Browsed by
Category: place

Wednesday Walk

Wednesday Walk

Comments 0 Comment

There wasn’t much time, a window between 1 and 2. I left a pile of papers on my desk, a long list of to-dos. Wrapped a scarf around my neck and found a brisk playlist. Bernstein’s Overture to Candide followed by a Renaissance number followed by one of my faves, the last movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. 

It was my standard stroll: left on E and right on New Jersey, the trees overhanging the sidewalk there, the circular drive of the Hyatt Hotel, the Capitol swathed in its scaffolding. Around it to First.

A flock of blackbirds flung themselves at the Japanese pagoda tree. They appeared to be eating something. Does that tree have fruit? Must investigate.

The Supreme Court loomed ahead in all its stony majesty.  No crowd there today, no protesters, barely a guard to be seen. I thought as I always do at the trail spot — how beautiful D.C. is in winter, the contrast of dark trees against white buildings.

Behind the Capitol, two vehicles normally used to ferry tourists sat forlorn and unused, nose to nose. A police officer tugged at his parka, flapped his arms. On this day there was one enemy, and it was the cold.

Still, a few brave swaddled souls were walking about as I was. Most of us caught each others eyes and smiled. It was that kind of day.

Half Hidden

Half Hidden

Comments 0 Comment

This is a good year for ornamental cabbage, its creamy centers unblemished by frost spots or drought. I noticed a stand of these plants on my walk yesterday. Light pink shading to ivory, edged by sage green.

I stared hard at them as I passed, lost myself momentarily in their spiky beauty so that I could re-create them on the page this morning. A type of stillness in their leafy flower. “A violet by a mossy stone, half hidden from the eye,” in Wordsworth’s style.

Later I would stroll past the Capitol and the Supreme Court, philosophies etched in stone, all the grandeur of official Washington.

But what stayed in mind were the cabbage plants, their quiet beauty, their brave salute to winter.

Sunsets in Arlington

Sunsets in Arlington

Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday I saw the house where Suzanne and Appolinaire will live. It sits on a ridge in Arlington where, on a wintry day when the house across the street has been torn down and the new, big one not yet built in its place, you can almost see the Capitol dome and the red light atop the Washington Monument.

It’s an amazing situation, made possible by the generosity and hard work of two dear friends (who live next door). And the more of the place Suzanne and Appolinaire saw yesterday, the wider their eyes became.

This is not your typical one-bedroom apartment in the boonies or crowded share in Columbia Heights. This is kismet — perhaps what you get after living for years without electricity or running water.

Whatever the reason, come January, the happy couple will move in and inherit not only an enviable, close-in location but also an untrammeled view of the western sky.  A bank of kitchen windows will see to it that they end each day with views like this. And if I know them as well as I think they do, they will end each day feeling as blessed as they do now.

The Great Migration

The Great Migration

Comments 0 Comment

I’d wanted to read The Warmth of Other Suns for years, from when I first heard about it. I knew little about the movement of African Americans from the South to the North other than that it occurred.

I hadn’t realized the time frame of the migration — that it lasted from World War well into the 1960s. And I was unprepared for the calmly recited horrors of the Jim Crow South that drove people North and West.

The three people author Isabel Wilkerson chooses to follow — chooses after conducting more than 1,200 interviews — talked with her over days, weeks and years. They shared every detail of the fearful, stunted lives they left behind and the hardscrabble lives they found when they arrived.  We take the train with Ida Mae and her family as they head to Chicago and with George as he escapes to New York. We ride along with Pershing later known as Robert as he drives across the country fighting sleep because few motels accepted black guests.

Wilkerson accompanied the three on trips to visit friends and family, back to the southern lands they left behind. She visited them in the hospital and attended their funerals. She knew their dreams and disappointments.

So it was with no small measure of authority that at the end of the book Wilkerson could write:

The three who had come out of the South were left widowed but solvent, and each found some measure of satisfaction because whatever had happened to them, however things had unfolded, it had been of their own choosing, and they could take comfort in that. They believed with all that was in them that they were better off for having made the Migration, that they may have made many mistakes in their lives, but leaving the South had not been one of them.

(Tens of thousands of emigres from the South moved to Harlem in New York City.)

Neigh!

Neigh!

Comments 0 Comment

Though I live in the suburbs, there are rural aspects to my neighborhood. Septic systems rather than sewers. A stubborn attachment to winding two-lane roads. And then there are the farms behind the houses across the street.

These are not big operations with silos and combines. These are not even the “gentleman farms” I got to know in New England. (Now those are my kind of spreads — picturesque orchards run by retired heads of English Departments.)

These are four-acre parcels with houses of varying value. Some still have the original ranches and split-foyers, but most have large multi-gabled mansions that were built after the originals were torn down.

Sometimes I walk on the trails that wind through this neighborhood. I imagine the kind of place I’d like to have — herbs, flowers, chickens, a writing cabin in the back — nothing profitable, of course. I while away time moseying and fantasizing.

But usually, before I get home, something has brought me up short. Maybe it’s a prickle-bush barring entry to a favorite cut-through. Or a pile of manure I notice too late. Some bit of rural reality that intrudes on my fantasies. “Neigh,” say the horses in the pasture.

Nay, indeed.

Landscapes of Childhood

Landscapes of Childhood

Comments 0 Comment

“We think it essential that a 5-year-old learn to read, but perhaps it is as important for a child to learn to read a landscape,” says Washington Post columnist Adrian Higgins in his article “The British Forest That Gave Life to Pooh.”

Higgins is the Post‘s gardening columnist, and he came to this topic after reading The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh, a new book by Kathryn Aalto. Aalto is a garden designer who spent time in the places where A.A. Milne lived with his wife and young son Christopher Robin. Milne drew on these landscapes to create his fictional world. There was the walnut tree that housed Pooh, and Owl’s aerie in an ancient beech. There was the real Five Hundred Acre Wood.

The beauty of the English landscape — and Milne’s memories of his own childhood decades earlier — made its way into the stories, and as such stands as a testimony not only to the power of topography but also to how important it is in the life of the imagination.

“As important as the Pooh stories remain, they speak to something of greater value, the importance of landscapes to children, places they return to, places they own, places to stage their own dramas, and places that imprint themselves on the mind,” Higgins writes.

I found these landscapes in the broad bluegrass meadows of central Kentucky, my children found them in the yards and woods of suburban Virginia. It doesn’t take a 500-acre wood; sometimes just an empty lot will do.

Walkers Awake

Walkers Awake

Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday I walked to Metro in an almost rain that required almost an umbrella — but you could get away without one. It was  refreshing.

A misty gloaming, the end of a deluge, meant that those who were fed up with the pelting had given up on any barrier between them and the sky.

And then you had people like me, people cooped up in an office all day and glad for the feel of the elements, any elements.

So I walked quickly, thinking I could dodge the occasional fat drop or two. In my ears the Bach cantata “Sleepers Awake.” Trumpet soaring; organ chords giving me a rhythm for footfall, a walking bass line. I let the contrapuntal melody move me forward.

It took three and a half plays of “Sleepers Awake” to reach Metro Center. I was a little damp but no worse for the wear.

Schuylkill River Walk

Schuylkill River Walk

Comments 0 Comment

The meeting ended a few hours before the Northeast Regional left 30th Street Station so I had enough time to stroll from my West Philly hotel, down Chestnut to 34th, then Spruce, then across the Schuylkill to the walk that runs beside it.

It was Friday afternoon, sun had broken through the clouds, and the temperature was about 70. I joined the baby-stroller-joggers, cyclists, skateboarders and others heading north along the river.

I almost went to the Barnes Museum — one of the Philadelphia’s new premier attractions — but I like to think that in walking we get a glimpse of the true city, the one that exists beneath the attractions.

There were glimpses of skyline with tall grasses in the foreground, there was the sun striking the water; there were all the people and conversations. There was, above all, the joy of moving through space, a space new to me, thrilling in its unknowns.

View from DAR

View from DAR

Comments 0 Comment

A wedding Saturday at the Daughters of the American Revolution headquarters building in downtown D.C. Temperature in the 60s, crisp flag flying, the Washington Monument etched pure and clean against an October sky. This is what I saw from my seat on the portico.

You know, you live here for a while, you deal with the traffic and the cost of living and the general headaches of a major metropolitan area — and you forget, far too often you forget, the beauty.

But on Saturday I didn’t forget. How could I? I took it in, deep breaths full of it. And I took a few photos to preserve it.

Papal Aura

Papal Aura

Comments 0 Comment

It is difficult to know that the Pope, the bishop of Rome and shepherd of the Roman Catholic Church, will be speaking less than a mile from where I’m sitting now and there’s no way to be present for it.

Even being on the West Lawn of the Capitol to see the Pope on Jumbotron is not an option. Those tickets went in less than an hour.

So this morning I’ll watch via live stream on my computer as the Pope address the U.S. Congress. I’ll sit quietly and absorb the papal aura. Watching clips from his appearances yesterday it’s hard to be unmoved by the outpouring of love and admiration for the pontiff, and by his smile and jauntiness in return, by his relish for the crowd and his appreciation of the American spirit.

Already some have attributed a stateside miracle to His Holiness. Roads are empty, Metro cars, too. The Pope has given us what we thought was impossible: an easy commute. If he can do this, who knows what else he can accomplish?