone steps. Behind them three or four adults — teachers, I guess — were in fast pursuit. There was no way they could catch up, but they were trying.

It was funny, it was crazy, it was one of those “life force” moments so full of energy and joy that I knew I would remember it forever. After I saw it, I had no choice but to run up the steps myself. At the top I felt breathless and happy and ready to go home.