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Author: Anne Cassidy

White Trees at Sunset

White Trees at Sunset

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It was almost dark by the time I drove down Franklin Farm Drive with its magical, top-heavy Bradford pear trees. I had been meaning to make this pilgrimage for a week and am glad I made it before the blossoms blew away.

I counted 40 trees just on one side. Spring is extravagant here; it sends forth far more beauty than we need. Honestly, it’s hard to criticize the suburbs too much this time of year. The flowering cherries, phlox, redbud and forsythia see to that. They remind me that these outlying neighborhoods are designed to be beautiful.

I often forget this. I rail about the crazy highways and the ugly strip malls— but the suburbs happened when people left the dusty, dangerous, crowded city for a calm, green, airy substitute. The movement from city to suburb is as certain as the American push westward toward the frontier — and perhaps springs from the same place, a need to step out of the fray, to find a place we can call our own.

Another Day in Paradise

Another Day in Paradise

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Today I heard on the radio that a Cambridge University scientist has declared April 11, 1954 the most boring day since 1900. This is based on a computer analysis of 300 million facts, according to an NPR interview with William Tunstall-Pedoe, the scientist who invented the search engine that sifted through the facts and arrived at this oddly compelling conclusion.

Listeners who’ve commented on the story have mostly offered personal evidence to refute it — usually their own birthdays or those of their loved ones. None of the comments convinced me that this day shouldn’t be one of those most boring in history.

If April 11, 1954 was so ho-hum and ordinary, then wasn’t it also the most wonderful day, too? No great people were born, but neither were there explosions, battles or mass murders. And aren’t the simple, uneventful days the most special?

In Abraham Vergehese’s book Cutting for Stone, the character Ghosh tells his son, Marion, “You know what’s given me the greatest pleasure in my life? It’s been our bungalow, the normalcy of it, the ordinariness of my waking, Almaz rattling in the kitchen, my work. My classes, my rounds with the senior students. Seeing you and Shiva at dinner, then going to sleep with my wife.” Ghosh, the overworked doctor at a poor hospital in Ethiopia, falls asleep every night with these words on his lips: “Another day in paradise.”

I hope that April 11, 2011 — like April 11, 1954 — is just another day in paradise.

Low Clouds

Low Clouds

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A chill air has arrived; a few minutes ago it was sleeting. I try to look at the bright side. The warmth, when it gets here, will be that much more welcome. And cool temperatures make the blossoms last longer.

Still, it’s hard to be patient. The winter has been long. The clouds have been low. The carefree days of summer seem far, far away.

People Power

People Power

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Yesterday the air had a softness and a fragrance that practically begged me to come outside. And once out, I ran into friends and neighbors. In the city, at work, I met someone new in the courtyard; at home, in the suburbs, I chatted with a neighbor I’ve known for years but hadn’t seen in months.

As I was walking back to the house after that second conversation, it dawned on me that one of the things that puts a spring in my step are these random conversations. Research shows (ah, I love writing “research shows” — I’ve spent so much of my career writing those words!) that interaction with friends and acquaintances bolsters mood.

Yesterday at least I would have to agree with those researchers: Maybe it’s not just the warm weather that makes us feel like we’re coming alive again after the long winter; maybe it’s the people we see when we finally emerge from our cocoons.

A note on the photo: Unable to find a picture of my neighbors, I can only come up with a photo I snapped last November during a walk through Chinatown in New York City. Now there’s a place where people get out and enjoy their friends!

The Kindness of Strangers

The Kindness of Strangers

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During the last few months I’ve gotten to know a man named Pat, who is blind. I met him on the Metro. Our schedules are similar; we get on at the same stop and get off two stops apart. More to the point, we both change trains at Metro Center. This is no big deal for me, but quite a big deal for Pat, who must navigate the walk along the narrow platform, find and ascend the escalator (if it’s working), then get to the right spot on the platform to catch the Red Line train to his final destination.

While he can do this on his own with a cane, it’s much easier if someone helps him. And often someone does. More than most of us, Pat is dependent on the kindness of strangers. “I’ve met some wonderful people,” he told me this morning. “And some who aren’t so nice.”

Perhaps because he can’t see, he’s closely attuned to sounds. “Twenty years ago people used to talk on Metro,” he said. “They laughed and told stories and exchanged business cards. Now it’s quiet.” We talked about the reasons for this: Blackberries and iPhones, iPods and laptops.

The lack of chatter makes it harder for Pat to know where he’s going, but the lack of camaraderie isn’t good for any of us. It’s a still and stilted world we travel in — and I’m as much to blame as anyone, my nose in a book or my journal. But sometimes, when I’m lucky, I run into Pat. When I ride with him and we chat, the Metro seems a warmer, friendlier place.

Don’t we all depend on the kindness of strangers?

Park Bench in Spring

Park Bench in Spring

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Yesterday I went to see the cherry blossoms at the tidal basin. It was a fresh, just-drenched morning with a bar rainbow (looking like a colorful UPC code) in the sky above National Airport. There were low clouds and intermittent rain.

The blossoms were past peak, so I had them (almost) to myself. Pink petals piled on the pavement, clung to tree bark, dotted park benches. It was a pointillistic paradise. The beauty was still there; it was just broken and scattered.

Perfect Timing

Perfect Timing

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Now that my blog is in its second year I sometimes worry that I will repeat myself, write the same post on the same day. After all, many of my posts are about the seasons and the cyclical nature of life. Or, maybe I only have 350 thoughts, give or take one or two, and it’s inevitable that I recycle them.

I say this as a preface to writing about violets, because I wrote about them last year. But this year I want to single out their punctuality, how I can always count on seeing them as soon as April arrives. I saw the first violets of the season on Saturday, when I lifted up the screen that had been protecting young lettuce and saw instead the first violet. Such a sweet, unassuming flower — but nevertheless a product of complex forces and drives. How else to explain the punctuality?

The timing of blossoms is big business around here; predicting the cherry trees’ peak bloom is both an art and a science. But what strikes me when I look at the violet is that its timing and placement is always perfect. Less heralded, but always on time.

The Unexpected

The Unexpected

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Twenty-four years ago, in Lexington, Kentucky, it was snowing on this day. It had been an unseasonably warm March, but the weather changed when the new month blew in. And by April 4, our wedding day, it wasn’t just flurrying, it was snowing hard, drifting and accumulating, slowing traffic and obliterating spring.

We drove behind the plow on the way to the church, tiptoed through slush on our way to the reception. The snow left a delicate filigree on car windows, buried the daffodils and bent near to breaking the just-blooming dogwood trees. Friends from up north, expecting balmy breezes, braved the weather in light floral prints and big-brimmed hats. The day was a joyful blur of blossoms and snow flakes.

It was not what we’d planned or expected, and was therefore a good way to begin married life. More than two decades later, no one has ever forgotten our wedding day. We certainly haven’t!

A Compass

A Compass

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It is a day of clouds and sun, of wind and flower. I have yet to walk; I’m about to now. But I can tell from the weather that the wind will challenge, the sun will warm and maybe the rain will fall, too. It will be a walk that is not unlike life.

I found in my photos a snapshot of a small windmill, a decorative one, I think, but suitable enough for illustration. It makes me think about how much a day can buffet us and how important it is to have a compass, something that helps point the way, that keeps us on track. Something that keeps us heading down our own truth path, steady to our own true north.

Purpose

Purpose

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To live in the suburbs is to orbit rather than to center, for our very existence is built on proximity to the city. You could say that all towns exist in complement to others, their services and spaciousness reflecting how close or far they are from the next best place. But we who live on the periphery, we were never intended for anything but the vast outer ring. Our place has no point but to serve another.

Still, what begins accidentally can proceed with purpose, and so I walk and listen and search for what lies beneath the subdivisions and shopping centers. Because what is true is deep, and what is deep is hard to find no matter where you look for it.

“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion and prejudice and tradition and delusion and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through Boston and New York and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we call reality … ” Thoreau wrote in Walden. “Be it life or death, we crave only reality.”