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Author: Anne Cassidy

Strings Attached

Strings Attached

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This is not a complaint, so I hope the weather gods don’t take it as one. But the human body is more comfortable when it stays in one temperature range for a season. When it’s 70 degrees one day and 40 the next, it does something to a body. In short, it makes it shiver, then roast, then shiver again.

Today the high is forecast to be 80 degrees. This is February 23, I’ll point out. Daffodils are blooming. Snowdrops and hellebores have been out for weeks. By Saturday we may have snow.

Perhaps this is just a cycle, a La Niña phenomenon. But  unseasonable winter warmth — and these crazy yo-yo cycles, too — now carry with them a tinge of guilt and fear. In their balminess are denuded forests,  smoke clouds, flooded homes, loss. 

I love warm weather. But not with these strings attached. 

(This photo was taken in Washington, D.C., on January 24, 2023.)

From Ordinary to Extraordinary

From Ordinary to Extraordinary

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To the untrained eye this is nothing but an ordinary parking lot. But to me — and the other people who parked their cars here — it’s a suburban trailhead. 

Yesterday I took two short walks, both of which began in parking lots. In each case, I had to find the paths, which took online research (which happened years ago) and on-foot exploration. Then I traipsed the paths themselves, an ongoing process of discovery. 

Who would guess that less than a quarter-mile from the lot above there are fox dens and creek bends and greening briars glittering with raindrops? 

The photo above was snapped quickly with no attention to angle or light. But I’m glad it looks as ordinary as it does. It’s proof that around here, the ordinary can lead to extraordinary. 

TMT

TMT

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While I’ve never been a clean freak, I do keep a relatively neat house. Just don’t open any closets or drawers, and avoid the basement at all costs. 

But even I can experience what I’ve come to think of as TMT — Too Much Tidiness. 

With four friends over for dinner last weekend, the house had come perilously close to this condition. Waking up to a blank coffee table for the second morning in a row, I knew what I had to do. I marched down to the basement and brought up two armloads of magazines. 

Here are two years worth of National Geographics, a year and a half of Atlantics and various other publications, plus a couple of books for good measure. 

Ah yes, that’s better. 

Emotional Minefields

Emotional Minefields

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Last week I went through files in the basement, an ongoing task. I ripped and shredded and came up with two bags worth of trash. It barely made a dent.

A weirder (to me) but also necessary form of clean-up is digital detoxing. In the course of updating my computer’s operating system (one of those pesky to-dos I haven’t tackled in a while), I realized that I may not have enough memory to install the new system.

So I’ve been prodding and poking in the digital bowels of my machine, finding all sorts of hiding places where large files lurk. Many of them are videos sent with text messages. Clicking on those videos yields blasts from the past, old work snippets, footage of dogs (not mine) romping in fields. Those are easy ones to delete. But the other day I found a video with a much-younger Copper dashing around the backyard, giving his much-larger dog cousins a merry chase. 

To see him again in his younger skin brought a tear to my eye. There was our own dear, frisky pup, bobbing and feinting and generally being his own irascible self. I used to think only hard-copy cleanup was an emotional minefield. Now I know otherwise. 

Always Evidence

Always Evidence

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I’m writing this post as a break from designing an economic system. It’s a class assignment, of course. I don’t design economic systems just for fun. 

But once I’ve gotten going on this project, it’s more enjoyable than I thought it would be, somewhat like the hours I’d spend drawing pictures of houses when I was a kid. They had towers and secret passageways and all sorts of bells and whistles. I didn’t worry about the cost or the plumbing. I gave my imagination full reign.

This assignment is not quite so free-form. We must explain what this system would produce and cite evidence to prove our case. But one thing I’ve learned in my brief time as a graduate student is that there’s always evidence … somewhere. I’ll go and look for some now. 

(A market in Myanmar, 2017, part of a more sustainable agricultural system.)

No Map, No Phone

No Map, No Phone

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The trail was unfolding as it had the last few times I hiked it. I thought I knew where I was going … until I didn’t. 

Yesterday I took off for a stroll in the woods without a phone or a map. This was not a well-marked Reston trail, where I usually know where I am. This was one of the district parks with sporadic signage and paths that meander all over the place.

When I saw the outlines of a rooftop in the distance, I took the turns I thought would bring me out on a street where I could get my bearings. But even doing that took more twists and turns than I would have liked. I was, in short, beginning to feel a bit anxious about being in the woods alone at 4 p.m., the sun lowering in the sky, not knowing exactly where I was and without the tools to find out. 

This is not a cliff-hanger. I kept walking and eventually made my way home. And in the end … I relished that my heart skipped a few beats along the way. 

(Signage for a walk near Asheville, the kind I wished I’d had yesterday.)

Connector Trail

Connector Trail

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The trail beckoned, a trail beside the trail, a connector. It meandered from the Washington and Old Dominion (the W&OD), a rails-to-trails strip of asphalt that runs from the D.C. border to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, to a garden park. 

Connector trails are surprises. Often makeshift and cobbled together with stray pieces. Frankintrails, you might call them.

This one had a bridge, a warning to avoid trespassing on the surrounding land (on which was built one of the more impressive mansions I’ve seen in this region) and a bucolic stretch where the scenery had the scale and immediacy of a New England lane.

Beyond that, there was a street winding through a neighborhood, then a shaded trail threading its way among fir trees to the park itself. That part was hilly enough that I can feel it today in the backs of my legs.

Still, the connector walk was a beauty of a discovery. I’d take it again today, if I could. 

Love and Whimsy

Love and Whimsy

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A long walk yesterday along a Reston path, the Cross-County Trail, then around Lake Audubon and back to the car. 

It was one of those hybrid walks that I enjoy for its variety. 

Along the way, this Valentine’s surprise attached to a fence post. A tribute to the power of love … and of whimsy. 

Megalopolis!

Megalopolis!

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Over the weekend, a family birthday party took me to Towson, Maryland. It dawned on me as I was driving that my niece, her husband and their now one-year-old daughter live in the same metropolitan area that I do. I can get in my little gray car and drive for an hour and a half and never leave home.

It sure feels like leaving home, though. Four expressways are involved: the Dulles Toll Road, the Capital Beltway, I-95 and I-695 (the Baltimore Beltway). And the two places have quite a different look and feel. 

The megalopolis is a strange creature, a many-bellied beast of a term. Coined in the middle of the last century, it means two or more adjacent metropolitan areas that share enough transport, economy, resources and ecologies to blur their boundaries and complete a continuous urban area. I see that megalopolis is an outdated term. It’s now megaregion, according to the America 2050 Initiative. 

Given that most humans identify with a house, a block, a town at most, I think we’re in dangerous territory here. Let the geographers have their fun, but as far as I’m concerned I definitely left home on Saturday.

(The Northeast Megaregion at night. Courtesy Wikipedia, which also served as source for some of the information in this post.)

23,000

23,000

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23,000. The number flares, it burns a hole in the mind. The pain it represents. The terrible loss of life from earthquakes in Turkey and Syria and the human misery left in their wake.

The earthquake that struck Lisbon on November 1, 1755, occurred before there were ways to measure temblors, but it’s estimated to have been as high as 8.0 on the Richter scale. Estimated loss of life: 30,000 to 50,000. 

The event widened an already wide rift in European intellectual life as philosophers like Voltaire challenged optimism and belief in a loving and engaged God.  

Natural events ripple through history. How, I wonder, will this current one ripple through time? 

(An engraving of the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami that followed. Courtesy Wikipedia. Four days after I posted this,  the death toll in Syria and Turkey reached 41,000.)