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Author: Anne Cassidy

After the Rain

After the Rain

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I could tell the difference before I reached the first dip in the road. A day earlier I had misjudged, found myself trudging through rain, my socks damp, my hair wet. But yesterday, I stepped into a drenched clean world.

On my way, an empty mail truck. An early lunch for the carrier? We on his leeward side were still waiting, but those whose letters had arrived were slowly shuffling to their mailboxes, sweaters pulled tight, suspicious glances at the sky.

In the new section of the neighborhood a worker swept the wet street in front of a construction site. He seemed only to be moving mud, but he greeted me cheerily.

Down at the corner the cars zoomed by, as they always do, and the dying sycamore dropped its leaves. The rain came too late for that poor tree. And the big white house that was abandoned for so long, it still looked abandoned, even though someone seems to be living in the place. So a good soaking doesn’t solve everything, but it did put a spring in my step.

On the way home, I waved at the cars I passed. People do that here.

Moonset

Moonset

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On my drive west Saturday I followed the moon as it slid slowly toward the horizon. It was a beacon for the early hours of my trip, the ones I struggle with most because it’s dark and I’m tired and the steaming mug of tea has cooled and there are hours to go before I enter the Bluegrass state.

But the moon was dramatic in its slantwise trip, thanks to its full state and to the banks of clouds that colored in its wake. It seemed even larger as it reached the horizon. Big and glorious and sun-like in its setting. A full moon can mimic the sun much better than a half or a crescent.

I realized, though, as I admired the moonset, how sun-centric I am, how I compare the satellite unfairly with the star.  The moon has its own motions and missions and poetry.

I missed the moonset’s final moments, because by then I was driving south through the Shenandoah Valley and the western sky was hidden from view.  But it was there when I needed it most.

(A partial-moon moonset viewed from our house.)

The Concert

The Concert

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The tickets were a gift, generous and unbidden, and so the concert was, too. It had been a while since I sat in a hall while music poured over me, and I had forgotten how exciting it can be. Even the preliminaries: A rush to find parking in the limpid early evening, a parade of evening-dressed concertgoers entering the hall, taking a seat quickly before the lights dimmed.

The featured performer was Itzhak Perlman, and Lexington audiences are not used to having him around. The applause was loud and sustained — even before he began to play. But then — ahh — he did, and there was that familiar, charged concert stillness, and the violin singing out over it, taking us along.

 Perlman hunched over this violin, seemingly at one with it, and when he finished the opening section of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, he used the fingers of his right hand, slightly cupped, to gesture “come here, come here,” to the first violin section, asking them for more, for a swell of sound to answer his lone voice. And they responded, this student orchestra that was most definitely not the New York or Vienna Philharmonic but which, last night, must have felt, just for a moment, like it was.

When the last notes sounded, the audience jumped to its feet.

30 Days

30 Days

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And so we come to the end of September. Evenings are chilly; birds are still. The equinox has come and gone. Warmth is no longer something to be feared but something to be coaxed and welcomed. We start at brisk and work our way to warm. Only at the end of a golden, blue-sky afternoon are we there: a perfect, spun-gold, fall day.

Thirty days hath September.

Is there no way to wrangle a few more?

Vote of Confidence

Vote of Confidence

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It’s no secret that the printed book is under siege, that newspapers and magazines are ceasing publication or becoming online only, that information delivery is being revolutionized before our (increasingly blurry) eyes. Any doubts the Kindle may have left behind, the iPad is dispelling.

Which made reading the following all the more delightful: “The book is like the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be bettered,” according to author Umberto Eco in a new book about the book called (appropriately and straightforwardly) This is Not the End of the Book.

The book, which was reviewed today by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, is essentially a conversation between Eco and French screenwriter and bibliophile Jean-Claude Carriere. The Internet gives us “gross information, with almost no sense of order or hierarchy,” Carriere says. “As soon as you click on the next page you forget what you’ve just read,” Eco says.

And I thought it was just me. I flipped through Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending the other day and could summon almost no memory of reading it, despite the fact that I definitely did read it earlier this year — though, it must be noted, on a Kindle.

I’ve written about this before, and probably will again (and again and again). But reading this review (and, I hope soon, the book itself) made me feel less alone in my Luddite ways. Maybe the codex isn’t really in danger. Maybe the book really will survive. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Slow Start

Slow Start

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Sometimes the day starts slow and and will not move faster. Time to enjoy the many small steps that take me down a city block, the rising sun that reddens office windows, the man who walks ahead of me, a picture of the bureaucrat, black pants, blue long-sleeved shirt, the closure of a lanyard peaking out from his back collar.

On a slow day I savor details I might otherwise miss. The freedom of the lone cyclist pedaling one of the new red bikes you can rent and ride. The swagger of a young woman who has mastered the art of scarf wearing. The caffeinated chatter of a couple leaving Starbucks. The quiet diligence of the man hosing the sidewalk in front of the building next to mine.

The pavement smells fresh after this cleaning.

It’s a new day.

What I did not see on my walk this morning.

On the Beaten Path

On the Beaten Path

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It’s my second post in as many days with cliches (or slight alterations of them) for titles, as I pause for a moment to praise the beaten path. Not being off it — being on it. This year, this dry summer, the paths in our woods are especially beaten. Tough, cracked; not dusty but springy and elastic (thanks, I suppose, to the clay in our soil).

Since I’ve lately been exploring unfamiliar trails with my head down to look for the errant root that could send me flying, I’ve become familiar with the beaten path, have even reached down to touch it. The surface is smooth and clammy and imperturbable, like marble in its coolness. But unlike marble, it is a living, breathing thing. It shrinks, expands and cracks. When the weather is dry it becomes a dusty brown powder.

Traipsing these beaten paths makes me wonder what it was like when they (or slightly wider versions of them) were roads. Of course, they would have lacked the layered toughness and impermeability of a paved surface, would have been a mire of mud on rainy days and a cloud of dust on dry ones, but one can see that, at least part of the time, they would hold up their end of the bargain. That one would want to be on them. That to be off them was to be lost in the wilderness.

Glaring Error

Glaring Error

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A momentary meditation on glare, on slanting sun and how it blinds us not with darkness but with light. Too much of a good thing, then, or a good thing misdirected. Put this light behind us and we have tall shadows, a crisp sense of possibility.

Shine it in our face, though, and everything else fades away, the colors in the sky, the outlines of the buildings; even the stoplights hide their true colors. Ironic and telling, this inability to see what’s right in front of us. It’s easy to draw parallels.

Most of my walk is due east, but finally, at the end, I turn north. I’m relieved. It’s colder without the sun, but now I can see.

Valedictory Frame of Mind

Valedictory Frame of Mind

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I hadn’t meant to wind up at the girls’ elementary school, but that’s where our walk took us. Copper and I had crossed Fox Mill Road, taken a dirt path down to the creek, tiptoed over the spillway (thanks to the low water), trotted down what seems to be an old road along the stream and then trudged up a steep path along a ridge line and (pant, pant — that would be both Copper and me) arrived at the school grounds.

Even though we live less than two miles from the place, it’s tucked away on county parkland and I hadn’t been there in months, maybe years. Only a few days earlier I had gone to my last back-to-school night ever, what was probably my 36th, give or take a few (three children times 12 years), so seeing the old school so soon after that event put me in a valedictory frame of mind.

I kept seeing ghosts of the girls’ former selves, the field days and plant sales in the big field to the east of the school; the playground on that side, too, where we used to come on still summer afternoons (before most of the equipment was deemed unsafe and replaced with boring, innocuous stuff), the mornings when we’d walk to school or I’d drop the girls off at the kiss-and-ride lane.

How big the place once seemed, how imposing. It was a first foray into the real world for them, and such a gentle, loving entry into that world. Almost a decade of dealing with the high school (with its thousands of students and a sign-in process that seems modeled on that of a maximum-security prison) have made me forget what school was like when it was close and comfortable and small-scale.

I miss those years. But I wouldn’t want to live them again.

A much older, smaller (one-room) schoolhouse in our neighborhood.

Autumnal Equinox

Autumnal Equinox

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I checked my email and learned from the Writers Almanac that the autumnal equinox occurs today at 10:49 a.m.  — only to glance at my computer clock and see … 10:49 a.m.

We are perfectly poised now between sunlight and shadow, between darkness and light, our days and nights equal halves of the same whole, like the beginning and end of a beloved book, each part integral to what we love, ultimately, for its completeness.

I write outside, a brisk wind blowing. As I type, a single leaf floats down and lands on my keyboard.