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Author: Anne Cassidy

Happy Anniversary!

Happy Anniversary!

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What started 60 years ago was not just a marriage; it was a family, a way of life. It was jumping in an old Chevy and driving across the country. Finally running away to California to start all over again — then realizing that Kentucky was where they wanted to be all along.

Mom and Dad married on May 24, 1952. Another of countless post-war weddings. A few years after the war, of course, but the soldier had to get his degree and start his career. And so the marriage began, and it has endured.

The family that flowed from that union has never felt like any other family. (Does any family, ever?) There were the businesses, the magazines, the museum, the houses with garages full of boxes that would become family rooms (but never did). There were the four children and the trips across the country in station wagons. Look at this country, they told us kids, see how big it is. There has always been a certain jauntiness, a sense that you didn’t have to be what circumstances dictated. Dreaming was encouraged. Escape was required.

So today we celebrate this union, these people, still here, still dreaming and planning. How lucky I am to have them as parents.  Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad!

Question and Answer

Question and Answer

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“What do you want for your birthday?” my daughters ask me.

“Family harmony,” I say, “world peace.”

I don’t say “what we have right now.” What we have sitting around this table, eating dinner at 10 o’clock. (Sometimes it takes that long to get everyone together.)

Give me a month of these conversations, of talking about what color to paint the kitchen and how much our floors creak. Of how much we love San Francisco and what our neighbors will think of our new siding. Of gun control and abortion. Of where we want to live when we grow up … or retire.

And, just to be really greedy, bottle these voices for me. These voices I could pick out of a billion, they are so clear to me, and so dear.

That’s what I’d like for my birthday.

And you say I’m hard to shop for.

Honeysuckle Season

Honeysuckle Season

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It isn’t just the flowers and new leaves that make May my favorite month, the azealas and the iris. It’s the perfumed air. Take a walk in our neighborhood now and you would have to be suffering from a severe head cold or sinus infection to miss the olfactory assault.

The air is literally perfumed. Stroll past the honeysuckle. Deconstruct that scent. For me, it is cool mornings along a Fayette County Lane, out early to pick strawberries. It is a roll-on perfume by Avon that I wore in high school, came in a little tube like Chap-Stick. I thought it marked me as a “natural girl.” No Shalimar for me!

Honeysuckle drapes itself over hedges and fence rows. It is an elegant, lithesome plant, willing to grow just about anywhere.  Which is good news for us. Because that means we can smell it on walks through woods or along suburban lanes.

Last night I picked a sprig and bought it home. Now it sits beside the kitchen window. Bringing the outside in.

Photo: GardenLovetoKnow.com

Birds Take Flight

Birds Take Flight

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“Every day,  I walked. It was not a meditation, but survival, one foot in front of the other, with my eyes focused down, trying to stay steady.”

This is from Terry Tempest Williams’ new book When Women Were Birds. A few pages later, Williams writes: “I am a writer about place who is never home.”

I link these two passages. The walking and the writing about place.  Each essential to the other. One to prime the pump, the other to fill the jug with cold, clean water.

So where do the birds come in? Williams meets her husband at a bookstore, as he’s buying a bird guide. Williams finds her voice through a special teacher who reads to her about the winter owl. A peregrine falcon once slit the corner of Williams’ eye. Another time, Williams sees a painted bunting that arrived in a wintry Maine on the cusp of a fierce winter storm.

“When dawn struck his tiny feathered back, he ignited like a flame: red, blue and green. … I have not dreamed of white birds since.”

When I finished Williams’ book I flipped through the pages with my thumb — and saw the birds that illustrate the outer edge of each page fly back and forth as if alive.

Birds take flight. So do words.

48 Hours

48 Hours

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To return home is to find your way back when you didn’t know you were gone. To return home is to see what happens when you weren’t looking.

What happens when you don’t know where home is?

That’s why I pay attention to the feelings that accompany arrival.

I’m in Kentucky for 48 hours. It isn’t long enough.

Long Evenings

Long Evenings

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After dinner, almost dark — I work in a quick walk around the neighborhood. The sounds of the day mingle with those of the night. I hear a catbird settling in a maple tree, and, at the same moment, a chorus of crickets from a hedge beside the road.

The peepers are gone now but tree frogs are already serenading us. Wind chimes and soft music waft across the street from our neighbors with a front porch.

In a few weeks the pool will be open and the sun setting even later. Long evenings soothe and invigorate. We can live without them — don’t we prove it every winter? — but it was hard last night to imagine how we do.

Unfamiliar Route

Unfamiliar Route

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Sometimes I take the long way to the office. I go straight after leaving Metro instead of turning left. I walk alongside one of the largest homeless shelters in the city and past a wall of cars exiting a tunnel. There’s a building under renovation, and I have to scamper across the street to avoid the construction.

This route takes a little longer. I can’t do it on auto-pilot. But there is a bustle and an energy to it that isn’t present on my regular path.

Does the allure of this walk come from its unfamiliarity? Or is it the nature of the scenery itself — closer to the train station than the sunken highway — that’s responsible? I’m not sure. But it’s worth the extra steps to ponder the answer.

May Showers

May Showers

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We woke to a green world this morning. Days of rain have freshened our lawn and trees, have sprouted weeds, have scrubbed the air clean of pollen and delivered back to us a pristine place we have to look twice to recognize.

What to make of this sodden, soggy terrain? It is no trouble for us, with our paved roads and our close-and-lock windows. With our non-leaking roofs. We are free to muse on the weather rather than fight it. Though there have been torrents in the past, flooded roads and parking lots, wet basements and water damage — these were not our fate this time around.

It was hard not to appreciate this rain, even the thunderstorm last evening that topped it off.  I can hear the flip of wings as birds bathe in green springs that will be gone by noon.

April was short on showers. May is making up for them.

Heeeere’s Johnny!

Heeeere’s Johnny!

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I stayed up late last night watching Johnny Carson. Tom and I laughed in front of the set as my parents had so many years ago. I remember hearing them from my little bedroom upstairs. Dad would pop popcorn and open a Pepsi; the Tonight Show was a grownup party I wasn’t invited to.

But there would be plenty of time to watch Carson — when I was in high school; during college summers, when I came in from my 3-11 p.m. waitress shift; when I was single and living on my own; and (less so) after I married and had kids. Johnny’s last show was in 1992. Our middle daughter was not quite one; our oldest was three. I slept whenever I had a chance — including through the last Tonight Show. This is something I’ve been sorry about through the years, so when I heard there would be a documentary about Carson on last night, I made a point to tune in.

There they all were — Ed McMahon, Doc Severensin, Johnny in his natty suits  — all of them young, so young. There was Johnny bursting through the curtain, fiddling with his tie, swinging his imaginary golf club. There he was running from a baby cheetah and jumping into Ed’s arms, wearing a turban as Carmak, deadpanning after a guest’s wacky comment, saying things he would surely be called sexist for now. Johnny worked a flubbed joke better than anyone in the business.

It seemed like most everyone watched Carson, liberal and conservative, gay and straight.  Carson has been off the air for 20 years — and the world has become a more brittle, more divided and less funny  place. Don’t you wish we could all stay up late again watching Johnny?

Photo: dvdtalk.com

Rain in Isolation

Rain in Isolation

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One aspect of living here that I’ve never minded is our sunny climate.  I don’t know the statistics, but the D.C. area is the brightest place I’ve ever lived. Which means I appreciate the rainy days when they come.

Today’s patter sounds like the rain in white noise machines. It has the same rhythm and pitch, the same levels of splatter. It is, then, a model spring shower. Made to order for the annuals I just settled in the ground yesterday.

I enjoy today’s rain only because it is the exception not the rule, though. There are places in this world I could never live because rain is the rule, not the exception. I’m thinking of Ireland.

Here is Heinrich Boll in his slender 1967 volume “Irish Journal,” writing about the weather of the country to which he says he is “too attached”:

“The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather. You can call this rain bad weather, but it is not. It is simply weather. …”

Rain in isolation does not drain the spirit. It excuses one from outside labors. It opens up the book, turns the page, settles the pen in the hand. Sometimes it even inspires.