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Author: Anne Cassidy

Washing and Drying

Washing and Drying

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The dishwasher is fixed so now I can look back wistfully to the weeks of washing and drying. OK, not too wistfully. It was getting old. But the glasses did feel squeaky clean when I rinsed them and  the plates stacked up nicely after they were dried.

There was the pride of completion that I don’t feel when the dishwasher does all the work. And I never ran out of knives or spoons. Dishes were washed after they were used. No two-day limbo while the food left on them grew ever more caked and dried.

So yes, washing dishes by hand had its charms. But I’m glad the old machine has been pressed back into service.

The Dentist

The Dentist

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On Monday I went to the dentist for what was supposed to be a routine extraction. It was a wisdom tooth, not impacted, and I was assured that I didn’t need to consult an oral surgeon.

Wrong! The routine quickly became difficult and I experienced two hours of what can only be described as medieval dentistry — with gloves.

As I reclined there, hands clasped tight, mouth pried unnaturally wide open, the young (key word) dentist experimented with tool after tool. (I was waiting for him to try a come-along!) And I kept imagining those old illustrations of medieval dentists. I’ve seen this kind of art in modern dental offices; it’s supposed to be a humorous nod to how far we have come.

After Monday I would say we haven’t come far. Because now I know that underneath all the equipment, all the whirring, spinning bells and whistles of modern dentistry, there is still just the dentist and the tooth. It’s a contest of wills. In my case the dentist won. But just barely.

Johann Liss, Farmer at the Dentist, 1616-17 from Wikipedia

Home Leave

Home Leave

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Yesterday word came from Suzanne. Her home leave is approved! She will be arriving at Dulles Airport at 1:30 on October 20 — and she’ll be in the U.S. for six weeks!

The Peace Corps grants paid home leave to folks who sign on for a third year. Suzanne has already started her new job, as technical assistant to Population Services International and its Beninese partner, planning and training for the peer-education program there known as Amour et Vie. PSI estimates that in 2012 alone its services helped prevent 1,340 HIV cases, more than 70, 000 unwanted pregnancies and almost 30,000 cases of diarrhea.

The peer educators now give Ebola prevention suggestions, too. But their primary work is to bring about the sort of deep-boned changes that will someday lift the country out of poverty — and these will continue long after the epidemic is in check.

It’s good, important work — but it’s thousands of miles away. I’m beyond excited to know that our girl will be home soon — at least for a while!

Leaving “Black Care” Behind

Leaving “Black Care” Behind

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“Black care seldom sits behind the rider whose pace is fast
enough.”

                                                      — Theodore Roosevelt   
So the man I met last night in Ken Burns’ new film “The Roosevelts” is in many ways the man I knew:
the man of action, man of privilege, man of tragedy and loss. His
father died when he was in college; his mother and wife died a few years later on the same
day.  In an agony of grief Roosevelt headed west, to the Badlands, where the limitless
sky and active life helped him heal. 

Hearing all this last night — especially the quotation — makes me think about walking. How many suburban amblers stroll just fast enough to make their worries go away. I know I do. Sometimes I can outrun my troubles, sometimes I can’t. But I usually return in better spirits than I left. “Black care” is almost always left behind.
Tangled Harvest

Tangled Harvest

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It’s harvest time on the back deck. The thyme is thriving, the basil is bolting and the cherry tomatoes are tangled up with the climbing rose (which I’m training to clamber up the balusters).

There’s not enough sunlight in the backyard to put tomatoes directly into the ground, so they grow in pots. And the most successful pot-grown tomatoes, I’ve learned, are these little guys. They’re as sweet as candy and taste great in salads or pasta or right from the vine.

The only problem, every year, is that they really get the hang of it in September. There are green tomatoes aplenty on these vines. Will they ripen in time? Some of them, probably. The rest will harden, their stems will shrivel — and then — and only then — I’ll untangle them from the rose.

Difference of Opinion

Difference of Opinion

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At my writer’s group last night we had a difference of opinion. Half of us thought a short story ended with a narrator’s father in the intensive care unit of a hospital, and the other half thought it ended with the narrator herself there.

The other half was right, said Cathy, who wrote the story.

But this raises some questions, the kind you can’t help but ask yourself if you believe that the endpoint of self-expression is to communicate with an audience. Because the essay or novel, play or story takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? It is reshaped and relived every time a new reader comes to it, takes its words into her mind, makes it her own.

Even though I stood corrected, even though I realized that I had to some extent missed the point, the piece I read worked well on its own, the details of landscape and sky were no longer that of a pain-fogged dream but of an actual journey through a quiet forest. Because when the words leave our pen or keyboard they stop being ours and become the reader’s. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, I think. In a very important way, that’s the point.

Writing and Forgiveness

Writing and Forgiveness

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When I picked up Ann Patchett’s book This is the Story of a Happy Marriage I wasn’t expecting an essay collection.  Whatever review convinced me to foist it on my (decidedly pro fiction) book group had long since vanished from my sieve-like brain. I like Ann Patchett’s writing — and that’s that.

But the book is an essay collection and the essay I’m reading now, which has also been published as a single, is “The Getaway Car.” It’s about writing. And forgiveness.

“I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I’m capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.”

Writing and forgiveness. I hadn’t linked them like this before, hadn’t thought of how much slack the rope requires before it turns taut and stops you. Now I have.

“It is Solved by Walking”

“It is Solved by Walking”

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I just finished reading Alice McDermott’s novel Someone, in which twice appears a favorite quotation (motto? adage?) of mine: “It is solved by walking.”

When I wrote about this in an earlier blog post, I used the Latin “Solvitur Ambulando,” a term beloved by pilgrims and poets, and mentioned that I might have given this name to my blog had it not already been taken. Still, the spirit of “Solvitur Ambulando” fills this space. I can’t count the number of times my mood, my priorities, even my energy level, have been “solved,” have been set right, by walking.

According to some sources, the phrase originated with Diogenes, who disputed the unreality of motion by walking away. In that sense, solvitur ambulando not only means walking but any practical proof of an argument.

In The Tao of Travel, Paul Theroux attributes the adage to St. Augustine. “Walking to ease the mind is also the objective of the pilgrim,” Theroux writes. “There is a spiritual dimension, too: the walk itself is part of a process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing.”

For me, it’s the most essential. Not for locomotion — but for sanity. 

Rush Hour

Rush Hour

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My walk yesterday nudged right up against the morning rush hour. Not the D.C., Reston or Vienna rush hour — but the Folkstone rush hour.

Because my subdivision’s “main drag” leads to the local elementary school we have a half hour in the morning and a half hour in the afternoon when active pedestrians risk being run over by a convoy of mini-vans.

Not so for me today; I squeaked in before the brigade. But I wasn’t too early for the bus stop coffee klatsch. Whether by choice or requirement, every child now waiting at the bus stop waits with at least one parent. Gone is the small kid society my children enjoyed during those years — with its own hierarchy and pecking order, sixth-grade patrols at the top, morning kindergartners at the bottom.

Now it’s a time for parents to chit-chat and kids to revolve around them. It’s another way that childhood is changing, another thing I miss about the way things used to be.

View from a Hammock

View from a Hammock

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Speaking of (pictures of) hammocks, I spent some time in one yesterday. I’d been looking at it longingly all week but there was no time to partake. The weather was summer but the work load was decidedly back-to-school. By this weekend, though, with a big project completed and the house (relatively) clean, I had no choice but to relax.

It’s funny that hammocks are so often the symbol of carefree existence. Perhaps it’s their weightlessness or their airiness, the fact that they swing.

Or maybe it’s their contours and mechanics. While I’ve often heard of folks flopping into a hammock, you cannot flop into mine. The contraption is not easy to get into or out of. In that sense it holds me captive. Once I get into it, am I  really going to try and get out very quickly?

Take yesterday, for instance, I had my pillow, my journal, a book, a phone and of course, the requisite glass of iced tea. Imagine the logistics of assembling all that within arm’s reach. I didn’t stir for an hour. Then again, why would I want to?