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Author: Anne Cassidy

Distraction

Distraction

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As our part of earth tilts farther from the sun, as days shorten and gray, as night swallows our lives  — there’s a good chance we won’t notice.

We’re too distracted standing in line at the post office, searching for ornaments in the dank storage area of the basement, finding if not the perfect tree then at least one with flaws that can be successfully hidden by strategic placement in the corner.

Did the ancients have this idea when they celebrated solstice or whatever holiday we purloined for Christmas? Were these feasts only to appease the gods or shout hooray? Or were our ancestors saying to themselves, yeah, looks like the world’s gonna end any day now, but I have this goat to slaughter and these wild herbs, they might freshen it up a bit, and it seems a shame to let it go to waste…

Because distraction, I think, is one of the surest bets of all. Distraction itself is worth celebrating.

Joy!

Joy!

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Six years ago we surprised Claire with a dog from the pound. He was a funny looking animal, advertised as a border collie basset hound mix — but there must be at least half a dozen (unadvertised!) breeds in his pedigree.

Claire had been begging for a dog for months and we had held off, but two days after we learned she’d have to wear a back brace for scoliosis, we adopted Copper.

Early signs were not auspicious.  He ate underwear, socks and eye medicine. He bit people. He ran away on numerous occasions, including the first time we tried to get him out of the car.

But there was always something about him, something ragged and rambunctious and loving, that gave us hope. He was — and still is — the embodiment of joy. A reminder that happiness doesn’t always fall into our laps; that we have to search for it, allow ourselves to be disrupted for it, even sometimes pretend we have it when we don’t.  Pretend long enough, though, and it begins to feel like we do.

Photo: Claire Capehart

Postscript

Postscript

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I don’t usually write postscripts, but today calls for one. I wrote yesterday’s entry hours before the tragic school shooting in Connecticut. It was a post about guns — not a topic I usually cover.

And now this.

There is everything to say, and there is nothing to say.

Could the tears shed over mass shootings fill an ocean?

I think maybe they could.

Shopping After Dark

Shopping After Dark

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I do most of my shopping in a two- to three-week period in December — not a perfect system, but it works. In order to buy lots of gifts in such a short time, however, I’ve had to head out after dinner — when I’d typically be curling up with a book or a movie — onto the cold, dark highways of suburbia, pulling in and out of massive parking lots, threading my way past holiday displays and shelves of sweaters in search of the right gift for each person on the list.

The other night, looking in vain for help in a large sporting goods store (what is a lure? and how do you tell one from the other?) I found myself in the one section of the establishment that was bustling, the one section where you could find clerks. That would be the gun department.

Don’t think I’ve ever seen so many guns in one place before. There were camo models and long sleek menacing ones and short, stubby almost cute ones. People were milling around cases, speaking animatedly to staff, pawing through boxes of ammunition.

I told myself that guns must be a big seller around the holidays, that these guns are for hunters. Put out of my mind the frightening alternatives.

Still, it was hard to forget that in this entire cavernous store the only place where there was life and activity and conversation, the only place that was lively … was where the guns were sold.

Hawks in Flight

Hawks in Flight

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It’s a matter of perspective, I tell myself. Of angle and scale. I see the birds, their outline against the  sky, their large size and hulking shape not robin or jay-like. Their stillness predatory, dangerous. Must be hawks. Hawks in trees.

Three times in the last week I’ve seen them — twice in the suburbs, once in the city. Are there more of them or am I simply spotting them more often? Are they desperate for food this time of year?

I read a little about them, their exceptional vision, their annual migration patterns, their behavior — more peaceful than you would think (when you rule out what they must do to eat!).  Though I’m seeing them in trees, I’m imagining them in flight, seeking, soaring, alone among the clouds.

Allaboutbirds.org

Cloudscape

Cloudscape

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Yesterday on Metro, uncharacteristically bookless, I stare at the scenery passing by. The clouds were winter ones, thin, remote. So different from the fat summer cumulus. They reminded me of whitened  animal bones.

The light almost gone, me half asleep, wishing myself home in time to catch a walk in the brief dusk.

But before Vienna, a bonus — the sun, sinking fast, lights up the clouds, turns dross into gold.

Candles in the Darkness

Candles in the Darkness

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Some houses have candles in their windows. Others, tasteful white twinkle lights around trees limbs and branches. There are spotlit doors with wreaths. And there are icicle lights, easiest to install if you have a slight overhang, which we do not.

A few years ago people started putting not just one large wreath on the front door, but smaller wreaths on every front-facing window, a holiday-decorating escalation that seems like it would be overkill but can look surprisingly nice when glimpsed from afar.

The house behind us drips in icicle lights and spotlit trees, and the house behind that features a snowman and reindeer and strings of lights shining from tree to tree, giving the place a fiesta feel.

Our own house has colored lights along the roof line, around the door, across the shrubbery and up the lamp post. The window candles are missing in action but should be up soon.

We are, in short, decked out for the season. At least we are until I plug in my hair dryer and blow the fuses (which has been happening far too often lately). But except for these black-outs, our house and the others in Folkstone have become what we need most right now: candles in the darkness.  

Photo of Bull Run Lights Festival: Virginia.org

Eggnog and Other Matters

Eggnog and Other Matters

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Discussing seasonality with a Millennial:

“Why can’t you buy eggnog year round?”

“Because it’s a holiday thing.”

“But if you like it so much, why not drink it all year?”

Because life is not about the words but the space around them. Because music is not about the sound but the silence, too. Because eggnog tastes better when you sip it only a few weeks a year.

The lesson is lost, though. This is a generation raised on winter strawberries and music you download instantly and sometimes for free from the Internet. They do not save dimes and quarters and trudge up to Wheeler’s Drugstore to buy a single.

For them, there is no time between action and reaction. They don’t yet realize that can be the sweetest time of all.

Night Sky

Night Sky

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I try to keep luddite posts to a minimum, but the new phone is making this difficult. To begin with, I’m intimidated by the thing. When I do slide it out of its special pocket in my purse, I hold it like a Ming dynasty vase. This is making it difficult to familiarize myself with its amazing features.

My children are horrified that I continue to use it like a 2005 flip phone: “Have you tried the GPS yet?” … “Have you bought any apps?” … “You don’t have any contacts, Mom.”

Well, that’s not entirely true. For some reason I have the email address of a high school counselor from 2009 but no numbers for people I actually need to reach.

And then there’s the way that the phone completes my words and sentences. I’m a writer; I’d rather do this myself.

But there is hope. Last night a satisfied user I met at a party told me what made him buy his iPhone — an app called Night Sky. “The phone knows where you are and it shows you all the constellations and their names,” he said.

Then he whipped out his iPhone — and the roof flew away and the people, too. And it reminded me of once when Tom and I were driving in Wyoming late at night and stopped to put oil in the car and looked up, almost accidentally, and could not believe our eyes.

A phone that brings the heavens into view. I’ll buy that.

Blue Marble

Blue Marble

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It’s the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 17 astronauts’ famous photo of earth from space, the  Writer’s Almanac tells me. It was the first time our planet was photographed whole and entire, its mountains and deserts and oceans in clear relief. Clouds like tufts of baby’s hair after a bath, when you comb it, still wet, into ridges and whorls.

It is a snapshot in time — a cyclone forms over the Indian Ocean — but so much more. It is our own precious, fragile earth. And it was the last time humans would be in a position to photograph it. (Robots were in charge of subsequent lunar missions.)

Just coincidentally, the Writer’s Almanac informs me that today is also the birthday of writer Willa Cather, who said, “We come and go but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.”

When we see our planet from space, how can we not love it more?  Not just our own corner of it, but all of it. How can we not want to do everything we can to protect it?

Photo: NASA