A Walker in the Suburbs

Tom showed me a chart in the newspaper on New Year’s Eve, a chart that recorded the highs and lows, the improbable multiple dips and rises of the stock market in 2011. Funny thing was, it ended right where it began at the end of 2010.

There is cause for celebration in this. For the patient investor, obviously, who finds that — yes! — he still has a retirement fund. But for all of us who think we have fallen far when really we’re stuck in the same place.

I don’t like being stuck, stuck isn’t good. But it’s better than the alternative. So here’s a toast to all of us who, for whatever reason, find ourselves this year right where we were last year. We know what we have to do; now we just have to do it.

The rain pounded and the winds roared but our trees remained upright and true. By mid Sunday morning, the sun was shining and the wind had blown in blue skies and puffy clouds. I took my camera for a walk and snapped photos of grasses blowing in the wind, late summer flowers nodding on their stalks and this one, of a pond near us.

It is an ordinary view made extraordinary by the quality of the air yesterday, pellucid and scrubbed clean. It was as if the true nature of the place was shining through.

I pass this pond several times a week, but now I will see, layered over its everyday clothes, this view — the pond decked out in its Sunday best.

I hadn’t ridden Metro in 10 days and my first day back brought a delay. “This train is being off-loaded. Everyone out,” the conductor shouted. So we grabbed our bags and backpacks and joined the crush of other commuters on the platform.

It was dark and steamy. Passengers were not happy. It’s one thing to end your day with an off-load; starting it that way, when you’re morning crisp, is especially trying.

Then it dawned on me. Yes, it was already 80 at 7 a.m., but I was close enough to walk to the office. So I maneuvered my way down the platform and up the escalator to the outside world. The sidewalks were wide and the morning was bright. There was a faint breeze. I was out of the tunnel and could see far ahead.

Vacations, even short ones, show me the edges of things, reveal ways around obstacles. They help me see that I am not trapped.

Photo: PublicDomainPictures.net

“How do you like to go up in a swing
Up in the air so blue.
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!”

Robert Louis Stevenson

I love the little poem in A Child’s Garden of Verses from which these lines are drawn. I recited it on stage at age six and read it often to our girls when they were young. Lines from it pop into my head whenever I go “up in a swing” myself.

Maybe it’s the residual kid in me but I still like to swing. There’s something about moving through the air, seeing the landscape from such a moveable perch, that is uniquely satisfying. Movement enhances vision, I suppose.

Of course, swinging doesn’t come as easily as it used to. It isn’t that I can’t pump my legs or move my arms. It’s that swinging gives me motion sickness. After a few minutes I have to hop off until the world stops spinning.

But the pleasure is worth the pain. There are few activitiess that provide as direct a link to childhood as this one. So I found a two-swing set in a neighborhood to our south. It’s tucked away in the woods (notice I’m not divulging the exact location), and it does not have a ridiculous sign like this one. There I can swing to my heart’s content and my head’s tolerance. Which means about, oh, five minutes or so.

Oprah Magazine used to contain a double-page spread photograph of a windswept beach or mountain peak or other natural scene. It was called “Breathing Space.” I loved the photos and I loved the concept. The generous bestowal of two pages with no advertising, no text, just a picture. It really was a breathing space.
Maye I’m just missing it, but I don’t see “Breathing Space” in Oprah anymore. So today I offer my own breathing space. Pause here a minute to catch your breath.

We haven’t fed the birds since we brought our dog, Copper, home from the Loudoun County Humane Society three years ago. Copper is part border collie, part basset hound. While he’s never harassed our beloved parakeet Hermes (who’s always in his cage, swinging from a hook in the kitchen), he does love to chase small critters in the backyard. But the snow and ice have been so brutal for wild birds that we’ve thrown some seed on the table and the deck railing. We’ve mostly had junkos, little gray things with a flash of white under their tails, so brave in the face of cold and ice, hopping the snowbanks on their little stick legs. As I watch them from the kitchen window, I think of how winter opens our eyes to what is usually hidden. It is, in that sense, the true season of renewal.