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Author: Anne Cassidy

The Sentry

The Sentry

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This little guy is off duty here but I have caught him (or one of his brethren) sitting in front of a house I pass on the way to the beach, looking for all the world like he’s guarding the place. He glances to the left and right, he moves his head up and down. He is alert and ready to scamper. What he would do to combat an intruder I have no idea. But … he’s ready.

Chameleons are known for their changeability, of course, and why not variation of role as well as color? A playful mood, a cautious mood, a dutiful mood.

Here he is hanging around the boards of a deck, perhaps contemplating his next change of skin.

Striped Shadows

Striped Shadows

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Here in the subtropics the palm trees shade you but the shadow they give is not solid but porous.

It doesn’t provide the same drop in temperature as do the big deciduous trees of home, but it is beautiful to observe and —if possible — photograph.

Striped shadows, delicate designs, green fronds waving — shade as a fluid, chancy, sometime thing. 

Languor

Languor

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I never visit a beach without thinking of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and her classic Gift from the Sea. I don’t have a copy with me this time but I remember her description of the beach rhythm. So infected am I by this slow and leisurely pace that I’m just now writing a blog post — at 6 p.m.!

Maybe this will be tomorrow’s post. Or maybe just today’s. A world ruled by clocks and deadlines suddenly has … none.  I took my watch off when I arrived and don’t plan to wear it till I leave.

A delicious languor has set in. Eating when I’m hungry, sleeping when I’m tired. Picking up one book, then another. Letting recent events percolate ever so slowly through a slowed consciousness. Maybe I’ll reach some conclusions, maybe I won’t.

What’s important for a change is not that I try — but that I rest.

Back to Back to the Beach

Back to Back to the Beach

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Not a typo. It’s just that I’m pretty sure I’ve used “Back to the Beach” before. Still, what better way to describe that first glimpse of the ocean and waves, of the vast plain of sand.

Yesterday’s arrival was complicated. Tampa had four inches of rain in eight hours. Planes couldn’t land. My flight was delayed. Rain continued off and on throughout the afternoon, so it was late in the day when I finally made it to the shore.

But it was the same as always. The drop in the shoulders, the air in the lungs, the feeling that once again I’m in a place where I can slow down, think, heal.

Back to the beach.

Walkway Over the Hudson

Walkway Over the Hudson

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Two free hours in the Hudson River Valley on Saturday and a walking trail that quite literally took my breath away. It was Walkway Over the Hudson, a New York state park that gave a whole new meaning to rails-to-trails.

When the first trains crossed the Hudson on the Poughkeepsie-Highland Railway the bridge was the longest in the world. It became a park six years ago and claims to be the longest pedestrian bridge in the world.

But what struck me most wasn’t the length but the height. I tried not to look over the edge, my stomach was doing too many loop-the-loops.

So instead I looked straight ahead until I got acclimated, then a glance to the left and a glance to the right to take in the scenery. Ah yes, this was walking. A long paved path to stride on and a sweep of valley and mountain to admire.

Walk Starved

Walk Starved

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The last few days have been a whirlwind, every minute filled. What’s gone missing is what never should — walk time, think time, coming-to-terms-with-it-all time.

This will change soon, so I’m hanging on.

In the meantime, though, I realize how much I need to be outside in the elements, striding through them. It’s a combination of movement and light, of rhythm and pacing. It’s the shrubbery, the flowers and the muddy path. It’s every house I pass and every tree.

But insights come from absence, too.

Placeholder

Placeholder

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It will be one of those days. Work piled on my desk. A couple of blog posts percolating that will take too many minutes to execute. 

Time for a placeholder … because there’s not much time for anything else.

But placeholders serve a purpose. They widen the moments, hold time in check. They keep us open to possibilities. And of course, they deserve a pretty picture. Just because.

Adopt a Spot

Adopt a Spot

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Walking home yesterday from Metro I noticed a sign. “Adopt a Spot,” it said. This is new to me. Adopt a highway, yes. But adopt a spot?

How good to know that spots have  clout, too. That a clump of trees, a curve of trail, a stand of meadow grass could be noticed, claimed, taken to heart.

I think about the spots I love, places I pass daily, corners worn smooth by passage, roads ridden and paths walked. A new boardwalk in the woods. A nubby stump in the forest. A block of sidewalk in the city, pavement stones ragged.

These are the textures that become dreams, that take hold of us and won’t let go.

Do we adopt the spot — or does the spot adopt us? 

Full Circle

Full Circle

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Our neighbors are expecting their first grandchild, due any day now. These folks have lived next door since we moved into the house 26 years ago. I remember their daughters as little kids and they remember my daughters as babies.

It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that we would stay in the house more than a quarter century (maybe two years?!), but stay put we have, and the staying and the putting have brought a great full-circle quality to life that almost makes up for the years lost to traffic jams and Metro delays.

So on this red-letter day for my family — one daughter celebrating a birthday and another learning that a long wait will soon be over  — I pause to savor the richness of it all — and to give thanks.


(Two rush hours, two red-letter days, much gratitude.)

Frontier Learning

Frontier Learning

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I’m just starting Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening to the West and am captivated by Stegner’s observation of the haphazardness of learning on the frontier.

I knew books were scarce; teachers, too. But Stegner riffs on this “homemade learning” and how boys (and they were mostly boys then, of course) were often captivated and bent by the first man of learning (and they were mostly men then, too) they encountered.

The closest books Abraham Lincoln could borrow were 20 miles away — and they belonged to a lawyer. The closest books John Wesley Powell could borrow belonged to George Crookham, a farmer, abolitionist and self-taught man of science. Crookham collected science books, Indian relics and natural history specimens.

So “[w]hen Wes Powell began to develop grown-up interests, they were by and large Crookham’s interests,” Stegner writes. Powell went on to explore the Grand Canyon and to champion the preservation of the West — all of this with one arm; he lost the other in the Civil War’s Battle of Shiloh. (Powell was a major with the Union forces.)

I think of us now with more influences than we know what do to with. Libraries at our fingertips. Information bombarding us day and night. Would we climb on a raft and venture down uncharted waters? Well, I know what I would (not) do. How about you?