Happy is the day that dawns unexpectedly cool. The door that swings open into rare air.
It is the surprise that matters, expecting heat and humidity in mid-July, unaware of weather reports, of fronts arriving or departing.
When you get something else, something altogether delicious and cleansing, it takes your breath away for a minute.
The world is newborn.
It’s a flag-snapping, low-humidity day, the kind I was hoping to have all month long. Weeping cherry boughs are swaying in the breeze and the back door is open to the sounds of the day, which is strangely bereft of cicada song (more on that, or the lack of that, later).
A walk took me through the neighborhood, up and down the main street and the cul-de-sacs, my new home route: longer, as befits my schedule, and slower, as befits my joints.
Which gave me more time to ponder the grand equation, one seldom acknowledged but always there, somewhat akin to Newton’s Third Law — “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” with a touch of Ecclesiastes — “to everything there is a season.”
In other words, there’s a built-in leveler that sees to it that we are paid back for sweltering humidity with perfect days like these.
What a solid word it is, the ascender and descender anchoring it to the line, the three i’s a constant, the other consonants rounding it out. Though it’s difficult to see the word without the lens of meaning, even its structure seems no-nonsense.
Discipline for so long my way of life, a particular discipline made for the paid workforce. And now, the freedom, intoxicating and terrifying, an end to the regimentation I chafed against for years.
And yet, some discipline still. In some ways even more, but of a different type, one that I devise and (I hope) enforce.
Discipline so different it seems to require a new word. Not control, structure or regulation. None of those will do. Some word I’ve yet to come up with.
I’ll let you know when I do.
(A deer spotted up close on yesterday’s walk, which has nothing much to do with discipline but was a photo I had handy.)
I have a habit of not wanting to leave the places I’m visiting, and yesterday I almost didn’t. Confusion about departure times meant we missed our original return flight. Luckily, we were re-routed to another airport and finally made it home — though six hours later than planned.
The first hours and days back after a trip are always a strange time. Life is mostly as it was but with subtle differences. The old house touches my heart with its creaky floors and familiarity. I don’t have to wonder when I wake up, where am I now? I can tell by the placement of lamp and beside table, by the feel of the covers under my chin.
But the trip has altered the house and the gaze with which I see it. The roses in Portland are part of me now, the walk around Lake Union in Seattle, too. The Japanese Garden and the Japanese American Museum, Cherry Street and Alberta Street — they’re all in there. The crusty bread and the little dogs.
It has been almost a year with no travel. The world of house and yard were closing in on me. But now … the world is big again.
Sometimes all it takes is a short stroll to open the mind and senses to the day ahead. Today I took the long way around to the newspaper — out the back door, down the deck stairs, around the garden and through the gate and side yard to the driveway where it lay, double-bagged in orange.
The ground is hard and cracked, given two weeks without moisture, which made it easy for me to amble out there in my (sturdily-soled) slippers. Weather folks say we need the rain, but I say we need the dryness. The yard is finally not a lake anymore.
On my short expedition, I found several sticks that I broke over my knee and stuck in the bin for tomorrow’s yard waste pickup. I noted the fine pruning of the hollies, which no longer graze the garage. I heard the tiny peeps of birds fluttering awake in the azaleas. And I spotted swollen buds on the forsythia.
It’s a new day, these details said. Embrace it!
Today is International Woman’s Day, one of the 31 days that comprise Women’s History Month, and one of many observation days we celebrate at Winrock International.
It is also a day I dubbed “PossibiliDay” back in 2017, when I’d been at my then-new job almost a year and was celebrating the freedom of my new work and an awakening to the power of possibility.
This year, March 8 feels far more International Woman’s Day than “PossibiliDay,” a fact I attribute to almost five years in this position, the last one spent working entirely at home.
But this is okay, I tell myself. Because the point of “PossibiliDay” is not to mark it every year. It’s to remember that possibilities lurk where we least expect them — and to take heart from that fact.
The fluffy white stuff we were (sort of) promised yesterday has turned out to be a bunch of crunchy ice crystals instead. It’s a sleet storm, not a snow storm, that’s greeting Fairfax County this morning.
So what to do? You can’t sled on it, can’t walk through it, can’t drive in it, can’t even admire it as it falls.
To put on my optimistic hat (oh my, it’s getting a lot of wear these days, since I only pull it out when natural optimism fails to respond), we are not getting freezing rain, which is what pelted us all day Saturday. Sleet does not coat tree limbs and bring them down.
Let’s praise sleet then not for what it does … but for what it fails to do.
(A photo of what we don’t have this morning.)
If there are seven degrees of separation, then are there not seven degrees of isolation? I’m thinking about the world as we know it: working remotely, separated from friends, too cold for outside get-togethers … and now further set apart by rain, snow, sleet and an anticipated ice storm.
I suppose it’s easier in one sense. We now have multiple reasons for staying at home. But that doesn’t warm the heart when the heart is accustomed to the stimulation and richness of a life fully lived.
What is called for, I suppose, is seven degrees of patience: hoping, praying, reading, writing, baking, cleaning — and of course, dancing. You can’t forget about that last one. It’s the most important of all.
Eleven years ago today, on another snowy Super Bowl Sunday, I started this blog. It was something I’d been meaning to do for years, but the windfall of time made possible by a weather disruption gave me the space I needed to make the resolution come true.
I still remember sitting on the couch, setting up the blog account, finding it easier than I thought. I had the title in mind, and a rough idea of what I wanted to say (though it would take months to learn how to size the photos), but it came together with the ease of something that was meant to be. It seemed to me then, and on good days still seems to be … magic.
Magic occurs when ideas have the room and reception to put down roots and grow. “Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest,” writes the author and memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert. “And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner.”
For eleven years, I’ve partnered with the idea of A Walker in the Suburbs, writing about walking and place and books and family life. I’m glad it came to visit me, this idea. But most of all, I’m grateful I chose to welcome it.
I noticed them the minute I stepped out of the house on Sunday. There was no evidence of humans making their way through the newly fallen snow — but a world of animal tracks greeted me on that still morning.
Tiny bird footprints, the skittering marks of a squirrel or chipmunk, and the more dog-like paw prints of our local fox. Whether hopping, scampering or loping, these animals left their marks.
We think of snow as a covering, coating the verges and leaf piles, making smooth the weed-strewn and the bald-patched.
But snow reveals as well as conceals. It tells us who was here and, if we pay attention, how recently. It’s a blank white slate on which movements make their mark.