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Category: change

Farewell to Blogspot

Farewell to Blogspot

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On February 7, 2010, when I wrote the first Walker in the Suburbs post, I knew only that I wanted to share a few thoughts with the world. I had no idea if I could keep blogging until the end of the month. Now, almost 15 years later, it’s time to move A Walker in the Suburbs to a new home. Truth to tell, it outgrew Blogspot long ago, but until now I’ve lacked the time and will to switch sites. 

Starting tomorrow, October 1, 2024, you can find A Walker in the Suburbs here. The content won’t change, but the design is updated, and you’ll be able to subscribe and comment.

Meanwhile, as I say goodbye to this platform, I think of all that’s happened since it began, the writing I’ve done; the people who are gone and the ones who’ve just arrived; how our world has changed. 

How grateful I am to have this opportunity to connect with all of you, to share my love of walking and place. Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope you enjoy the new Walker in the Suburbs. 

Another Meta Post

Another Meta Post

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Yesterday’s post was meta, as I think about the blog itself in preparation for launching it on a new platform soon. This has been long in the works, and on my mind for years. 

When it comes right down to it, though, I’m finding it difficult to make the leap. Which reminds me of a central truth: change is difficult. This is as true for small decisions — turning right rather than left at the corner when I stroll the neighborhood — as it is for larger ones, like moving a blog of 14 years. 

But change is also essential. More and more so as the years move on, I’ve noticed. 

And so, this Blogspot home will soon be history. I’ll keep you posted as I make the move — and I hope you’ll make it with me. Don’t worry. It will take a few days. These things always do. 

Every Verse

Every Verse

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“Second verse, same as the first,” goes a line from an old Herman’s Hermits song. 

Two verses used to be the limit for the processional and recessional hymns at my church. But there’s a new music director in town, an organist no less, and he plays all four verses of every entering and leaving song.

Is it my imagination, or is there a certain restlessness as we plunge into verse four of the entrance hymn, a narrowly avoided temptation to glance at the watch? 

As for the recessional, people are voting with their feet. This morning, about half the congregation left before the last notes of “The Church’s One Foundation” sounded and the postlude began, organ chords thundering down from on high. 

This is how we’re supposed to leave the sanctuary, I thought, as I made my way to the holy water font and out the door — caught up in a marvelous swell of sound. 

(This organ is from San Bartolome Church, Seville, Spain, not my church. I wish!)

Charting Time

Charting Time

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It’s only a baby habit, just getting started, but I’ve decided to keep a time chart, noting on my (paper) calendar what I’m doing and when. 

Time flows differently these days, it eddies and it stalls and sometimes it swirls by so quickly that I barely see the ripples it leaves behind. 

So rather than wondering each day, where does the time go, I will try to chart it as it flies. 

A noble experiment, yes? 

We’ll see. 

The “R Word”

The “R Word”

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This week, I’ve begun to share the news with colleagues that, come May, I will start a new phase of life, one without the grind of daily work-for-pay. You might say I’m “retiring,” though that’s a loaded word in my vocabulary.

Writers seldom retire, but editorial directors for international development organizations do, so I’ll use their nomenclature when necessary. 

The fact of the matter, though, is that I don’t much care for the “R word.” It sounds like Bermuda shorts and golf courses and happy gray-haired couples staring off into the sunset. 

Which won’t look much like what I’ll be doing, which is writing and peddling my work, not so much a new thing as an old one with a twist — a return to the freelance world I inhabited happily for decades but with less of the financial pressure. 

Still, it’s an adjustment, one I’ve been mulling over privately for months — and one I can finally mull over publicly here. 

Farewell to the Spinet

Farewell to the Spinet

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When the moment finally came, it was nothing at all like what I thought it would be — as moments  seldom are. I worried that my dear, sweet Wurlitzer spinet, the piano Mom and Dad had bought on the rent-to-purchase plan when I was a kid, would have to leave here in the instrument equivalent of a body bag, bound for what I’ve heard described as “that great concert hall in the sky.”

I’d been dithering over this for years — knowing that if I was to continue to play, the spinet would have to go, but being unable and unwilling to get rid of the instrument on which I plunked my first scales, practiced for hours a day in high school, and accompanied the girls when they were young musicians. 

It finally dawned on me that I was going about this the wrong way. To get rid of the spinet, I would need to fall in love with its replacement. So last Saturday I ventured out to a piano showroom in a mall not far from here, intending only to look and see what was there. 

What was there was a used Schimmel studio with a top you can prop up like a baby grand and a tone and touch that sent shivers down my spine. It was more than I was planning to spend but they were willing to take the spinet on trade! That clinched the deal, and the day before yesterday, the spinet left the house in a piano truck safely belted and blanketed, perhaps on its way to another young pianist.

Meanwhile, I can’t stop playing the new piano, which fills the house with its sonorous sound. I would say I don’t know what took me so long — but, of course, I do. 

Baby Step

Baby Step

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Tonight I take a baby step toward my next life: a webinar for a course of graduate study I have in mind. I have no idea if this will work out, if it will be what I think it can be, or even if I want to apply. But I won’t begin unless I know more, so hearing them out seems a good way to begin.

As I watch our grandson become more alert, as I marvel at his first smiles, I realize, all over again, how much change is a part of life. Babies change weekly — no, daily! — and older children almost as quickly. But as we get older change becomes the enemy. The body fights it and the mind does, too.

So the question becomes, how to build change and challenge into life? Work provides this for me, but it won’t always. Study seems like a perfect substitute: pushing the mind to new frontiers. Or at least that’s the plan. As with so much these days, all I can say is … we’ll see …

Catching Up

Catching Up

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Saturdays are usually for catching up, for buying groceries and running errands, for cleaning the house and doing the laundry. 

Today I’m posting this blog using a new browser, which is a different kind of catching up, the technological kind, one I’m less familiar with and not very good at. The switch is not altogether by choice. It’s been progressively more difficult to write posts using the previous interface, and an older browser wasn’t helping. 

So now there’s a new browser and a new back end for the posting process and … it’s anybody’s guess what this will look like once I press publish. 
Middle-Aged Woman Project

Middle-Aged Woman Project

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A few weeks ago I heard an interview with writer John McPhee on the radio. He was explaining a series of pieces he’s writing for the New Yorker, which he calls his “old man project.”

The idea is that he doesn’t have the time to explore in depth a drive through Spain he made decades ago or a dairy farm in Indiana with 25,000 cows or any number of other ideas he’s been saving up to explore, so he is dipping his toe in them, then moving on.

McPhee is basing his project on a long-ago encounter with a 66-year-old Thornton Wilder, who had decided to catalog all 431 plays of the playwright Lope de Vega. The younger McPhee didn’t understand why Wilder was doing this. The older McPhee does: it’s a project without an end, a way to keep yourself going.

This got me thinking about what I do, am doing, to keep myself going, specifically my writing self. And the answer, right now, is simple: Every day, I write a blog post. And I’ve written one most every day for close to ten years. A Walker in the Suburbs is my Middle-Aged Woman Project.

Suddenly Cool

Suddenly Cool

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It was 37 last night here. I’m tempted to research highs and lows to learn just how long ago it was since we had such a temperature. Back to April, I imagine.

In honor of the brisk air, I’m back in black running tights and sweatshirt — and am wishing for socks that came up farther than my ankles.  Seasonal change may finally be upon us.

I’m no fan of cold weather, but once it’s here, I remember why we need it: to kick the fall foliage into high gear, to energize us — and, more than anything else, to provide variety.

It feels good to pull on tights — not just because they are warm, but because they are different.