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Author: Anne Cassidy

Shooting Stars

Shooting Stars

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Tonight, if we’re lucky, we’ll look skyward and see specks of light streaking across the night sky. It’s the Perseid Meteor shower, late summer’s elusive fireworks. I say elusive because clouds or city lights often edge them out of eyesight. But some years the heavens have cooperated. One summer we saw the meteors from lawn chairs by a lake in Arkansas; another year we camped out in our neighbor’s driveway. More often than not we just turn off our porch light, walk outside and wait. The brilliance is fleeting and it’s easy to think you’ve imagined it. But you haven’t. It’s a glimpse of the beyond, and it’s unforgettable.

Horizontal

Horizontal

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I’m not a graphic designer, but editing a magazine — and taking pictures for this blog — have made me more aware of the orientation of a photograph, whether it’s horizontal or vertical. And being known to muse about things from time to time (!) I have mused about this, too. Yes, the vertical is stirring. It is the mountain, the skyscraper, the urge to touch the sky. But for everyday photos, give me the horizontal. It is restful, it is kind, it neatly fills the page or screen. It is the horizon, telling us how far we can go.

Blame it on Tchaikovsky

Blame it on Tchaikovsky

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Before I was a walker, I was a runner. I ran through Lincoln Park in Chicago, along Todd’s Road in Lexington, around the reservoir in Central Park. I ran in the suburbs for a while, too — until my knees caught up with me. Now I walk — fast — figuring it’s better for my body if I keep at least one foot on the pavement as I pace.

Sometimes when I’m feeling strong and listening to good music, though, my emotions get the better of me. That happened yesterday. It was a brass-driven piece, loud, bombastic, a show stopper. The sort of symphony that provokes applause after movements. If I can’t move around as well today, I’m blaming it on Tchaikovsky.

Money and Happiness

Money and Happiness

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Yesterday’s New York Times ran an article about a couple who stepped out of the rat race and now live a simple, happier life in a 400-square-foot apartment with 100 possessions (each, I think!). The article mentions the research of Thomas DeLeire at the University of Wisconsin. He recently discovered that of nine categories of consumption, the only one positively related to happiness was leisure spending on vacations, fishing poles and the like. I don’t know about fishing poles, but you wouldn’t have to sit too long on our living room couch to know where we stand in this debate. We take great vacations — and our rumpled, well-loved house tells the tale.

The Meadow

The Meadow

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To search for the soul of the summer, you could travel from mountains to shore, from lake to canyon, from baseball diamond to golf course. But you could also head to the nearest meadow. That’s what I did this morning. And there amidst the buzzing bees and jumping crickets, in the bright sun and rough foliage, I found the soul of summer. The heat and the heft of it. The brightness of it, the sturdiness and the shagginess. There was Queen Anne’s lace, Joe Pye Weed and goldenrod just coming into bloom. Above all were the grasses, tall and lanky and swaying over the scene as if to fan it and cool it down.

I used to overlook meadows; I found them ordinary. I preferred cool wooded glades. But lately I’ve realized what a treasure the meadow is, how it captures summer in its openness and lack of guile.

Untethered

Untethered

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The other night, in a fit of hedonism, I watched the movie “Crazy Heart” on my laptop while lying outside in the hammock. It was the ultimate luxury: two hours of downtime outside, watching a movie, slightly swaying under the trees. And what made it possible? Wireless communication.

I realize that many of my posts rail against technology. Here’s one that does not. A post in praise of cordless phones, laptop computers, inventions that untether us. I remember how I would contort myself to talk in private on a corded phone: squeezing into closets, stepping into darkened rooms, buying extra long phone cords that twisted and tangled. Now I take a phone with me wherever I go.

It’s interesting, though, that the privacy I searched for in the old days has not exactly been served in the wireless era. Are we truly untethered, or are we bound by much longer and more insidious cords?

Trees in Need

Trees in Need

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In the 21 years we’ve lived here we’ve lost a lot of our big, beautiful red oaks. They have been toppled by hurricanes, blown down by heavy winds and parched by heat. The first tree experts we called in were sensitive folk with college degrees and a calm, Zen-like manner. They didn’t so much diagnose our trees as they did feel their pain. More recently, we’ve hired daredevil cowboys who would as soon fell a tree as look at it. In other words, our attitude as tree owners has paralleled our evolution as parents. The longer we’ve been doing it, the more casual we’ve become.
Until now.
Something is killing our trees. We’ve lost five in the last two years, and hey, we don’t have an infinite number here. So yesterday another tree expert visited our house. What’s killing our trees, he said, is drought. Let the watering begin.

So Far Away

So Far Away

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The words to the Carole King song “So Far Away” are in my head these days: “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” Not because I’m longing for someone who’s moved away—nothing as dramatic as that. It’s more the pace of life that has me humming, the days that zoom by, the children growing up, the seasons passing. Sometimes middle age seems like one big whoosh.

But some of the disorientation is self-imposed. It comes from the constant distraction of living, of interruptions by text and email, of time disjointed and concentration broken. The “anybody” who doesn’t stay in one place anymore, that’s me.

Small Pond

Small Pond

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I jog past the cattail pond on West Ox, a containment pond, I suppose. But filled with cattails and buzzing with insects it becomes much more. It makes me think: There are as many hidden glades and sunny meadows in our neighborhood as one needs to inspire creative thought, to parse an identity. In other words: There are revelations that come to me along the path, and if I’m listening, they will find me. The natural world, even one as cramped and pruned as ours, holds wisdom.

Awed into Silence

Awed into Silence

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It’s August now. Mornings are later and evenings earlier. Some of my after-dinner strolls end in darkness. But a few nights ago I walked mid-gloaming, and the sky shimmered with light. The colors were those of a baby’s nursery, pinks and blues. Only they were lit from inside and shone with the brilliance of the spectrum; they were almost kaleidoscopic.

Before there were televisions and computers and electric lights to read by late at night, there were sunsets to awe us into silence, to send us off to sleep believing in something larger than ourselves.