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Author: Anne Cassidy

Making it Official

Making it Official

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This summer, more than any other I can remember, the yard was filled with birds. Lured by new feeders and treats they filled the mornings with song and the afternoons with excited chatter.

Now the birds are going away. Not all of them, of course. But the hummingbirds are scarce to nonexistent and the goldfinches appear in singles rather than flocks. The woodpeckers that hopped each deck pilaster to reach the peanut butter block — I haven’t seen them in weeks.

I suppose some of these creatures — most of them — are winging their way south. The last few evenings I’ve spotted Vs of blackbirds tracking southeast in the cloudless sky.

No secret what it all means. I can read a calendar, can feel the chill in the morning air. But when the birds start to vanish that makes it all terribly official.

Summer is almost over. Fall is almost here.

Beating the Clock

Beating the Clock

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I don’t know when cross-walks that flash “Walk” or “Don’t Walk” turned into cross-walks that give pedestrians a countdown of the seconds they have left for crossing, but I was thinking yesterday how this development has changed my walking style.

Before, I would find my cadence and stride confidently from block to block. My feet were on auto-pilot while my mind was free to wander. I stopped and started when needed.

Now if I spot a flashing “20” halfway down the block, I play beat the clock. The natural gait is gone. Instead, I race to the corner and dash across the street.The flow of thoughts is replaced by strategy. If I keep up the pace another block I can beat that light, too.

Do I get where I’m going any faster?

I doubt it.

Frying Pan Park

Frying Pan Park

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As soon as I pulled into the gravel parking lot, I knew it was a mistake. I hadn’t been to this farm park since the girls were young. I was missing them enough as it was. What was I thinking of?

Some sort of therapy, I suppose, the kind where anxious folks expose themselves to ever-increasing doses of what they fear. So I hopped out of the car and started my “treatment.”

There was the big barn where we’d admire the baby pigs and the field where we’d watch the young goats rut and run. There was the chicken coop, the old tractor, the field where the pardoned Thanksgiving turkeys (given to several American presidents, who chose not to slaughter them) now run free.

Mostly there were the shadows of my three daughters. One running ahead, a second clambering on a fence and the third holding her nose because “this place really stinks, Mom.” For a moment the memories overcame me and I had to stop and compose myself.

As I stared at the light on the early fall fields, a young father raced ahead of me, his two children pulling on his arms. He looked harried and hassled — and seeing him helped me remember the high drama of those days, the endlessness of them. My trips to this park were often out of desperation.

But I also recalled the way it felt to pull in the driveway after one of our outings, secure in our togetherness, feeling, as I rushed to start dinner, that everything was exactly as it should be.

“Fists to Knives to Guns”

“Fists to Knives to Guns”

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I looked it up first thing this morning. The Navy Yard is a little over two miles from my office. I could walk there in 40 minutes. That’s how close it came this time.

But despite how close it came, despite how horrific it was — the worst loss of life in a single violent incident here since 9/11/2001 — what’s most notable about this tragedy is how routine it has become.

At least there were no children killed this time, I caught myself thinking. Yet undoubtedly children were affected. Children and other innocent people. The 12 victims all had loved ones — husbands and wives, kids and parents, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues — and their lives will never be the same.

There has always been anger and hatred in the world. But anger plus gunfire is a potent combination. As Janet Orlowski of Washington Hospital Center said as she updated reporters on the condition of the wounded: “I grew up at a time when people were mad at each other, they put up their fists and they hit each other. And for some reason people have gone from fists to knives to guns.”

(Photo: Wikipedia)

The Bibliophiles Have Spoken

The Bibliophiles Have Spoken

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I’d first heard the news from a friend a few weeks ago, someone who works in the Fairfax County Library system. Books were being tossed and librarians were being let go, she said. A new plan was in the offing, one with fewer librarians and fewer books, a plan later hailed as the transition “from a print environment to a digital environment,” according to a Washington Post article that broke the news last week.

When a county supervisor heard the news about the banished books, she rescued scores of good volumes from a dumpster and deposited them on the desk of a county official. The discarded books became a call to arms.

Since the news was made public, the Fairfax County Library has been told to put its new library plan on hold.

The books are safe. For a while, at least.

Farmer’s Market

Farmer’s Market

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Warm sun, cool air, full harvest. The Reston Farmer’s Market is one of the bigger ones in the area, and even though we arrived at the end of it there were still plenty of tomatoes … and peaches … and eggplant … and grapes. 

Let the salads and stir-fries begin.

(Photos by Claire Capehart)

Hidden Garden

Hidden Garden

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This is a corner of the yard you can’t see from inside, the outer edge of a small grove of trees that softens and shelters half the house.

Ferns, hollies, a crepe myrtle and a knockout rose are gathered here with little thought to their placement except hope that the rose and crepe myrtle would have enough light to bloom.

There is no gate, no wall or key, and it holds no fairy magic. But I like to think of this place as a hidden garden, because though it’s visible to neighbors, it is, for the most part, invisible to me.

Burying the Lead

Burying the Lead

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Though it originates in our nation’s capital, this blog is decidedly apolitical — with a few exceptions, several of them also occurring, curiously enough, on 9/11. What I have to say today is not a solemn memorial, though — it’s an editor’s view of President Obama’s speech on Syria.

Maybe it’s because I’m in the final stages of getting the magazine to the printer and am thinking best with a red pen in my hand, but it struck me last night that the startling new diplomatic developments that began emerging  the day before yesterday were not so much fully incorporated into the president’s speech as they were tacked on at the end. This gave the address a confusing inconsistency.

For at least two-thirds of the 17-minute speech Obama told us why we should use force to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons against its own people — and then for the next five he told us that the vote to authorize such force was postponed in order to explore a diplomatic solution. We in the journalism biz call this burying the lead.

This didn’t just confuse me; it made me feel used. As George Orwell pointed out 67 years ago in his essay “Politics and the English Language, “…[T]he decline of a language must ultimately have political
and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that
individual writer. But an effect can become a cause…” As he noted a few paragraphs later, “[I]f thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Perhaps there is no hope for political speech. Orwell didn’t think there was. “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” he said.  It’s hard to believe that the world has improved much in the last seven decades.

But if last night’s explanation had been more honest from the start, it would at least have gotten my attention.  And perhaps even earned my respect.

Waist-High Weeds

Waist-High Weeds

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I found my neighbor, Teresa, weeding in the woods. “It’s Japanese stiltgrass,” she said, “and the only way to get rid of it is to pull it up.”

Tell me about it. I’ve been pulling it up all summer, but have never felt sufficiently ahead in my own yard to take on the common land.

But Teresa has. And does. She and her husband, David, often take a bag along on their walks to pick up trash in the neighborhood.

I do not bag and neither do I weed. Instead, I ponder the stiltgrass as I walk, notice the height of it, waist-high in spots, think about this wild vegetation taking over the woods, the fields, the yards.

It’s a green wave, a green sea, rolling ever forward. We can try to stem its tide, but we are powerless in its wake.

Light on Water

Light on Water

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I walk when the time is right, when the writing and the chores are done. I don’t always consider the quality of the light.

Maybe I should.

Yesterday, Copper and I made our way through the woods as the sun slanted low through the oaks, glanced at their roots and spotlit the creek. The water shimmered in response, gave up its secrets, its depth, its hurry.

The light was a laser pointer teaching the landscape. Look here, it told me, here are sights you should not miss.