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Author: Anne Cassidy

Lockdown

Lockdown

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As I write, the entire city of Boston is on lockdown. All businesses, offices and schools are closed. No public transit, no street life. Seven and a half million people told to stay inside as police comb the streets looking for the second suspect in the marathon bombings.

Across the country, a town leveled by a fertilizer explosion searches for victims and buries its dead.

And finally, an Elvis impersonator who struggled with mental illness is accused of sending Ricin-laced letters to the president and other officials.

Try putting this in a novel and your editor (if you had one) would protest. Unbelievable! Too much! Take some of it out!

But this isn’t a novel.

Stem, Bud, Leaf

Stem, Bud, Leaf

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I write about this hedge every year. It’s a welcome subject today, when there are so many things I’d rather not write about. So many sad and unnatural things.

The hedge, on the other hand, spends its days just being a hedge. It was trimmed earlier in the season, so it has the sad openness of a little boy after his first haircut, curls heaped around the chair.

But the haircut has not deterred the hedge from performing its hedgely duty — the steady transformation from brown stem to pink bud to green leaf.

Some years it takes weeks for this to happen, and I hold my breath. But this year it took only a few days. An ordinary miracle.

White Violets

White Violets

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An oxymoron, I guess. A rarity, for sure.

Find a field of violets, and the ratio of white to purple will be roughly the same as this one.

But finding a field of violets isn’t easy. Too often the sweet flowers have been weeded or mulched or mowed into oblivion.

The owners of this house have the good sense to let their violets bloom free. (No, it’s not our yard — I wish our weeds were this attractive.) And they’ve been rewarded with the rare white variety. Not many of the flowers, just enough for contrast, just enough to let us know they’re still around. 

Post Boston, Post 9/11

Post Boston, Post 9/11

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The Saturday before 9/11/01 I went to the National Book Festival. We milled around the Capitol grounds, soaking up the literary ambiance. Books and book lovers as far as the eye could see. Paradise!

Two days later the world was a different place. I thought to myself, there will be no innocent crowd scenes again. No more National Book Festivals — or anything like them. Gatherings will take place, but we won’t participate in them the same way. We’ll always be looking over our shoulders, bracing ourselves for a pop or a crack or a boom.

The reality has been far more complicated. I’ve gone back to the book festival and many other happenings on the Mall. Just last weekend I was standing with throngs of others at the base of the Washington Monument as Claire completed the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler. I plan to be waiting for her at the finish line of the Marine Corps Marathon in October. It’s been 11 and a half years since 9/11. Sometimes I forget.

But the Boston Marathon bombing has made us remember all over again, remember that we live in a different place than we did on September 10, 2011; remember the silent, cloudless sky, the Twin Towers incinerated, the Pentagon on fire.

Remember that innocence, or what we had left of it, is gone forever.

Goals and Deadlines

Goals and Deadlines

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On this national deadline day, a few thoughts on reaching goals. How what keeps us going is setting new ones, and what happens when we don’t know what the next new one should be.

The natural world may be of some help here. It’s all about growth and change: bud to flower, flower to leaf. Waves rolling in; waves rolling out. The steady rhythm of the tides.

But all of this within seasonal cycles.

Nature doesn’t mind repeating itself. But it does so with endless variation.

Pear Trees

Pear Trees

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It’s the most suburban of neighborhoods, a place of happy families and dogs and swim team cheeriness. It’s tidy and cultivated.

Except every spring when the Bradford pears bloom. Then it’s magical. The natural world has taken over and I hardly notice the vans with sports stickers.

The white trees, the way they bend over the road.  Their lacy branches and dark trunks. The ethereal effect of it all.

Spring reminds us of what is invisible the rest of the year.

Sound of the Season

Sound of the Season

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What happens when you jump from winter to summer overnight? When you move from a few brave daffodils and halfhearted forsythia to flowering cherries and Bradford pears; to hyacinth, forget-me-not, periwinkle and violets — and, most especially, to budding maples and poplars and oaks.

What happens is perhaps summed up in one word, actually one sound. Awwwwwww choo!

Once or twice in this blog I’ve written about our late, great parakeet, Hermes. He was a talkative little guy who had a dozen or so words in his repertoire. But the sound he made most often was the human sneeze. He heard it enough that he figured it was our call.

There’s a reason for that.

Wild Ride

Wild Ride

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The magazine I edit is stored in the second (deepest) level of the parking garage under the building next door. Ferrying our shipment of magazines from truck to cage involves a handcart that slides under the pallet so it can be lifted and pushed to its destination.

But when its destination is down two steep ramps and there are more magazines than usual, it’s a wild ride.

“This weighs 1,200 pounds,” said the driver when he surveyed the scene. “You want me to push it down that ramp?”

“Yes,” I nodded, adding something vague about how there must be more boxes this time, the delivery is usually no problem.

The driver used the side of the ramp to slow the momentum, but there was still a point when I thought we might have a runaway pallet on our hands. “This is like a ride at King’s Dominion,” the driver said.

The boxes eventually reached their destination, but it would take another guy and another handcart to finish the job. Along the way I moved some pallets and boxes myself.

Woke up this morning with aching arms and back. What gives? I thought at first. Oh, that’s right, it was yesterday’s delivery. It was a wild ride.

Photo: bestcardboardboxes.com

Seize the Day

Seize the Day

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Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough
And stands along the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide

Now, of my threescore years and ten
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
A.E. Housman

I kept thinking of these words yesterday, of how beauty is bounded by time, how all things precious are. And so this seasonal ritual is not just spectacle, not just renewal, it is reminder.

The blossoms are fleeting; they, like us, will come and go. But we’re here, and they’re here.

There’s nothing left to do but seize the day.

Blossoms for the People

Blossoms for the People

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I used to wait for the perfect photograph, hold my camera steady until a split-second unobstructed view. But on today’s early morning stroll around the Tidal Basin, I didn’t mind including people in the picture. It was the people I noticed most.

The joy on their faces, not a sour look in the bunch. These are cherry blossom devotees, early risers,  up before 6 to be downtown before 7.  Joggers, bikers, picnickers, photographers — all here for one reason, to get their fill of beauty.

Here’s what they saw: