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Olmsted in Kentucky

Olmsted in Kentucky

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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.

Feast for the Eye

Feast for the Eye

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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. 

Some are traditional, others contemporary. Windows are mullioned or plain. Doors arched or square.

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.

In Kentucky

In Kentucky

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I drove to Kentucky yesterday, following the new route through the mountains. For the first few hours, I took in the late-fall color on the gleaming hillsides. But by early afternoon, I had driven into the predicted cold front. 

Dark clouds gathered above the huge windmills, and strong gusts sent leaves swirling and scudding across the highway. The rain started when I was at about 3,000 feet, lightly at first, then heavier by the time I reached the interstate. 

It was not the bucolic drive I had in August, when I stopped to admire the mountain views. This was a no-nonsense-just-get-me-there kind of trip. 

And it worked. I pulled into the driveway just as the last light was draining from the sky. 

Immersed in Van Gogh

Immersed in Van Gogh

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“I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.”

Vincent Van Gogh

The Van Gogh immersive experience begins as soon as you walk in the door and are greeted with a wall of sunflowers, or, I should say, a larger-than-life Van Gogh-like depiction of them. A few steps away is a bust of the painter that morphs from black and gray shadows to the swirled blues and lavenders of his flowers.

You pass a re-creation of the room at Arles, complete down to the washstand and window and hat hanging from a peg on the wall. Take a photo of the room and you’ve created a masterpiece.

There are videos on the artist’s life, his hospitalization, self-mutilation and eventual suicide. And there is music: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, something by Debussy, others I couldn’t place, all soaring and emotive.

But the best is saved for last, when you walk into the final gallery and find yourself a part of the paintings. You stand or sit or recline on the floor while the art comes alive around you, pages slide off easels, stars explode in the night, and a hundred sunflowers bloom against a lapis lazuli sky. 

Dancing in the Streets

Dancing in the Streets

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I read this morning of the return of 26 pieces of history from France to Benin. The return was celebrated with dancing and singing and general merriment. There were thrones, statues and other artifacts, all taken by France from what was then its colony of Dahomey, all of them finally home after more than a century of exile.

Since some of my family hail from Benin, this is big news. And since I’ve been to that wonderful country, I have a small sense of what it must have been like to see the big truck pull up, the decorated horses and riders escorting it to the presidential palace, the jubilation of the people.

There are plenty more looted treasures to be returned, and it sounds as if Benin is fighting for those, too. But for now, for one small country tucked between the Sahel and the sea, there is dancing in the streets. 

(At the Voodoo Festival in Benin, January 2015)

Driving Day

Driving Day

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It’s been a driving day — not a Sunday-drive kind of driving day but a rush-to-the-dentist-then-run-errands kind of driving day.

It’s been the kind of driving day when I look longingly out the window as I zoom past side trails I’ve strolled, imagining what it would be like to be on them rather than behind the wheel of a car. 

I’ve smelled the pine needles, pushed a low-hanging branch out of my way, even felt the fine feathery tendrils of a spider web. 

But all the while I was really cruising down Main Street, Chain Bridge Road, the Beltway. I was in Fairfax and Vienna and Tysons Corner. Everywhere and nowhere, which is how it is when you’re driving. All the while racing to get home … so I can walk.

The Piedmont

The Piedmont

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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.

Exorcist Stairs

Exorcist Stairs

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Even watching the trailer sends chills down my spine, so I will probably not be watching “The Exorcist” this Halloween. But tonight I will be attending class right next to the “Exorcist Stairs,” the Washington, D.C. landmark where the movie’s final scene was filmed. 

In this scene, Father Miller, who’s attempting to rid the 12-year-old Regan of the demon, falls from Regan’s window down these narrow steps to his death. According to Culture Trip, the stuntman assigned this task had to fall down the stairs twice to perfect the scene. 

I found the stairs a couple weeks ago after walking past them earlier in my rush to get to class. But once a classmate told me where they were, I made a point to walk them the next week. 

I’m happy to say that I did not fall. But I did huff and puff a little. And I definitely felt a sinister vibe. The stairs are steep and creepy, just as billed, and apparently, if you try to count them, you’ll never come up with the same number twice. 

Vienna Walk

Vienna Walk

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I found myself in Vienna last Friday. Not Vienna, Austria (though that would have been nice) but Vienna, Virginia, which is 20 minutes from my house, a place I often pass through on my way to somewhere else.

There is a strange disconnect to walk along streets one usually drives, sort of like flipping a video from regular play into slow-mo. 

There is the house on the corner lot with its split-rail fence and funky upstairs addition — but instead of zipping by it I can see the details, the little upstairs deck with its wrought-iron tables and unmatched chairs.

There are streets whose names elude me at 35 miles per hour: Garrett and Malcolm and Holmes. Solid middle-class names, though their neighborhoods are ones made pricey by their (mostly) large lots and desirable location within walking distance of Metro (back when that mattered). 

I ambled along Center and Lawyers, past Salsbury Spring, which was the only source of water for the area during the drought of 1930. I saw the place with new eyes after learning that, felt a little more connected to this place I (almost) call home. 

First Hill

First Hill

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Seattle is a city of neighborhoods, and I’m getting to know them. Today we toured the Central District (in hard hats, no less!), then lunched in Capitol Hill. Several mornings I’ve hiked along the waterfront. I also visited Green Lake and Woodland Park. 

But I’ve spent most of my time in Seattle’s first neighborhood, First Hill, also called Pill Hill because of the hospitals here. 

I’ve trudged up steep grades and sidled through shortcuts. I’ve spotted fewer tents under I-5 but heard more sirens heading up to Harborview. 

It’s an urban neighborhood with all that implies, but there’s a gentility beneath the grime. Here are leafy lanes and named apartments buildings, an old German deli on Madison and a cathedral garden behind St. James.

I leave today with the smell of the city in my pores and the pitch of the hills in my calves. And I leave … from First Hill.