The moon was with me this morning as I drove to the airport, so early and so long ago now that it seems like another week.
And the moon was with me later, a pale disc as I zoomed down I-66 on my way to school.
The moon is with me still, in this photo (not a very good one, I’m sorry to say), growing ever brighter as I walked through a darkening campus on my way to class.
The moon will be full tomorrow … but it’s hard to see how it could be any fuller.
It was just above freezing yesterday when I set off through the woods down a path that leads to our sister neighborhood on Westwood Hills Drive. I had walked there a couple weeks ago and admired the forest views, the courts and cul-de-sacs, the feeling of being on the other side of the looking glass. But I’d driven to that walk. This one was solely by shank’s mare.
Finding new ways to escape the neighborhood on foot is becoming a minor obsession. I enjoy the great suburban irony — driving to walk — but still like to subvert it whenever possible.
Yesterday’s walk was a pleasing mix of sedate street and woodland trail. The ground was thawing in the latter and mud was a factor (my shoes were banished to the garage after the stroll). But I plunged on, making a large loop through the still, spare, monochromatic landscape.
Now that winter is settling in, it’s decided to give us another dollop of snow to freshen up the batch we received on Monday. Which means I’ve been scanning the clouds.
Yesterday we had a swirled and mottled firmament, a stingy winter sky. Though it was a montage of clearing and melting, the sky kept its distance.
At about 3 in the afternoon, between errands, I looked up and thought: This is all the light we’re going to see. It’s a sober realization but also a practical one. In weather, as in life, it’s good to know what you have.
This morning I awoke to the house at rest, a house that somehow held 22 people for a sit-down Thanksgiving dinner yesterday.
An outside table was pulled in, borrowed chairs were tucked under it, and the best china was pulled from its sleeves, dusted off and actually used.
Today, I could do some Black Friday shopping, I could catch up with classwork …. or, I could do what I most want to do, which is to look out my office window at clouds scudding across the sky.
I learned through weekend wanderings that famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted once turned his attention to my hometown.
He and his brother, as the marker explains, had a hand in designing Transylvania Park, where the lovely Lexington Library once reigned; Ashland Park, where I spotted this sign; and Woodland Park, one of my favorite haunts.
It doesn’t surprise me. These places may not be the Chicago World’s Fair or Central Park (two of Olmsted’s more well-known accomplishments), but in them the built and natural environments work together. They have a beauty and a presence — a sense of having always been there.
A walk this morning before the rain moved in: tall grasses swaying, leaf piles growing. I love to walk in Lexington because, at least where I stroll, no two houses are alike.
Chinquapin oak leaves litter brick sidewalks, and a ground cover I’m not familiar with froths around the base of a tree.
The variations are a feast for the eye and a balm for the brain.
The Washington and Old Dominion (W&OD) Rails to Trails path was bustling late yesterday when I finally made my way to it. There were runners and walkers and cyclists, mostly the latter zooming by with a brisk warning of “passing on the left.”
I slipped into what I always think of as the “bridle path” part of the trail, the unpaved route that runs alongside the asphalt. But due to the bridges over Herndon and Fairfax County Parkways, I couldn’t always stay on that calmer and less traveled path.
What I could do was to focus on the scenery I passed: the changing colors of the deciduous trees.
The subtle beauty of the shaggy undergrowth … and the sun setting way too early, once again.
I took a stroll late yesterday through the gloaming, the exquisite though way-too-early gloaming — I was walking between 4 and 5! — then came home and wrote these words:
The late fall light is draining quickly from the sky and a bright near-half moon showing itself. There are the most delicate of evening sounds: a few hardy crickets, the bird that says “Judy” (did I determine that’s a wren?) and various human-caused sounds — a pinging that could have come from a small forge but was likely a kid banging on a pipe — the distant downshift of a passing truck. But none of these sounds disturbed the peacefulness of the landscape. They only enhanced it.
Some of the shorter shrubs have lost most of their leaves. Those that remain seem to be offering themselves for viewing, like golden coins on a platter. Back on my street, the russets and scarlets of the maples and oaks shimmered in the twilight.
Night falls fast this time of year, but when it’s warm, as it has been today, that doesn’t seem to matter as much.
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.
Although you might not think it, there are hills around here, inclines that push walkers and cyclists into overdrive. These are not the hills of Seattle rising like cartoon mountains, making a hazard of rolling suitcases and winding the faint-hearted in just one block. These are more subtle gradients, but gradients just the same.
It dawned on me lately while walking up a steep rise that it’s the piedmont at work. The land we inhabit here on the western edge of Fairfax County is just past the fall line of the Potomac. Virginia hunt country lies nearby.
We live in the northern Piedmont region, literally at the foot of the mountains, those mountains being the Blue Ridge, which you can see rising like gray ghosts a quarter mile from here if the weather is clear.
It’s comforting to think, as I chug up a steep grade, that I’m not just out of shape … I’m hiking the Piedmont.