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Author: Anne Cassidy

The Accidental Arborists

The Accidental Arborists

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In honor of Arbor Day, a few words on the small forest growing in our backyard. No, not the weeds, although some of them are tall enough to qualify for small-tree status, I’m afraid. No, I’m talking about the nether reaches of our backyard, which were smooth and green and grassy when we bought this house but are now a tangled, briar-filled forest incubator. I was just back there this morning, checking on Copper, who’s in dog-digging heaven, when I noticed how tall some of our volunteers are. We have several fledgling oaks and hollies and a few trees of uncertain lineage. They’re the lusty newcomers, racing to catch up with the old grandfather oaks, which are dying at an alarming pace. I mourn the old trees, especially the one that came crashing down a year ago, the first day Suzanne was home from college, 100 feet and double-trunked, so that one half narrowly missed our neighbor’s house and the other half narrowly missed ours. But I take comfort in the accidental forest that grows to replace these venerable giants. Some day the new trees will be old and tall, too, and I can say, I knew them as babies.

Dream Come True

Dream Come True

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A friend I haven’t seen in years reminded me of a dream we shared in high school. We were going to throw our own ball — ladies would wear long gowns, we would swirl and twirl to waltz music — it would be the next best thing to Vienna.

In two weeks Tom and I are going to Vienna. We’re going to see Suzanne, who’s been studying there all semester. We’re planning very little — we’ll let her show us her world — but there will be music and art and coffee houses and Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms. There will be no dancing — the ball season is in January and February — but that doesn’t matter. Suzanne was able to dance through two of them (see her photo above) and I’m content simply to return to Vienna, which I saw so many years ago.

Dreams are funny things. They never fade away, but they soften with time. They’re replaced with gratitude, I think. And with memory.

Taking the Stairs

Taking the Stairs

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In my old job I started each day by climbing to the third floor of a hundred-year-old building on a staircase that looks somewhat like this one. Now I scamper down a single flight of inside stairs, better than most, I’ll admit, but definitely the hidden-away staircase of an elevator building. When stairs were the only game in town, they were broad and grand and open. You climbed them with a sense of purpose. Now it often takes me several minutes just to find the stairway, and once I do, well, I’m usually underwhelmed. I climbed one of these in a Maryland medical building Monday: dingy, dark, with an aroma that reminded me of the New York City Subway system in July. I know we can’t give up elevators–they’re with us to stay–this is just a small tribute to those grande dame staircases, and to the kind of living and walking and thinking they made possible.

There is a Morning

There is a Morning

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“Will there really be a morning? Is there such a thing as day?
Could I see it from the mountains, if I were as tall as they?”

These lines rolled through my head last night as I tossed and turned, unable to sleep. What got me going? Unsettled dreams, our upcoming travels (what they call “good stress”), or just the normal wear and tear of daily life that frays the spirit enough to set the ends flapping in the wee hours, waking us with their clamor. As usual, I shifted position scores of times, made mental lists, fretted over words said and unsaid. I didn’t get up and read; I was tired enough that I hoped to be drowsy again momentarily. But the moments became hours. I did, however, drop off again eventually, so that I can at least pretend to have been asleep all night, so that I can answer Emily Dickinson’s question, “Will there really be a morning?” with “Oh, yes. There is a morning, all right. And it comes much too soon.”

In Medias Res

In Medias Res

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I love this phrase. I first learned what it meant when I read The Odyssey in high school. “In the middle of things.” It’s how The Odyssey begins: in the middle of the story.

Some days begin “in medias res.” I’m catching up with myself before I’ve even begun. Today was like that. I woke up thinking about one of the 120 professor profiles I’m editing at work. Have I pulled out the sidebar information? Have I shown it to the professor? Plainly, it was time to get up.

So I did, and because my morning began before it started, I’ve tried to provide a more intentional counterpoint: I’ve read, I’ve written in my journal, and now my entry here. The weather is still and quiet, perfect for catching my breath, for attending to bird song, for feeling, in my bones, that this is a new day, a fresh start, a gift.

Book Lust

Book Lust

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“Where is human nature as weak as in a bookstore?” — Henry Ward Beecher

The Friends of the Reston Library Used Book Sale is not for the faint of heart. I stumbled upon it this weekend and found myself on my knees sorting through books of essays as another woman (also on her knees) pulled them almost out of my hands.
I don’t buy many books these days. My house is full of them already. But the Reston Used Book Sale is a notable exception. Hardbacks for $1.50 and paperbacks for as little as 50 cents. How could I resist Rural Hours (1850) by Susan Fenimore Cooper (daughter of James), billed as one of the earliest pieces of American nature writing and the first by a woman? Or The Footpaths of Britain, complete with marginalia from a previous owner? Or Book Lust — a telling choice, given the quietly intent crowd at the book sale. Book lust. That’s what it is. That’s why I was at the book sale. It’s why all of us were there.

Missing the Rose

Missing the Rose

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“Mourning the Rose” was my first title for this post. But I thought better of it. After all, it’s a plant I’m missing, not a person or a pet. But the back yard seems empty without the climbing rose. For 20 years it’s shaded and delighted us. I’d always show off the tiny trellis dwarfed by the thick woody stems. I thought it showed what an able gardener I was. What it really revealed was how little I knew about climbing roses.

Its name was “New Dawn,” and when I bought it I still thought I could turn our yard into an English cottage garden. The astilbe, peony and other plants I bought at the same time never did very well. But the rose took to our hard clay soil and flourished for almost two decades.

I’m not enough of a gardener to understand what went wrong. Did I prune it too much or too little? Did it get a disease? Was it parched to oblivion in the drought two years ago? I’ll never know. But it’s hard not to see this as a metaphor. Did the rose flourish when our children were young and scampering about? Is its passing proof that life is passing me by? Nonsense, my practical self tells me. Something got it, and it’s gone. Plant another one, move on.

But about this time of year the long thorny boughs would be greening up and curling around the posts of the pergola, the buds would be full to bursting, the little bump-out roof of our kitchen would be groaning with the weight of all this bliss and all this blossom and I’d be looking forward to the rose’s biggest, grandest bloom at the end of May. Instead, I’m snapping off woody canes and throwing them on the brush pile in the back of the yard. I’m missing the rose.

Eaveswalking

Eaveswalking

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Walking in the city, on the trudge to and from Metro or at lunchtime when I stroll around the Mall, I can’t help but listen in. “We only have two months.” “I said 15 not 50.” “Do you think she’ll be able to pull that off?” Everywhere I walk there are conversations to be overheard. I’ve come to think of it as “eaveswalking.” It’s not as intentional as eavesdropping but it’s almost as satisfying.
Then what of the walker in the suburbs? My eaveswalking here is a mostly silent affair. But still, the houses talk to me. When I walk through our neighborhood each house has a story. Sometimes the story is about the people who live there now, but other times it’s about people who lived in that house five, ten years ago.The family with four boys who used to play football in the front yard. The boys grew up; the family moved away. The man who planted a beautiful perennial garden. His wife once admitted, “I don’t love gardening but I love the gardener.” The gardener died three years ago. His wife moved back to California. But the flowers still bloom every summer.

The Path

The Path

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On a walk yesterday I spied a path I’d never noticed before. I followed the trail, let it take me across a bridge, past clumps of skunk cabbage and a forest floor carpeted with violets and spring beauties.
As I walked I wondered what it is about paths that so appeal to me? “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,” the poet Byron wrote. “There is a rapture on the lonely shore.” Though I, too, love the wilderness, I also love the sight of a beaten dirt track curving around a bend. Do all humans share a hard-wired appreciation for this parting in the forest, for this passage through the briars? Or am I the only one? To me a path is proof that others have gone before us, that there is a way through this tangled treescape, which, lovely though it may be, is still not our home, our yard, our world.

Little Black Book

Little Black Book

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I’ve been a journalist for most of my adult life, but I’ve been a journal-keeper even longer — since a student teacher in Mrs. Ahren’s eleventh grade English class assigned us to write one for 12 weeks. I’d kept diaries before, I’d scribbled stories and poems — but this was different. I wish I could remember the student teacher’s name or the words he used, but the message I took from this assignment was to go out into the world and observe it, ponder it, make it my own. Suddenly a pen and a notebook were the keys to the kingdom.
I started carrying a small spiral notebook around in my purse, recording thoughts, observations, favorite quotations. When the 12 weeks were over, I couldn’t imagine life without some notebook or other by my side.