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Author: Anne Cassidy

Best Desk Ever

Best Desk Ever

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The season has turned, mornings are cooler, but I still haul my laptop out to the best desk ever. That would be the glass-topped table that’s tucked under the rose arbor on our deck.

It may not be the place to sit when deep concentration is required. There’s too much to look at and listen to: the poplar whose leaves are just starting to turn at its crown, the liquid sound of blue jays calling to each other, the hawk crying from the oak next door. During rose season an errant petal may float down and land on my lap. But I love sitting here. I feel inspired and enabled. I seem to draw strength from the green, growing things around me.

I’ve worked in cubicles and carrels, at wide tables, and once, for a few months, in a converted closet. My office desk, where I park myself when it’s too cold to sit outside, has a similar view — more expansive since its higher up but less immersive since it’s inside.

But today, and I hope for a few more weeks, I’ll be working at the best desk ever.

Summer Preserved

Summer Preserved

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I usually take months to fill a handwritten journal. The one I finished this morning took exactly six weeks. I began it in the dog days of summer, sitting in the hammock as twilight fell, two days before flying to France. I knew that when I returned, the season would almost be over.

And though we’ve had heat and humidity, dry parched earth and one torrential rain, the calendar tells me that autumn begins today. So I finished the journal, tying the summer in a bow.

I filled about half the 80 pages the last two weeks. In the rush of travel there may only be time to record names, dates, places, impressions. Digesting it all begins later. This time it began while I was waiting for the return flight. I wrote for hours, capturing moments I was afraid I’d forget: three Eurostar conductors on the platform frantically puffing their cigarettes after we reached Paris from Brussels. The flapping plaid flannel shirt of a cyclist who zoomed past me in Amsterdam. The translucent orange butterflies at the Botanical Gardens.

Words like ripe fruit that I process and freeze, preserved for the future. The words and the seasons were in sync for a while. Now summer is over, but the words remain.

Hummingbirds’ Farewell

Hummingbirds’ Farewell

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In 2024, September 19th was the last day we spotted hummingbirds at the feeder. But so far this morning I’ve seen no sign of the tiny birds. We had two days of rain, which may have chased them off, or maybe they were following that mysterious call that sends them from suburban backyards to tropical rainforests.

They fly hundreds of miles, winging their way south over the Gulf of Mexico to their winter home in Central America. The calories they consume will help them make that journey.

On Tuesday, before the rains came, a hummingbird left the feeder and hovered right in front of me. Birds have done this before, almost buzzed me. They seem to be checking me out — or maybe they’re thanking me and saying goodbye.

I answer them in a soft voice, as I do to the parakeets inside. “You’re welcome,” I say. “Please come again next year.”

Postcard Weather

Postcard Weather

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My trip to D.C. last Friday happened to be on one of those perfect late-summer afternoons. The mall was strangely empty — school’s in session, which has cut back on visitors — and those who work in the area must have taken off for a weekend at the beach.

I felt like I had the place to myself as I walked toward the Capitol, snapping a photo every few yards. I couldn’t help myself. Each view was better than the next.

This is the kind of day the postcard photographers should be out and about, I thought, before catching myself. Postcard photographers? Were there ever any? There can’t be many now given how few postcards are in circulation.

Meanwhile, I crossed Fourth, Third and First, the big white building coming into sharper focus. Snap, snap, snap. I soon had a dozen photos. Here are some of them.

House Fire

House Fire

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It happened a week ago, on an ordinary suburban Monday. No one knows exactly why yet, but there are theories: a leaky gas meter, an air conditioner clicking on, a spark that ignited a conflagration. The occupants escaped with their lives, but they lost most everything else.

I live in a neighborhood of two-story and split-level houses. This one was split-level, with a more open floor plan than most. It went quickly, despite the efforts of numerous trucks and firefighters. Neighbors say the smoke was visible miles away, and I still catch a whiff of acrid air from time to time.

The ruined house now stands sentinel on my neighborhood walks. Part of its brick front remains but the garage and rear are mostly gone. Stalactites of charred wood loom eerily from its interior. It’s a sad and bracing reminder of how quickly it can all disappear.

(Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Cinema Therapy

Cinema Therapy

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I believe in cinema therapy. I know it works because upon occasion a film, a single work of art, has pulled me out of the doldrums. Whenever I try to explain this, I use “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” as an example.

That movie made me happy for months. I started wearing gaucho pants after wearing it, for goodness sake. Those and the boots I paired with them made me feel open and free, not exactly an outlaw but not my timid self, either. For months, I tromped around in this renegade costume, and I felt the darkness lifting.

Robert Redford was a big part of the reason I loved that film. The scene where he and Paul Newman jump off a high cliff into a raging river always entertained. It seemed the epitome of gutsiness, of braving danger for a desired end. Never mind that they just had robbed the Union Pacific Railroad and were jumping to avoid arrest. They were the heroes. I was pulling for them.

Redford died today at age 89. Another star from my youth is gone. I try to recognize and appreciate young actors, but it’s hard to forget the heartthrobs of my youth. Rest in peace, Robert Redford.

(The cliff-jumping scene was shot near this rugged area of Colorado, north of Durango. Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

A Resolution

A Resolution

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Travel is limited, by definition. To optimize it, I make resolutions. Do I always follow them? Of course not. But I keep making them, just the same. This year, returning from an art-filled few weeks, I resolved to visit more museums. On Friday an opportunity presented itself, a meeting downtown. So I got myself moving earlier than planned so I could visit the National Gallery of Art.

It was the right thing to do. Right in so many ways. For one thing, it brought me off my European high horse. Do we have world-class art in the United States? Of course we do — and it’s time I started enjoying more of it. After all, I live in the D.C. suburbs, endure the D.C. traffic. Should I not enjoy the artistic treasures of our nation’s capital?

The visit was worth it most of all because of the paintings themselves. I hadn’t visited the National Gallery in years, thanks to the pandemic and the busyness of life. But from the moment I walked up the imposing stairs, I knew I was in for a treat.

There were Monets, Cezannes and Renoirs: the bridge at Giverny, the cathedral at Rouen. There were Gainsboroughs and Constables and Turners. There was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln by George Healy, who I’d just been reading about in The Greater Journey.

For a moment I thought I was back in Paris, turning my head sideways to take in every angle of a precious canvas or tapestry. But no, I was an hour away from my house. The precious canvas was close to home. It was, of course, a view of Paris.

(Boulevard des Italiens, Morning, Sunlight by Camille Pissarro)

“Home, Sweet Home”

“Home, Sweet Home”

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I’m glad to be home, to fall asleep in my own bed and wake up in familiar surroundings. But I wasn’t away long enough for homesickness to set in. This wasn’t true for the 19th-century traveler to Paris. In those days it took long and often torturous weeks at sea to reach the continent, so trips were longer.

As we traveled in France this summer I was reading David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, which is not about the “Hemingway generation” of expats but about an earlier group of Americans bound for the City of Light, beginning in the 1830s. For them, this was the trip of a lifetime, and it was not just for pleasure but for study. Writer James Fenimore Cooper, painter (and later inventor) Samuel Morse, educator Emma Willard and poet and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes.

These and other Americans thrived abroad, but they did get homesick. In fact, it was an American in Paris, John Howard Payne, who wrote the song “Home, Sweet Home.”

“Be it ever so humble,” he wrote, “there’s no place like home.”

(My last glimpse of France as our flight departed from Orly early Tuesday morning)

In Its Wake

In Its Wake

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For those of us alive on that day, time was split in half. There were the years that came before terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon — and those that came afterward.

We are a country surrounded by oceans, cosseted by space, a geographical feature I’m most aware of since our return from Europe the day before yesterday. Our cities were not bombed. We had no relatives forced to surrender or fight for the resistance. Our relative isolation gave us an air of invincibility that was punctured that early autumn Tuesday 24 years ago.

Since then, a generation has passed away and another has been born. The good bots at Google inform me that approximately 60 percent of the world’s population alive on September 11, 2001 is still alive today. Which means, of course, that approximately 40 percent is not. Those of us who remember scarcely outnumber those who do not.

I recall saying to my kids shortly afterward, “Life will never be the same.” For me, and for many, it hasn’t been. But for them — and even more so for those born after the terrorist attacks — the post 9/11 world is the world they inhabit. They live in its wake.

Out and Back Again

Out and Back Again

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As we closed in on Dulles Airport yesterday, I studied the interactive map on the screen in front of me. It’s fun to see the progress of the plane, though I found myself lingering over the map of Europe.

What I noticed most was the route taken by our Portuguese Airlines jet. Unlike many flights heading to or from the continent, which hug the Canadian coastline and cross the ocean at a narrower point, our flight struck out boldly across the Atlantic.

We were flying through Lisbon, so that was part of it. And I’m sure that the weather, air traffic, jet stream and other variables were factors. But it also seemed in keeping with the Portuguese, who were some of the first to venture forth into the Atlantic centuries ago. And it matched my go-for-it mood.

It’s invigorating to venture out into the world, to find one’s way out and back again. To find the correct train platform when it’s announced over a staticky intercom in a foreign tongue. To roll with the inevitable delays. It’s a bit like flying over the fathomless depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

(The North Atlantic, viewed from the Portuguese island of Madeira.)