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Author: Anne Cassidy

Rereading Leopold

Rereading Leopold

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I read an essay the other day about Aldo Leopold, which got me thinking about the great conservationist and some writing I did about him a few years ago.

At first glance Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac (1949) seemed to be like other evocative writing about place — books by Annie Dillard or Henry David Thoreau, for example, books that shed light not only on cities or rivers but also on the author or the human condition, books in which the landscape is a vehicle to the self.

What I got was much more. It was not just a book about the transformation Leopold and his family underwent as they fixed up an old chicken coop in Wisconsin and lived there on weekends. It was in this place that Leopold wrote the essays that became his masterpiece, A Sand County Almanac, a book that encapsulates the philosophy of place that makes him one of our earliest prophets of ecology and wilderness preservation. This book, like the twisted little apples of Winesburg, Ohio, is the hard-won fruit of the deep thinking Leopold brought to the land on which he chose to live.

“There are those who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot,” writes Leopold in his introduction. But from such big pronouncements the work quickly becomes more specific: the winter awakening of a skunk, the trail of a meadow mouse, the fate of the passenger pigeon, the life of a downed tree, the difference between a shovel (which makes us givers) and the axe (which makes us takers).

To Leopold, place is much more than a vehicle for self-discovery. It is essential to the health and welfare of our planet. The landscape is not here for our amusement or to further our self-awareness; we are working parts of it. Leopold sings of the wilderness, the wild creatures, the original grasses and grizzlies and wolves and weevils that are born and nurtured by a particular soil and rainfall. Here is the moral work of place, the ecology of belonging.

(Fox cubs frolic in a clearing.)

Without Copper

Without Copper

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I was so full of the lessons and carols yesterday morning that I forgot what day it was. No matter, the radio soon reminded me that it was Beethoven’s special day. And that meant it was also the birthday of our very own, dearly departed Copper. So as I listened to the Seventh Symphony, the Coriolan Overture and the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, I was also thinking of a certain sweet doggie.

We never knew his real birthday, but December 16, 2006, was the day we brought him home from the Loudon County shelter. His debut performance involved slipping out of his inaugural collar (after that, he always wore a harness) and dashing down the street with a frantic parade of humans in his wake. He was eventually retrieved and brought into his new home. From then on, there was never an open door he didn’t try to rush, never a closed one he didn’t try to open by grabbing the knob in his mouth.

I make light of it now, but at the time it was terrifying. Here was this beautiful creature with silky hair, strong shoulders and big brown eyes, a canine we adored from the moment we saw him, and he seemed determined to leave the only loving family he ever had. This was not from ingratitude but from anxiety. The little guy was a bundle of nerves. Later in his life he cowered when thunder pealed. Sometimes he even barked at his own tail thumping.

Yesterday was the second December 16th that’s come and gone without Copper. Is life simpler without him? Yes it is. But it’s poorer, too.

Nine Lessons and Carols

Nine Lessons and Carols

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The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols I know is the one that takes place in King’s College Cambridge on Christmas Eve. It’s the one that begins with these words “Once in Royal David’s City,” often sung in the dulcet tones of a boy soprano.

It’s also the one that the famous Groton School of Groton, Massachusetts, holds or used to hold, which we once foolishly attended with newborn Suzanne. She didn’t cry … much. But I spent most of the service worrying that she would, especially during the agonizingly long minutes when the solemn procession blocked our exit.

The Festival of Lessons and Carols last night was a different matter. It was beautiful and earnest, not a flame in the darkness but a well-lit performance featuring the choir and its new director, an organist extraordinaire. The reading and songs weren’t the exact ones I was expecting but they checked all the boxes.

Afterward we went up and talked with the director, congratulated him on the success of the event and asked some questions about the organ. Turns out, it’s a hybrid instrument, part digital, part real pipes. I had no idea such a combination exists and am doubly amazed now at the sound that comes out of it.

To hear “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” on that instrument is to hear the carol in all its ancient and aching wonderment. A suiting accompaniment to the words of Isaiah: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

Newest Addition

Newest Addition

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There was a hush abroad in the land when I woke this morning. All I could think about was that there’s a new little person in the world who wasn’t here this time yesterday. On any given day this is always case. But yesterday was special because this little person is our newest granddaughter.

When the pandemic began in 2020 we had no grandchildren. Now we have six. Not that I feel old or anything. Okay, maybe just a little bit old. But mostly I feel blessed.

What we have here is an embarrassment of riches. What my daughter has is her newfound status as mother of three. As I helped her out yesterday, scrambling like crazy to get a preschooler and toddler out the door, dealing also with two large dogs and a cat, I wondered how she will ever manage with a third. But she will. I did (minus the two large dogs), and many manage much more with far fewer resources.

Our job as grandparents is to support the family however we can. Which is what I’m planning to do, starting … yesterday.

(Between them, these two “babies” now have six kiddos.)

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On Fire

On Fire

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Up before dawn this morning staring at this screen, which I’ve done all too often of late. I think about the legions of writers before me, also up early plying their trade. Down through the centuries they go, scribbling by fireside and candle flame and lamp light.

And then you have us modern folk. Our tablets are illuminated. Our laptops gleam. We need no lighting source save the one upon which we type.

There’s a lovely scene in the most recent film version of “Little Women” where Jo writes in the attic of her home in Concord. She has just lost her dear sister Beth, for whom she began writing tales of their girlhood, and now it has dawned on her that these stories, humble and homespun as they originally seemed, are the real thing, the stories she’s meant to tell.

She writes in soft candlelight, dipping her pen in and out of the ink. She wears her old writing jacket and scratches out the words as if in a trance. Days pass. The manuscript pages pile up, and she moves them around on the attic floor.

She writes in light and in darkness. When she strikes a match it sounds as if she’s setting the house on fire. But it’s she who’s on fire, penning the words that even after all these years I can still quote from memory: “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”

And here I sit, as the day lightens around me, as the screen glows.

(Saoirse Ronan as Jo in a still shot of “Little Women,” 2019, directed by Greta Gerwig, Sony Pictures Entertainment)

Midday Finish

Midday Finish

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I think, I hope, that I’ve completed one of the two research papers due this weekend. This is welcome news since I have another one to go. The other one is well along but by no means finished.

The dilemma now is what to do while the first one “marinates.’ I learned long ago not to push send too quickly. It does any written work good to sit a while, to settle, much like a cake cooling on a wire rack after you take it out of the oven. Cut into that cake too soon and you’ll be sorry.

Should I plunge immediately into the next project? It takes some time to shift gears, to remember where I was when I knocked off working on the other one late Monday. There’s always lunch and the newspaper to while away an hour or so, to punctuate the time. A midday finish should mean taking a complete break, but today the break will be mini, with promises of a longer one to come.

(No picture of a cake cooling; this one will have to do. It’s making me hungry!)

Running the Reservoir

Running the Reservoir

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The fog was so pleasant this morning when I walked outside to pick up the newspaper that I almost took a walk then and there. But duty calls, brain work beckons, and the walk will be postponed.

It will not always be this way, I remind myself. But these days I must harvest every bit of brainpower I can, and that harvest is best begun in the morning.

There was a time, though, when locomotion came first. For many years, I rolled out of bed right into my running gear, laced up my shoes and dashed around the reservoir in Central Park. What a way to start the day! It was bracing, it was beautiful, it was always a pinch-me-I’m-living-in-New-York moment.

When I ran the reservoir I forgot about the cramped room where I lived, the money I didn’t have, the extra work I did to make my editorial day job possible. My heart and lungs were full of the park and of the city that surrounded it. The run was only two miles, but at the end of it I could tackle anything.

December Distractions

December Distractions

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The mid-month semester deadline is bearing down — two papers to submit and a final class — and I’ve barely begun Christmas shopping. Which means I’m clinging to the single-digit days of December for all they’re worth. The 9th feels comfortable, capacious even. Tomorrow, the jig will be up.

Why have we done this to December, clogged the month with so many to-dos: shopping and year-end appointments, card writing and holiday baking? Why have we taken a perfectly good, quiet month and turned it into a production?

We can blame Christmas, I suppose, and its Druidical forebears: the solstice, darkest days from which we seek solace and diversion. December is all about distractions, really. I’ll keep that in mind. It won’t help me check items off the list, but it may keep me sane.

4:47

4:47

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A stiff wind roared in yesterday, accompanied by low-flying Dulles-bound jets over the house. It was unsettling enough to make me check the weather on my phone, and when I did, I noted the time of sunset: 4:47. I looked at the time on my computer: also 4:47.

With 4:47 on my mind, I did a bit of googling. It’s an early sunset, to be sure, though not as early as the 4:18 sunset in Seattle. If it’s this early now, though, what will it be next week or the week after?

Turns out, it will be later, steadily later every evening, back to 4:57 by the end of the month. In fact, 4:47 seems to be the earliest sunset we will have this year. It’s all up from here. The total minutes of daylight will continue to shrink as we approach solstice, but only because sunrises will be later.

I don’t know why this made me feel so much better, but it did.

Caged Bird

Caged Bird

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For the last two days we’ve been in a battle of sorts with our remaining parakeet, Cleo. Having just lost her companion, Toby, we’re in no mood to lose her, too. But she seems determined to escape, even if it means killing herself in the process.

On Tuesday we found her flying around the living room and kitchen, banging into the glass patio doors, bouncing off the ceiling and finally, after 10 harrowing minutes, coming to rest on the outside of her cage. From there, she was quickly dispatched to the inside with the use of a towel.

Yesterday’s near escape was almost more terrifying. I found her halfway through the bars of a cage which I now realize is a little too open for her (.6 rather than .5 inches between bars). Who knew? None of our other parakeets have been such escape artists. But Cleo is female — and feisty.

She’s about to move into tighter quarters, slightly more snug inside with less space between the cage bars. We’re hoping these new digs will discourage escape attempts.

Ultimately, of course, she needs more freedom and a new friend, both of which take time to make happen. So for now, and until her new accommodations are readied, I’m working beside her, keeping an eye on this beautiful blue parakeet, making sure this caged bird sings … but does not stray.

(Cleo behind bars, where we hope she stays.)