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Author: Anne Cassidy

Refilled

Refilled

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Last night, a stroll through the spring twilight. The street was quiet; only a few last-minute mulchers still covering their garden beds. (Tonight we will be covering tender plants against the predicted freeze.) To the west, the sky was streaks of brightness and a smudged contrail. To the east, a gathering darkness. In every direction, a softness born of moist soil and budding trees.

Tulips are up, dogwood is blooming and Bradford pears waning. The Kwanzan cherry in our front yard has erupted with its double pink blossoms like big greedy fists.

What was stark and monochromatic has become pliable and pastel. I left an empty vessel, and with every step I was refilled.

Left Behind

Left Behind

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A dawn chorus draws me outside. Bird song, crow caw, the rat-a-tat-tat of the woodpecker. I walk without earphones, content with the music of the morning.

On my way I spot a herd of deer. Three leap across the road in front of me, but with that finally honed sense of suburban wildlife presence, I have a feeling there are more. And soon I spot another herd, five or six of the little guys, grazing on new plants and leaves.

As the two groups merge and bound into the woods, I spot one little fellow who’s been left behind. Forlorn and nervous, he paws the ground with his small hoof. I realize suddenly that I’m the one who’s cut him off from his kin, that he can’t get to the others because I stand in his way.

I pick up my pace so he can catch up with the others. So that I no longer have to see him surrounded by basketball hoops and mulch bags, a creature as out of place as I am.

Leaves Beginning

Leaves Beginning

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As spring proceeds at warp speed I strain to catch the hedge in front of my office as it erupts with new growth. I’ve written about this hedge before, about the moment in its unfolding when the pink of the bud and the green of the leaf are in equipoise.

This year it caught me by surprise, but I’m glad I noticed. It’s important to see the hedge at its beginning, to travel the journey of the growing season together. To be able to say, I knew those leaves when they were born; heck, I knew them even before they were born.

They are tender at this point in their emergence, with all their young leaf life before them. Later on they will undoubtedly be hot and tired and weary of being green. If only they could remember how they look now, the rosy splendor of their emergence. That’s why I look and linger. I’ll remember it for them.

Once Again

Once Again

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The cherry trees blossom on their schedule, not on ours. So you rush to them after work, even if it’s cloudy and threatening rain, even if you know there will be a crush of people there.

Maybe, in fact, it’s because of the people. Their faces as careworn and hopeful as last year, their picnic baskets and cameras in tow. They are here, as I am, for renewal.

Wild Places

Wild Places

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A few days ago I wrote about Robert Macfarlane’s book The Wild Places, how the author sought remote mountaintops and bogs as comfort and as challenge. I’m almost finished with the book now, and Macfarlane has learned something.
–>He talks about the wildness that is all around us, the simple views of field and fern that may be recorded in a journal or a letter or may not be recorded at all but simply held in mind.
Most of these places, he says, “were not marked as special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. A bend in a river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree, a stretch of old hedgerow or a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along — these might be enough.”

A few paragraphs later, Macfarlane says this: “It seemed to me that these nameless places might in fact be more important than the grander wild lands that for so many years had gripped my imagination.”

To take Macfarlane’s idea one step further: These nameless places are what attach us to a place, what make us feel bound to the land around us. This morning, I think about my own “wild places.”


My Heart With Pleasure Fills

My Heart With Pleasure Fills

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I’m thinking of that poem, the one we learned in elementary school, the one that seems jaded and obvious — until you stumble upon it in real time.

The other day I rounded the corner of a paved path and there was my own “host of golden daffodils.”

Or not my own, actually. That was the beauty of it. They were for everyone, were wild and free, glorifying not just a single backyard but a widespread and well traveled community woods. Tucked among the oaks and maples and just a few feet away from the skunk cabbage.

I slowed my pace as I strode beside them, wanting to savor their beauty as long as possible. Other amblers did the same that sweet spring morning. There was a hush in the air, a reverence for the blossoms.

I did not wait for “the inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude.” I took no chances. I used a camera. And now, as I look at the photograph, I remember the flowers’ surprising presence in that parceled suburban landscape. The words flow into my mind before I can stop them: “And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.”

In Their Glory

In Their Glory

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On Saturday morning I took one of my favorite walks — through the Franklin Farm meadow, around a lake, through a woods and back home. It is a varied terrain of shade and sunlight, and the day was so warm I could feel the old earth turning and sending its shoots skyward. Geese were grazing on deadnettle and other early spring flowers.

I’ve walked this way for years now and no longer see just the path ahead of me, the rough fields on either side. I see what has been and what will be again, the tall grasses of midsummer, the chicory and Queen Anne’s lace. I hear the crescendo of cicadas. The meadow soil has a memory, and so do I.

The walk was so lovely that I went back later with my camera. The setting sun slanted across the pond and lit up the cattails. I found a spot under a Bradford pear where I could snap meadow, pond and woods. All these humble sights that I look on in my wanderings, that have made me feel connected to this place, they were transformed in the mellow light of early evening. I saw them in their glory — and captured them that way.

A Walk in Ireland

A Walk in Ireland

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The walks we took in Ireland: along Grafton Street in Dublin, through the arch in Galway City, to the ends of the earth at the Cliffs of Moher.

The walk I remember most: An ordinary one in Donegal, fuchsia hanging along the hedgerows. The fuchsia surprised me. I thought of it as a hothouse plant, something to be coddled. But in Ireland it thrived on neglect — along with rain, mist and the soft Irish air.

This walk I remember with the fuchsia was down a small lane. The sun seemed never to set, and our summer would never end. This was a long time ago.

Wild Time

Wild Time

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A walk can be a passage out of time, a way to move from the world of clocks and calendars into a suspension of schedule and duty, so that I attend only to what is under my feet and before my eyes.

Today, reading The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane, I found a poet’s explanation for why this is so. Macfarlane seeks out wild places, moors and islands and ridges that are remote and dangerous to reach. He plumbs them for their beauty and lessons. In a valley on the Isle of Skye, he finds a sanctuary, “the allure of lost worlds or secret gardens.”

“Time in the Basin moves both too fast and too slowly for you to comprehend, and it has no interest in conforming to any human schedules. The Basin keeps wild time.”

The reason, he reckons, lies in a quotation by a nameless source: “Landscape was here long before we were even dreamed. It watched us arrive.”

Even in the suburbs, the deep creek beds and tall oaks predate our arrival. I seek them out for their separateness and their nonchalance. They put my world in perspective. They keep their own wild time.

New Neighborhood

New Neighborhood

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Yesterday, a walk in a new neighborhood: Strolling down a paved path that flanked a busy suburban byway, I crossed under the road through a pedestrian tunnel, automatically plugging my nose as I learned to do in New York, but unnecessarily, since the only whiff I got was of concrete.

The path wound along a creek, where gangs of loose-limbed kids sifted the water, looking for tadpoles. I could see the road I needed to be on, but took a chance that the path would bring me back where I’d begun.

I passed willows that gleamed with the first green of spring. And farther along there were more kids, careening down the path on too-big bikes or too-small scooters. A playground sign that said “For children ages 5-9” had been altered: “For children ages 5-59.” Young mothers threw back their heads and laughed. No one seemed to have a care.

I know that the homes along the path sheltered bankruptcies and infidelities, rebellious teenagers and addled grandparents. It was just that, in that early spring light, these didn’t seem to matter. It seemed like a new beginning, like an Eden.