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Category: place

Landscapes of Childhood

Landscapes of Childhood

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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? 

Urban Obstacle Course

Urban Obstacle Course

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My one-mile walk to Metro in the afternoon is a study in pedestrian behavior. I became interested in this when I lived in New York, where a rush-hour stroll down Fifth Avenue can be an exercise in start-and-stop frustration.

There are fewer people on D.C. streets but sidewalks can be narrower and walkers slower. So at 5:30 p.m. I must still employ some of the skills I learned in New York: looking for openings in a crowd, gauging the approach of the walker ahead of me, looking down at crucial moments so as not to engage in one of those awkward dances where no one knows whether to go left or right.

If everything works according to plan, I can make it from my office to Metro Center in the same time it would take on the subway.  This produces a lot of satisfaction, some welcome weariness and a renewed appreciation of pedestrian flow.

It’s an urban obstacle course, completed for the day.

Cicadas in the City

Cicadas in the City

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Out the door and down New Jersey Avenue. The familiar arching trees shade the hotel and taxi stand. The Capitol lies ahead; its scaffolding gleams in the noonday sun.

I run for every light, avoid the waits, move as much as possible. It’s the pace that does it, I think — a steady cadence does much to loosen the joints and free up the mind. But scenery helps also, and yesterday’s was perfect. Blue skies, cicadas still singing, all the bustle of early September.

For many years I mourned New York City. Washington, D.C., could never measure up in quirkiness or energy or street life. But in the last several years I’ve mellowed to D.C. I appreciate the cicadas, for instance, and the tall trees that shelter them. Their crescendo is the sound of hot southern cities, a sound that says slow down. No one heeds it, of course, but at least it’s there, mixed in with car horns and sirens.

Time, Place and Prairie

Time, Place and Prairie

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Last weekend at the National Book Festival, author Marilynne Robinson said some things about time and place that I’m still thinking about.

On time: She sets her books 40 to 50 years in the past, she says, because she likes to write about a period when people had less access to each other, more privacy; when they couldn’t always be reached. “I think it made people think differently,” she said. “I like people who think long thoughts.”

On space: A native of the East, the Berkshires, Robinson had to learn to read the landscape of the Midwest. “I find the prairie very beautiful,” she said. But there was was not an automatic affinity. “I wanted my soul to love the landscape.”

In time, she said, it did.

Time for place. And a place that grants time.

Place of Memory

Place of Memory

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A trip to Kentucky, one I wasn’t planning to make, has put me in the place of memory. I came to see my mother, who is improving though still in the hospital. What I found is so much more. It always is.

To be in her house without her is to imagine a future where she is memory. Unimaginable — except it was precisely what I was thinking about when I began the drive out on Monday. Perhaps because I was trying hard not to frighten myself, I arrived here unprepared for the memories this place evokes. By the time I pulled off the interstate onto Paris Pike it was as if I had flown here rather than driven. There was that same abrupt displacement, the same new ways of seeing it provides.

There was Loudoun Avenue and Dad’s old neighborhood. There were the charming cul-de-sacs off North Broadway. And then downtown, the one-way streets still two-way in my mind.

Even the summer air — breathed in deeply after leaving the hospital at 9 p.m. — even it belongs here and nowhere else. I struggle for a way to explain this that makes sense. Is it the way air currents move across old bricks? Is it the breezes that spring up in bluegrass pastureland? Or is it simply because it comes from the place of memory?

Voting for our Feet

Voting for our Feet

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Some folks will pay a premium to walk in the suburbs. Just ask Merrill Lynch. When their lease was up in Rockville, Maryland, they chose to move to the new “mini city” of Pike and Rose — a decision that may have cost them 40 percent more than staying at their office park location.

It’s a decision that’s playing out over and over again in the Washington, D.C.-metro area and across the country. People are voting with their feet — or rather, voting for their feet. They’re paying a premium to live and work where the vibe is urban and the body can move around without being encased in several thousand pounds of steel.

In some ways this isn’t new at all. For centuries — heck, for millennia — humans have gathered to eat, work and walk. We do better when we’re not tied to a desk or an untethered building in the middle of nowhere. We do better together (for the most part). And we do better in motion rather than stasis.

(Detail from the highly walkable city of Annapolis.)