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Author: Anne Cassidy

Big Sky

Big Sky

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It is a day of clarity and blue sky, a day that makes me dream of the West with its forever-faraway views. What would it be like to live in the open, to give up the canopy we Easterners hide beneath?

In Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner has some answers:

Over the segmented circle of earth is domed the biggest sky anywhere, which on days like this sheds down on range and wheat and summer fallow a light to set a painter wild, a light pure, glareless, and transparent. The horizon a dozen miles away is as clean a line as the nearest fence. …

The drama of this landscape is in the sky, pouring with light and always moving. The earth is passive. And yet the beauty I am struck by, both as present fact and as revived memory, is a fusion: this sky would not be so spectacular without this earth to change and glow and darken under it.

Books at Hand

Books at Hand

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They’re piled on the bedside table, scattered on the coffee table, wedged two deep on bookshelves.

At least one commutes on Metro with me, often two, fiction and nonfiction. And always, of course, my own little black book, my journal, along for the ride.

Why must I have books around me? More books than I can possibly read?

Same reason I’ve always loved bookstores and libraries, I guess, which has something to do with the special calm that comes over me when I’m in them.

Here within reach this Friday morning are two memoirs, a novel, a book on mindfulness and another on grace, two books on place and some historical fiction.

Will I read all of these within the next hour? Unlikely. I’m reading page proofs today. But having books at hand, knowing I can dip into them at any moment, is a way of being. Books are as essential as air.

The Places In Between

The Places In Between

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It’s a pit stop, a place to get gas on I-64, a hilltop station with rocking chairs on a little front porch that provides this view as respite for white-line fever.

Well, almost this view. To snap this shot I walked down the road a few feet while filling up the van. But still, this is more or less what you would see if you had a few minutes to while away.

I paused only long enough to take this picture. An impatient driver, I allow myself no more than 10 minutes at a stop — and I don’t spend them sitting!

This photo reminds me of the journey not the destination. It reminds me of all the places in between.

Shopping Alone

Shopping Alone

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It had been two weeks since I’d shopped for groceries. Two weeks of eating the ultimate leftovers, what’s left in the freezer after the kids have gone. But having exhausted most staples, I headed for the store.

I begin in the dairy aisle. No gallon of skim, just a pint of whole milk for my tea.

I skip the cold cuts, the Lunchables, the Fruit Rollups.

No candy or cookies or crackers. No goldfish! Kid cereal successfully bypassed, too; I go for the granola instead.

Meat, eh! Fish, double eh! I even pass on pasta. I settle on salad and one of those rotisserie chickens, the kind someone else cooks for you.

Before I leave I move through the produce aisle. The pears, I always bought them for Celia. The apples, those were for
Suzanne. Claire has always loved melon.

So I buy all three — pears and apples and
melon — just for the memories, you understand.

(Photo: 123RF)

Back to School

Back to School

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They have new tennis shoes and big smiles. Their adventure is about to begin. But “they” aren’t mine.

It’s the first day of school in Fairfax County. But for the first time in 20 years it doesn’t matter. No kid of mine is boarding one of those big yellow buses. Or getting a ride or driving herself to school, either.

And this is fine.

I miss the little people my children once were. But I love the young adults they have become.

As for nostalgia, I’m channeling Alice Cooper:

School’s out for summer

School’s out forever!

(Celia on her first day of kindergarten in 2000.)

Trucks Behaving Badly

Trucks Behaving Badly

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Today millions of Americans are driving home from their Labor Day vacations. They are cruising up on ramps, merging cautiously, leaving a safe following distance and otherwise obeying the rules of the road.

OK, maybe they are speeding a little. But basically, they’re out there trying.

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of trucks are also on the road. I don’t mean to pick on trucks unnecessarily. They can’t help it that they are large and heavy and block the view of signs. I don’t expect them to be quiet or dainty. 

They can, however, behave better than they do. After just driving 17 hours this weekend, seven of them on the nightmare that is I-81, I think I’ve figured out why trucks behave badly. They think they’re cars! They whisk in and out of lanes at 75 miles an hour. They merge with gleeful abandon. They give way reluctantly and with a great screech of downshifting gears. Sometimes they travel in tandem, tying up both the travel and the passing lanes while dozens of cars fume behind them.

Trucks should act like trucks. They should plod along at a speed that befits their tonnage. They should give way more generously than they do. And they should let cars … be cars.

Silver Maple

Silver Maple

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I saw them on the drive Friday. Trees with leaves that are green on top but glint silver when tickled by the wind. Leaves with flip sides that shine like the scales of a fish.

Silver maples thrive in wetlands, I’ve learned; I know them from the mountains of Kentucky. I remember my parents pointing them out to me on those interminable Sunday drives.

Since then I’ve reveled in this botanical knowledge and in the secret beauty these trees possess. Leaves hiding their loveliest feature, revealing it only when the wind blows.



(It’s hard to find a picture of a silver maple with its silver showing.)

Same Route, New Light

Same Route, New Light

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I drove to Kentucky yesterday — but left Virginia about six hours later than I usually do. The Blue Ridge were not the morning smudge on the horizon they usually are; they were full-bodied mountains rising in the west.

The little trail at the White Sulphur Springs rest stop had no trace of morning mist. It was shimmering in the midday sun.

And that last hour to Lexington was strangely peaceful, with darkness closing in fast.

All along the way I marveled at the road. I knew it was the same one, the map told me so. But the light said something different.

House Keeper

House Keeper

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To be alone in a house that once was full is to feel tender toward it, to show it greater care than usual. So you scrub the floor of the pantry closet and purge its contents. The kitchen faucet is now shiny and spotless, and the bedrooms are freshened by clean linens. This is not their usual state.

You are hoping that this is not the way you’ll always be. You’d like to have some of that old devil-may-care attitude, the one that helped you shrug off the untidiness and the disorganization. The years of toys ankle deep in the dining playroom, the piles of shoes by the front door.

Not the toys and the shoes themselves, mind you, just the ability to forgive them for standing between order and disorder.

It struck me yesterday that I am a house keeper. Not a housekeeper. The word break is crucial. I’m not a professional. I’m an amateur, one who comes to the task not from duty but from love.

Late Summer Color

Late Summer Color

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Purples and yellows splash color into the late-summer garden. Chicory blooms blue along the roadside. And for contrast, the bridal-veil white of clematis paniculata.

Summer may not have been hot this year, but it has been colorful. Plentiful rain has kept the grass green, has meant no watering, no parched soil.

Wildflowers scarce in other seasons are emboldened this year.  The soil has a memory, especially when it rains.

Late summer color softens the blow, warms these days of waning light.