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Author: Anne Cassidy

Dog Days Walk

Dog Days Walk

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Walking in the dog days is not unlike taking a bath. The air is full of moisture and weight.

I run down West Ox Road, past houses that have privacy now that trees have leafed out, filled in. As usual I strolled around the containment pond, hoping to see some red-winged blackbirds. But there were none. I realized how much I’d come to count on seeing them there. How each stage of my walk is populated with images and expectations.

Instead, I saw crowded cattails and reeds that might have been elegant had there been some wind blowing through them. We are at the tail end of a season. The scenery is looking tired. Or maybe it’s just the walker who is tired. That’s more like it!

Second Bloom

Second Bloom

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All through this crazy week, as I read page proofs, wrote proposals, attended meetings and planned a panel, the rose bud was swelling, opening, preparing to bloom.

I came out on the deck this morning, still exhausted from a string of challenging days, and almost gasped when I saw the flower.

What I was doing suddenly seemed so unimportant. This is what really matters. That soil, water and light can come together to send forth this one perfect flower.

Secret Weapon

Secret Weapon

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When there’s no time to stretch my legs for real I take a mental stroll. A trail that vanishes through a stand of  oak, passage to another world of fern and creek. I imagine an opening at the end of a field, slip through a curtain of branches. Sometimes the trail curves back upon itself, leads nowhere.  That’s when I’m feeling especially stressed.

Other times it opens onto a placid woodland, and my heart beats more slowly even though I’m standing in a crowded Metro car or about to lead a panel (which I will this afternoon). I conjure up favorite trails,  follow their sections from beginning to end: the entry, broad and leafy; the fair-weather crossing over Difficult Run; the confusing stretch where I sometimes get lost; the final burst of boardwalk put there by another devoted woods walker.

Then I realize that the calmness of the woods walk can be called back to mind any time, can be imbibed like a last-minute hit of caffeine or cup of chamomile. It’s my secret weapon. I’ll be using it today.

Person of the Book

Person of the Book

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When the going gets tough, the tough get a day planner. An old-fashioned model, ink on paper, 5×8. Each week gets a complete spread, so there are 10 lines for each day’s appointments rather than just a tiny square.

I used to swear by these books but over time had stopped using them. I made do with the tiny, purse-sized calendars and scribbled notes to myself each day of what I needed to accomplish. I liked being less scheduled, time a vast river rather than a tightly parceled stream.

But my new duties require lots of meetings, and meetings must be jotted down lest they be forgotten. So once again I am a person of the book. The appointment book, that is. 

Digging Ditches

Digging Ditches

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It was after 4 p.m. yesterday when I finally walked out into what some were saying was the most spectacular weather of the summer. It’s interesting how easily we accommodate ourselves to inside air, inside thoughts. Here we are, creatures of vastness, accepting so much less of ourselves.

We do it for all the right reasons, of course. To earn a living, to pursue a craft, to tend to the ones we love.

“You’ll never get rich by digging a ditch” goes a line from an old song, “You’re in the Army Now” (or some such title). Around the office I have a saying, “Well, at least we’re not digging ditches for a living.” And some in the office have argued that digging ditches doesn’t sound all that bad. Maybe not for those with strong shoulders and biceps like cannon balls. But for a puny pencil pusher like myself, having an indoor job is definitely a plus.

Still, there are days — days like these lovely, limpid, last days of summer — when indoor work seems a shadowy stand-in for the real thing.

Earlier Darkness

Earlier Darkness

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It’s still dark when I wake now, and it remains that way almost until I leave the house about 6. Early darkness can be such a comfort — a cover, a foil, a way to keep the eyes half closed until the destination is reached. Pools of light like mirrors but tree shadows barely emerging.

On the other hand, I know what this early darkness bodes. Fall and then winter. Cold winds, snow and ice. Crunching down the driveway at 6 a.m.

So let’s just linger here a while. It’s still summer, though heat and humidity are abating. A few tomatoes linger on the vines and the cicadas are singing their songs.

Walking and Talking

Walking and Talking

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Yesterday my sister and I walked on the Capital Crescent Trail in Bethesda, Maryland — and I realized this morning that I have no pictures to show for it. No shots of the tree tunnels, of the bikers and skaters and Sunday-afternoon amblers. This is because we were talking as fast as we were walking.

I am for the most part a solitary stroller, walking alone by choice. It’s when I sift through the day’s events, when I jostle myself free of the routine and to-do list long enough for thoughts to surface. Walking has become an essential writing tool. It’s the great “un-sticker.”

But when presented with a willing companion — someone who will walk and talk with me — ah, there’s almost no better way to make the words fly than moving forward together in space.

Improbable Harmony

Improbable Harmony

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A morning walk without music. Earphones left behind. Open to bird song and cricket chirp and the dull roar of faraway cars.

It reminded me of an orchestra tuning, the chorus of jays, cardinals and sparrows. From the woods came the cackle of a pileated woodpecker, its cry like an inland seagull and the rat-a-tat of its beak against tree trunk providing the percussion.

There was no plan to the sounds, no organization, but they were harmonious just the same, like meadow colors that never clash, like lily pads that dot a placid pond.  The improbable harmony of nature.

End of the Rainbow

End of the Rainbow

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Another day, another shower, another stunning display of refracted light. Day before yesterday I stepped off the train to a scene of giddiness and awe. Hardened D.C. commuters stopped their march toward turnstile and home. They juggled umbrellas and briefcases. They looked up.

The double rainbow arched all the way over Route 66, and it lingered for 10 minutes or more. This is what the smart phone has wrought: a generation of nature photographers. People who don’t have to slap their foreheads and say, “I wish I had my camera.” We always have our cameras.

So when nature gives us a picture show we’re there to snap it. And snap it. And snap it. And snap it.

All this beauty and bother put people in a jolly mood. We broke the code. We talked with each other. Even Metro employees. One train conductor pointed up as we walked toward the station. We smiled and nodded. Another (the one who should have been starting up the next train, I think) said, “Look at the rainbow. I’m gonna look for my pot of gold.”

Vienna: It’s not just the last stop on the Orange Line — it’s the end of the rainbow.

New Scenery, New Eyes

New Scenery, New Eyes

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How do we perceive the vistas around us? With what eyes do we take in the forests, hills and plains of the natural world? When a new and radical form of scenery presents itself must we change our tastes and proclivities to appreciate it? Wallace Stegner raises these questions in Beyond the 100th Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (Penguin, 1953) — and from what I can tell, he answers the last one with “yes.”

Stegner chronicles not only the physical exploration of the canyons, buttes and gorges of the “Plateau Province” (mid to southern Utah and northern Arizona), but also the artistic one.

The process that is triumphantly concluded in [Thomas] Moran’s “Yellowstone” was one that had begun forty years before in the water colors of Alfred Jacob Miller, when the painter’s eye first began to adjust to prairies that were not green meadows, mountains whose rocks were other than the Appalachian granite, scrub growth whose shades were those of gray and brown and yellow, earth which showed its oxidized bones, and air without the gray wool of humidity across its distances.

 It’s an interesting thought, that new types of places require new ways of seeing. Makes me ponder Pluto’s recent closeups and the fantastic images that the Hubble space telescope has sent back to earth. The strange beauty of the Grand Canyon must have been just as jarring and awe-inspiring to the mid-19th-century denizen as these cosmic vistas are to us.