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Author: Anne Cassidy

Most Walkable

Most Walkable

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The facts are in — and they’re surprising: Washington, D.C., is the nation’s most walkable city!

Yes, that’s right. I thought the same thing: What about New York (just for starters)? Turns out, it’s Number Two.

 I heard a fleeting mention of this yesterday on the radio and looked it up today thinking I had misheard. But according to a report prepared by George Washington University’s School of Business, Washington has more Walkable Urban Places (WalkUPs) than New York City, Boston, San Francisco or Chicago.

Having lived and walked in three of these top five (and not owned a car in two of them),
I’ll admit I was scratching my head. But then I started reading
the report. WalkUPs are based on the amount of office and retail space and a Walk Score, which looks at how easy it is to run errands without a car. New York comes in second because although Manhattan earns an 89-percent WalkUP score, the other boroughs aren’t quite so walkable.

The most amazing nugget: The D.C. area has the most balanced walkability ratio between city (51 percent) and suburbs (49 percent). Really? The George Washington University researchers must be strolling in Arlington or Bethesda, not Oak Hill. Still, there are more paths here than there used to be, and Metro’s Silver Line (4 and a half miles from my house) opens a week from today.

So I’m optimistic about walking in the suburbs. It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

Blackberry Winter

Blackberry Winter

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I grew up with this expression, used to describe a patch of cool summer weather. I’ve been thinking about it the last few mornings waking to temperatures in the high 50s — in July!

“A colloquial expression used in the south and midwest North America referring to a cold snap that occurs in late spring when the blackberries are in bloom,” Wikipedia says.

That’s not the way I remember it. Late-spring cold was dogwood winter. Mid-summer cold was blackberry winter. The time when blackberries were in fruit — not in flower.

Doesn’t matter. Both are lovely ways to talk about unseasonable chill. Poetic descriptions of essential contradictions. 

And the blackberries are in fruit and ready for picking. I see them along side roads and fence rows, in what remains of the meadow. They should peak this weekend.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Shifting My Weight

Shifting My Weight

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“Tap is easy,” Candy says. “But shifting your weight, that’s hard.” This is not the first bit of life wisdom I’ve learned from my tap teacher. But it’s the most recent.

“It’s like gymnastics,” she continues. “Gymnastics is easy. Landing is hard.”

Well, I don’t know about that. But I do know that hopping on my left foot, flapping with my right (or as my tap buddy Denise would say, “falapping,” since we give it two beats), landing on the ball of that foot before transferring weight to my left ball, heel and right ball, heel — yes, that is difficult.

In fact, balance is the most challenging part of tap class, apart from the traffic I must drive through to get there. And what makes balance tricky is letting go. To transfer weight from one foot to the other, one must, for a single terrifying moment, not have weight anywhere. One must leap into the void.

It’s not unlike a trapeze artist or a mid-life career changer. Yes, there is practice, preparation, mastery. But there is also the hand off, the letting go.

I’m thinking there’s a point where shifting my weight will cease to frustrate and begin to exhilarate. I’m still waiting for that to happen.

(A tap class in Iowa, 1942, courtesy Wikipedia)

Land Between Storms

Land Between Storms

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Driving home yesterday, dashing through puddles left from an earlier shower, racing to reach the house before the skies opened for another deluge, I thought about where I was. It was an interval of time, true, but it was also a place. The Land between Storms. The terrain: Steaming pavement, black clouds, a feel in the air that was part peace and part anticipation.

How many other times are places? The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, the last week of May. But these are fixed in time, not mobile like the Land Between Storms.

There is also the place that springs up after a blizzard. A world of white — silent for an hour or two then filled with the sound of snowblowers whirring and shovels scraping.

It has taken me a long while to realize the commonality of these experiences, how they pull together sights, sounds and smells so reliably, so ineluctably, that I can find the places every time.

Blue Spruce

Blue Spruce

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For some reason blue spruce trees have been calling to me lately. I can’t quite understand what they’re saying — other than look at me.

Maybe it’s their bracing attitude, as if they have imbibed the winter air. They make me feel cooler just looking at them. Or their color, which stands out amidst the oranges and yellows and pinks of summer bloom.

They bring to mind trudging through a frost-hardened field to chop down the Christmas tree, even though when it’s time to choose, we always go for a fir.

For whatever reason, they are catching my eye these days. They’re not letting me forget them.

Photo: Fairylandscape.net

Open House

Open House

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Common sense tells me to turn on the air conditioning. It will be in the low nineties today, high humidity. But another impulse keeps it off, a desire to be one with the summer, to feel the heat, to be cooled by fans and not refrigerated air.

And I think the house likes it, too. The wood swells, the plants thrive. Paper softens and curls. Deck doors are thrown open so the outside comes in.

A breeze flows through from back to front. A chorus of cicada song rises and falls, and because the windows are open I can hear it.

Summer is best in an open house.

Tread Well

Tread Well

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Yesterday’s walk began in the woods, late afternoon light slanting in through the canopy. Copper and I crossed Folkstone Drive, strolled down Treadwell, a street I love not just for its name (perfect for walkers) but also for its length and lack of traffic and for the calmness I feel when I’m on it.

Treadwell ends in a pipestem with houses tucked deep in the forest. Before you reach it, though, there’s a path back into the woods. We took it, picking our way through some sticker bushes and crossing a creek that required my first sitting down on the bank (a hesitation Copper didn’t understand) before launching myself forward to the other side.

Once across the tributary, we could wander from one trail to another. I noticed the silence, interrupted only by the caws of a crow and the hum of a distant airplane. Was it the silence that freed my mind to appreciate the beauty, the jewel-green moss atop the decaying log, the ferns waving slightly in the breeze?

Nothing is not beautiful here, I thought: the weeds, the stumps, the whole trees uprooted and left lying where they fell, their root balls like the inside of giant umbrellas. All of it a pleasure to the eye.

As we grew closer to the exit, the woods became noisier. It was a landscaping crew grooming the yard of a nearby house. Two mowers and a weed whacker. Welcome back, they seemed to say with their jangle and bluster, welcome back to the world.

Little Voices

Little Voices

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It’s summer time and into the click-click of computer keyboards and the businesslike tones of those  in Important Meetings comes another sound, a welcome sound — the high-pitched ping of little voices.

A couple days ago a colleague brought her baby to the office and I could hear the babbling and squawking from many doors down the hall. And both Wednesday and Thursday I ran into daycare kids on campus — yelling, laughing, taunting and teasing.

It brought me back to the days of the little voices in my own life, how I treasured them even then, knowing how precious they were, how fleeting. Now they’ve matured into the voices of adult women, not even a “like, you know” left from the teenage years. They are still precious to me, but they are different.

When I was knee-deep in child rearing I used to wonder why older folks would smile as I extricated  one of my noisy children from underneath a clothes rack or a church pew. Now I understand. They liked the sound of little voices too. Like me, they listened and remembered.

Late Arrival

Late Arrival

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First there is the wakening, slightly panicky, the feeling that something is not right. Next, a peek at the clock. After 2 a.m. Surely she should be home by now.

Should I get up and look out the window? If the car is there I’ll rest easy; if it’s not, I’ll be awake till she gets home.

Last night it was the latter. A late arrival, but not much later than my wakening. I fall back to sleep, happy and grateful.

The morning after the late arrival is another story: Bleary and disbelieving. How can it already be day?

Picture Window

Picture Window

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I saw them on walks in Lexington, what we had when I was growing up, what I see in older houses still, but not as much anymore.

The picture window provides an unbroken look at the out-of-doors. No parceled glimpses of street or flower or tree. The picture window is open and unbroken.

Or at least mine was. It was the way I first looked out at the world, and I wonder if it accounts for the fact that I like to be out in it now.

Picture windows, I read, are non-opening windows that allow light into a room. Ah yes, that’s right. That window didn’t open.

What strikes me now about the picture window is its name, which doesn’t refer to panes or light but to framing. The picture window frames what it sees and presents it to us brightly and tidily.

The world in a frame. Almost.