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Author: Anne Cassidy

Lost and Found

Lost and Found

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I thought I knew the way, so I headed out with no map, no directions, no GPS and no phone.

The first part was easy. Down Lawyers into Vienna. I knew that much for sure.

But when I turned into the neighborhood it was dark and alien. I recognized the median but not the turnoff. I drove slowly down the suburban lanes, turning every time I thought I’d found the road. But nothing looked familiar.

I realized then that I had never arrived at this house in darkness, only in daylight. In the light, the houses were large, solid, knowable. In the darkness they were too close to discern differences. More cars were parked on the street than I recalled. I drove so slowly I could have been walking, peering into windows with one eye while keeping the other on the road.

At one point I found myself retracing last Saturday’s local history tour. And then I laughed out loud. I can’t find my friend’s house but I can locate the site of an 1862 Civil War encampment.

It was then that I turned toward home. This time I knew the way: right on Lawyers, left on Steeplechase, left on Fox Mill.

When I pulled into our driveway, the porch lights were glowing a warm welcome. My heart leaped at the sight. I parked the car and walked inside.

Morning After

Morning After

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Amid yesterday’s electoral busyness and drama came word came of a high school classmate’s death. He was a wild man and a lover of life who lost his own life far too soon. Hearing this sad news from my hometown put everything else in perspective.

Not just the brevity of it all or even the wonder of it all but the preciousness of each individual person. Each one a world apart, each with aspirations and aggravations that we, on the outside, can never know. As we emerge from the collective that is an election season, when people are numbers, weights on a swing state scale, we return to what really matters — the individual.

This is the morning after, the day we cheer or sigh. But tomorrow is a new day, and like every new day, composed of the individual actions of individual people.

Election Day

Election Day

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I drove to work today, and as I crossed the Potomac the familiar landmarks loomed solid and significant in the wan winter light. Driving past the White House and the Capitol, I thought about the people who aspire to live and work in those places, people I’ll vote for today.

It does feel momentous, this election. Perhaps because we live in a battleground state and our phone rings half a dozen times or more a day. Perhaps because positions seem to be ossified — the fact that we had our first hard freeze last night, is that a metaphor?

Or perhaps because these polarized times make clear a truth we sometimes forget: that every vote really does make a difference.

(Photo: DClikealocal.com)

Resignation

Resignation

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The first day of winter is still weeks away, but this feels like the real thing: Cold and light earlier than usual, the low temps not part of the night but part of the day. Just so there can be no mistaking.

I notice the silence. The robins and jays have left us; the juncos have not yet arrived.

The shutters are closed, but I spy through cracks the flicker of branch stir outside, as a brisk breeze sets treed leaves a trembling.

Here in this quiet hour, clocks ticking again on standard time, I think, resignation is much like this — to crave long days and fireflies, yet know even in my longing that this is what must be.

History Lesson

History Lesson

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“Do you want to hold it?” asked Jim Lewis, our tour guide. “You might need both hands.”

And with that he passed me a 12-pound cannonball that, yes, was easier to hold with two hands than with one.

Lewis is a member of the Hunter Mill Defense League, which sounds like some sort of retro radical 60s organization but is actually a group of citizens formed to protect and defend the lovely, historic and oft-threatened (by development and widening) Hunter Mill Road.

Lewis and colleagues have bushwacked their way through the rolling hills of western Fairfax County, discovering old road beds, abandoned millraces and confederate earthworks, cannonballs and former camp sites. Now they’re sharing their knowledge through lectures, booklets and the occasional tour.

Yesterday’s four-hour jaunt delivered more information and ideas than I could possibly capture in a single post.  Like the cannonball, it was a lot to handle. It gave me a plethora of ways to see this land I live in. A place of history and of depth. 



(Jim Lewis and cannonball near the Confederate earthworks he found in the woods behind his backyard.)

Bucophilia

Bucophilia

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It’s still dark at 7 a.m., a cold inky blackness that does not invite exploration.  Leafless trees, downed branches littering the yard, a sky just light enough to promise hope.

It is a season that calls for poetry (as if all seasons didn’t). So I return from the library my arms full of Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Maxine Kumin.

This morning, Kumin makes me smile:

Bucophilia, I call it —
nostalgia over a pastoral vista —
where for all I know the farmer
who owns it or rents it just told his
wife he’d kill her if she left him, and
she did and he did and now here come
the auctioneers, the serious bidders
and an ant-train of gawking onlookers.

Bucophilia — it’s a word I’ll take into the day.

Under Water

Under Water

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When constructing my fantasy life I often get hung up on location. The suburbs are out, and a pied-a-terre is a given (after all, I still have to earn a living); the confusion comes with the country retreat. A cabin in the mountains? A cottage on the shore?

After Sandy, the answer is clearer. After Sandy, the mountains are starting to look pretty good. After Sandy, I wonder: What happens when the places I love are under water?

There’s Venice. But of course with Venice it has always been part of that city’s doomed charm.

And there’s Chincoteague. As the wind and rain pounded us Monday I thought of my time there this summer, the stillness of the refuge, the beach that goes on forever. Does it still? 

And now there’s New York City, too. Sea water coursing through subway tunnels, lapping at the steps of the Stock Exchange. Apocalyptic visions.

People perish; place endures. Or at least it used to. I’m not so sure anymore.

(Lower Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge.)

“Realms of Gold”

“Realms of Gold”

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Today is Halloween and the birthday of the English poet John Keats, who described autumn as a “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness.”

After two stormy days that were much closer to Percy Shelley’s depiction of the season —”O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being” — I slip back into Keats’s quiet vision. Autumn as a time of reflection and poetry, of observation and even of revelation.

Here is my favorite Keats poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
  Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told          5
  That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne:
  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
  When a new planet swims into his ken;   10
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
  He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Post Sandy

Post Sandy

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Sandy walloped us yesterday, but far fewer trees came down than expected and with new siding and windows we spent the day in relative silence. The battering and banging we used to hear during storms giving way to a muted roar as 50- to 60-mile-an-hour winds gusted outside.

Inside: a pot of chili, a stack of books and, more to the point, electricity.

Today, as the storm continues to send rain, snow and high winds our way, my thoughts head north, to New York, New Jersey and other Sandy-ravaged areas.



(It’s hard to imagine Times Square empty, but last night it was.)

Time Unbundled

Time Unbundled

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It’s still early in our encounter with the monster storm, but so far it’s no more than a lot of rain and strengthening wind. I expect it will grow worse with the day. To look at a graph of local wind speeds is to see a mountain we’re only just beginning to climb.

But for now it’s a silent morning — or as silent a morning as one can have with two parakeets in the kitchen. Of the noises I must attend to there are none. The pantry is stocked; the batteries are charged.

School is out (including the one where I work), and the government is closed. I’m alone with the dog and a good book. I have no place to go, nothing I must do. This is what I’ve been wanting and needing — time unbundled and unbound.