On a walk my first day back I marveled at the transformation. When I left for vacation, school was still in session and early heat was still battling spring chill. But now it is full-on summer.
On the lake, fishermen wait patiently for a nibble. Children cavort on canoes and paddle boards. Sunbathers turn their towels toward the sun. Shade is deep and wide; the walker seeks it when she can.
The place I live no longer feels like a suburb. It feels like a camp.
Today, Memorial Day falls on Memorial Day — May 30, that is. Perhaps it is doubly Memorial Day, then, Memorial Day x 2.
I looked for photos of Washington, D.C., to celebrate the occasion and came up with these from a nighttime visit to the monuments with work colleagues in October of 2018.
Notice how the emblems of our democracy shine out as darkness surrounds them. Perhaps a fitting metaphor for this day, this year.
Like Johnny Appleseed, Daniel Boone is part legend, and many of the images we have of him are false. He did not wear a coonskin cap, did not discover Cumberland Gap and was not the first settler to arrive in Kentucky.
But he did guide many through the Gap and he, more than anyone else, helped settle the Bluegrass State. In fact, one of the chief ironies of Boone’s life (1734-1820) is that he, more than anyone else, helped ruin the wilderness he loved.
The Daniel Boone that emerges from Robert Morgan’s biography is a bright, humble, kind man, a woodsman more at home in the forest than anywhere else and as sympathetic to Native Americans as most any of his generation.
Often in debt, Boone learned the hard way that his personality was better suited to the edges of civilization than to its midst. But not before he may have had this realization, Morgan writes:
By 1788 the irony could not have been lost on Boone that he, as much as any other single human being, had helped create the world that was now repugnant to him, so raging and relentless in growth and greed. And he must have seen, perhaps for the first time, the contradiction and conflict at the heart of so much of his effort: to lead white people into the wilderness and make it safe for them was to destroy the very object of his quest.
(Boone’s first view of Kentucky by William Tylee Ranney, 1849, courtesy Wikipedia)
When I wrote Saturday’s post, which only alluded to the Derby, I didn’t know what a Derby it would be. Didn’t know that friends and family would be calling and texting to share their amazement. Didn’t know that Rich Strike, the horse with the second-longest odds ever, would win the race.
What I had forgotten until my brother reminded me yesterday was that the horse who won with the longest odds ever was Donerail, 91-1, named for Donerail Station in Scott County, Kentucky. It’s a horse I’ve heard about since I was a child, a horse Mom would have bet on, for sure, if only she had been alive and of betting age at the time (1913).
As the descendants of both Donnellys and Scotts, as the proud daughter of a long-shot bettor, as a fan of hopeless causes everywhere, Rich Strike, I salute you!
It’s the first Saturday in May, the one day of the year when Kentucky takes center stage in the sporting world. But this first Saturday in May I’m thinking of a different sort of Kentucky and Kentuckian. I’m knee-deep into Boone: A Biography by Robert Morgan.
I’ve been learning a lot about my home state. For instance, the name doesn’t necessarily mean “dark and bloody ground.” It could be Shawnee for “at the head of the river.” Or Wyandotte for “the land of tomorrow.” Or Iroquois for “the meadow land”—kenta (level) and aki (place).
That one makes the most sense: it captures the open savannah for which the Bluegrass region is known.
But whatever the origin, Morgan says, “some words have a resonance, a color, and are memorable even before we know what they mean. We love to say them just to feel them in the air and on our tongue.”
Amen, Mr. Morgan.
A few days ago I met a friend for lunch in D.C. I parked in the Union Station garage and made my way past the old neighborhood: New Jersey and 1st Avenue, along E Street to the National Building Museum, where I stole a glance at those stunning columns.
From there to Chinatown, bustling again, though with way too many boarded-up stores. The restaurant we chose was still in business, though, and lively, to boot.
After that, a stroll down the Mall and over to the Botanic Garden and a cool outdoor exhibit/structure made of brush, a human-sized nest that kids were running in and out of.
I love the views of the Capitol you get from the Garden. It humanizes and softens the building, makes it seem more a part of the landscape. Which, of course, it certainly is.
A burst of warm weather is greening the trees and fast-forwarding the azaleas. But two days ago, you could still take a walk around Lake Audubon in full-bore sun; almost none of the leaf cover that normally closets and cozies that trail was out on Tuesday. Which made for some strangely open vistas.
It was a different kind of experience. I admired the views, but I felt exposed.
It made me think that we grow accustomed to certain sceneries in certain weathers, and not having them unsettles us.
Perhaps it is during these off-kilter times, in these unsettling moments, that we see things clearly.
Whenever I’m in Lexington I make the pilgrimage and drive to the houses where I grew up. Unlike my own children, who know only this much-loved and much-battered center-hall colonial, I had three places to call home.
My sister and I drove past one of them last month. It’s a house I lived in only two-and-a-half years, the one I returned to from college and my early work years in Chicago. But though my time in the house was short, it left a big impression.
I’m not used to seeing the house from the back, but we drove down a cul-de-sac that gave us this view, that showed us the deck that’s been added, the trees that have grown up in the decades we’ve been gone.
When I look at this photo, I see not just a ranch-style house with a walk-out basement and steep driveway, but the rooms inside … and the people who used to live in them.
If I’m lucky, I arrive on the Georgetown campus in time to hear the bells of Healy Hall toll the Angelus. It makes an already timeless experience feel even more so.
The bells were tolling last night as I walked to class past the old stone buildings through a cool and soggy evening.
I thought about a passage from Thomas Cahill’s Mysteries of the Middle Ages, which details a 1219 visit between Saint Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil of Egypt, Palestine and Syria.
Some scholars think that it was then that Francis came up with the idea of tolling the Angelus bells at 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m. — the Christian version of the Muslim call to prayer. A likely story, and maybe just that, a story. But it was easy to believe it when the bells were ringing.
I’ve visited Washington, D.C.’s cherry blossoms a couple dozen times through the years, but this is the first time I’ve seen them through the lens of a good camera.
Though I am a novice photographer, I’m an expert blossom-navigator. I can slip through crowds, skip over puddles and keep moving through the inevitable hordes of tourists.
Yesterday the Tidal Basin gave back with picture-perfect weather, peak-bloom blossoms, and the picnickers, strollers and flower-lovers that made this the place to be in the DMV.
