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Author: Anne Cassidy

Gift from the Sea

Gift from the Sea

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I spent the early morning hours (the fruits of insomnia) copying out passages from a book that must go back to the library today. It’s a posthumous collection of the letters and diaries of Anne Morrow Lindbergh called Against Wind and Tide.

I read the book before I went to the beach, and I was delighted to find in it the seeds of her Gift from the Sea, a favorite of mine that Against Wind and Tide prompted me to re-read. How illuminating to come across her original thoughts — thoughts she would later hone into the book that sold three million copies — on solitude, relationships and what it means to be a woman and a writer.

On that topic,  Lindbergh quotes a nineteenth-century writer who says that a woman writer is “rowing against wind and tide” — hence the title of this collection.

As I push against a steady current of my own, I’m happy to row for a few moments with Lindbergh’s words, words like these: “I feel a hunger now — a real hunger  — for letting the pool still itself and seeing the reflections. I feel a hunger for the kind of writing that I feel is truly mine: observation plus reflection.”

There were many passages like this one. My fingers are sore from typing them. But my mind is dancing with thoughts and images.

Tiny Hopeful Garden

Tiny Hopeful Garden

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I pass it on the way to work sometime. A dingy little corner at 2nd and D. It’s on the northeast side, next to the homeless shelter and across the street from the tunnel. There’s no more than five or six feet of soil between the sidewalk and the building.

Earlier this season I noticed a few green shoots. Not weeds exactly.  They were more intentional.

As the weeks wore on, I watched the plants grow up and out, the stems thicken , small yellow flowers form. Throughout the hot, dusty summer, they stayed alive. Not flourishing exactly, but not dying, either.

Today I walked past them. The flowers are turning to fruit, curved and healthy. I’m no master gardener, but I think we have a pumpkin patch here. A spot of color in a block of gray. A tiny hopeful garden.

Weighty Toil

Weighty Toil

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It’s harvest time — in more ways than one. In the last few weeks the magazine, brochures and booklets I worked on this summer have been delivered to the office.  I’ve been busy with what we used to call “fulfillment.” Which is another way of saying I’ve been schlepping boxes around.

As print publications are replaced by electronic ones, I assemble evidence to defend the hard copy. But I have to laugh. Even as I tally the numbers and build my case, nothing on paper tells the story as well as handing someone a box of magazines and asking him to hold it for a minute. A box of magazines weighs 30 pounds. It is real. It is tangible. There is no way to overlook it.

Once our lives were filled with real tasks. Toting water, splitting wood, wringing clothes.  For many of us now, a day’s work consists of tapping a keyboard or touching a screen. We’re active only from the wrist down. I liked carrying those 30-pound magazine boxes. It was the least I could do for them.  My mind’s labor had helped to produce them. Now it was time for my arms and legs to take charge.

Would I want to do this all day long? Absolutely not. When the arms are carrying 30 pounds the mind can think of little else. Still, I enjoyed this weighty toil. It made me tired in the evening, and it gave me something to think about.

Photo: bestcardboardboxes.com

Fair Weather Crossing

Fair Weather Crossing

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There are several of these along the length of the Cross County Trail, raised concrete cylinders across the width of a stream. The bold strider takes them easily, one foot to a step. The timid one (that would be me) navigates the creek with a mincing two-step.

I think of these pillars as fabricated steppingstones. No hollow log or moss-slicked surface to send one sliding. The suburban safety net is in place here. Nothing really difficult or bold will be asked of us. We will be killed with — if not kindness (because “kind” is not an adjective that comes to mind when describing this part of the world) — then with inordinate padding.

The irony is that I successfully crossed the creek only to stumble half a mile later. It was nothing but a root that tripped the tip of my toe as I fast-walked the packed-dirt trail. But it was enough to send me careening in what I can only imagine was a cartoon-like near-fall. Somehow, I caught myself, my arms flapping beside me like the wings of an errant glider.

Fair weather crossings are a good start; what we need next are cushioned paths.

150 Years Ago

150 Years Ago

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I went there once, a hurried pilgrim on my way home. Time to stop but not reflect. I vow to go there again, to walk the fields in silence, to meditate upon this number — 23,000 — the tally of soldiers killed or missing during the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862.

It was the single greatest one-day loss of American life. It happened less than two hours from here.

The landscape now is serene. It’s up to us to imagine the horror.


Burnside Bridge on September 1862 (photo by Alexander Gardner, courtesy Library of Congress) and in 2008.

Three Continents

Three Continents

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Yesterday, I went to a neighborhood party where I gratefully picked out familiar faces from a sea of new, mostly young, ones. Kids were everywhere, on the swings, the slide and right beside the birthday girl, as she blew out the candles on her cake.

What struck me most is how alike these young people looked. They were all so, well, little.

How quickly we forget. How quickly the days of naps and tantrums give way to graduations and goodbyes. How quickly the tangible family, the family right here in the same house bickering and hugging and being mightily present to each other, gives way to what one might call a family of the air, one connected by texts and phone calls; a family spread around the country and — in our case right now — the globe. (With Tom in Serbia on a business trip, we are on three continents.)

But here’s the amazing part — it only makes us closer.  Three continents, one family. It’s a funny equation, but it adds up.

Shells

Shells

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“Do we have a shell I could take to school for my photography class?” Celia asked this morning.

Shells? Do we have shells?

We have them from Topsail in 1996, Oregon in 1999, Clearwater in 2004, Chincoteague in 1997, 2003, 2008, 2011 and, from this year, shells still in the plastic bag I hurriedly stuffed them in two weeks ago. I stuck the bag in the garage and forgot about it until this morning.

I opened the bag, and there they were again: shark eyes, whelks, jingles, clams, cockles and half an angel shell.

I remember the long walk on the beach the afternoon I found most of them, the ridges and hills where the sand wasn’t graded, trudging and trudging until I couldn’t see another soul and finally, finally coming to the end.

The vacation has been over for two weeks. The shells — and the memory of that walk — remain.

Photo: InsideFlorida.com

Foreign Soil

Foreign Soil

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Tomorrow, Suzanne will be sworn in as a Peace Corps volunteer. Her two-and-a-half-month training program is over. She has improved her French and begun Bariba. She’s taught students at a model school and learned that when Beninese children want to get their teacher’s attention, they snap their fingers and say, “Madame! Madame!” The day after tomorrow she begins the two-day trip to the village in the northern part of the country where she’ll spend much of the next two years.

As she leaves behind the seacoast, the airport and other easy forms of egress, I worry about her more. But I trust that her training has been true and useful — and that she will temper her kindness with common sense.

I think of these things even more after the killing of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. Although there have certainly been enough world events to convince me otherwise (especially the Iran hostage crisis), I persist in thinking of embassies and consulates as safe havens, as foreign soil, our soil, in the host countries.

Now that feeling of safety and ease has been violated. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let these feelings get the better of me. Ambassador Stevens was a former Peace Corps volunteer. He wasn’t afraid of “rough” travel, of arriving in Libya (then still in the throes of revolution) on a cargo ship. I still believe in the “peace” in Peace Corps.

But world events are making that harder to do.

Pink Cloud

Pink Cloud

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Sunsets are earlier these days. What would have been a late-afternoon amble a few weeks ago is now an early-evening stroll.

Yesterday was like that. The air thinning and without the moisture that has become a second skin. The sun already down though still plenty of light for walking.

I found a beacon for my trek, a solitary pink cloud. I followed it from one end of the neighborhood to the other. It was a cheerful presence, a spot of color in a darkening world.

That Other Tuesday

That Other Tuesday

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It’s not just the date that’s the same; it’s the weather. Just a bit cooler, but with all the promise of a warm, low-humidity day.

And it’s the day of the week, too.  September 11, 2011, was also a Tuesday.

If each day of the week has a unique flavor, a character of its own, Tuesday is when the weekly routine has begun to buoy us up again.  We’ve made it through Monday. We can do another day; yes, we can. And if so, then we can even make it through the week.

And so we plunge ahead with renewed dedication. (Or at least that’s the ideal.)

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was not such a day.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012, will not be, either.