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Category: place

A Building is Born

A Building is Born

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This morning on my way to work I didn’t have to cross the street and cross it again a block later. I didn’t have to walk around a construction site. It seems that finally, finally, the new building is finished.

I’ve watched it fall and rise again, gutted, framed and windowed. The old building was indistinguishable from its brothers, another stone box. This new version is mostly glass, it seems. Shiny and bright, but I’m wondering how it will hold up.

No matter, though. I’m just relieved that my path here is not impeded, that cranes don’t swing across the sky, that First Street no longer narrows to one lane.

It happens all the time, I know, but usually not so close to home. And when it does, it’s worth mentioning: A building is born.

Place, Unexpected

Place, Unexpected

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So I’m reading along in Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, a re-telling of the last months of Thomas Cromwell’s life, riveted by her story of intrigue in the court of King Henry VIII, not expecting a discussion of place, when I find this:

He [Cromwell] is buying land in the lusher parts of England, but he has no leisure to visit it; so these farms, these ancient manors in their walled gardens, these watercourses with their little quays, these ponds with their gilded fish rising to the hook; these vineyards, flower dens, arbours and walks, remain to him flat, each one a paper construct, a set of figures on a page of accounts: not sheep-nibbled margins, nor meadows where kine stand knee-deep in grass, not coppices nor groves where a white doe shivers, a hoof poised; but parchment domains, leases and freeholds delimited by inky clauses, not by ancient hedges, or boundary stones.

 Here is a longing for place that is ancient but real, the pull of the city-dweller toward the bucolic retreat, the dream of land when land is owned but not possessed.

How many of us moderns feel the same?

Edging

Edging

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A walker notices boundaries. Often in the suburbs these boundaries are sidewalks, and often in the suburbs these sidewalks are edged.

And so … a brief meditation on edging, on the dividing line between concrete and soil, on the tendrils that can spread themselves across the border and on the neat way some homeowners have of highlighting this divide. 

The tool (perhaps it’s called an edger?!) that wedges itself between lawn and walkway or the whirring blade that separates weeds from lawn. Surely these are born of a need to cultivate, to order and refresh.

Though it’s easy to trip on edges, to twist the ankle or wedge the shoe, one has to admire the diligence with which some homeowners keep the wild world at bay.

I used to think edging was silly. Now I’m not so sure.

Sidewalks Gleaming

Sidewalks Gleaming

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Wet pavement, steam rising — an urban phenomenon I’d forgotten until I started disembarking two stops early and walking a mile through the city some mornings. It’s the ritual hosing of the sidewalk to start the day.

There is some pride of place here. The rest of the city can get by with grit and grime, but not our patch of pavement. It will be clean, rinsed by the waters of dawn, sun barely glinting above the horizon.

Some custodians, the polite ones, pause briefly to let pedestrians tiptoe through the puddles. Others dare you to cross.

Though a temporary annoyance, it’s all for the best. It’s a salutation, a baptism, a way to start the day.



(Pretend you can see the sidewalks in this picture.)

Place, Continued

Place, Continued

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I love it here. If this place was a boy or a girl, I would marry it. Maybe it’ll be legal to marry places one day. And if so, then I will marry this one.

— Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

The Interestings begins at a summer camp, where a group of artistic kids meet, give themselves the (ironic) name “the interestings” and forge friendships that will last all their lives. It’s a book that explores what it means to be talented and what it takes to build a happy life.

The line that grabbed me was spoken by a 15-year-old dancer about to be sent home from camp because of an eating disorder. She’s a minor character, the second generation the reader gets to see at the camp, but her experience mirrors that of “the interestings.”

The feeling she describes, an ecstatic connection with place, is probably as much about people as anything else. But haven’t we all felt that way once or twice, coming upon a town or a vista or an old house in the country to which we feel an immediate attraction?

It’s not always rational or easy to maintain, but it is real.

Door, Wall and Flower

Door, Wall and Flower

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Art imitates life imitates art. The door bedecked with flowers, a variety of hydrangea, I think, larger and more open-petaled than the usual. The wall decorated with wisteria — and a bicycle, in case you get tired of walking.

To walk in an old city is to stop often to photograph buildings. It makes for a halting step but a full camera (phone?) upon return.

It’s more than worth the trip.

In Miniature

In Miniature

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A view of the Capitol Fireworks I’d never seen before, from across the Potomac and down a few miles. The fireworks in miniature but just as splendid.

The spectators were a mini United Nations; they spoke Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Tagalog (maybe). Babies toddled, parents chased, teenagers stared not at the sky but at their phones. Some people sat on blankets, others on the grass. Some had packed elaborate spreads, but more had simply wandered over with a snack and a soda.

Like the fireworks, the venue was a miniature, a snapshot of our country now.

Jackets Off!

Jackets Off!

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A sure sign of summer in D.C., more even than long lines at the Capitol Visitors’ Center or Code Orange air alerts, is the suit jacket carried over a shoulder.

I noticed at least half a dozen examples of this on yesterday’s walk around the Mall, but didn’t snap any photos.

So for this one you’ll have to imagine it 20 degrees warmer, air steamy rather than brisk. Feel the heat radiating up from the pavement, see the leaves not moving on the trees.

It’s summer in the city. Jackets off!

Morning Run

Morning Run

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Early to the city, sun still low in the sky. The Capitol there in the foreground, white, imposing, lit from the east. The air is still cool, but there’s a promise of heat in the breeze.

I’m early enough that I slip into running shorts, t-shirt and tennis shoes, grab my iPod and head to the Mall. 

I didn’t mean to jog the whole way to the Washington Monument, but “Flashdance” was pulsing in my ears and the whole world seemed to be running. The slow moving with bandaged knees and the speedsters with no shirts. Groups of colleagues pacing each other, the worn down and revved up. All of them alive, gloriously alive, this May morning.

Before I knew it I was turning left down 14th Street for the return trip. I felt like I was floating on air.

Quite a Track

Quite a Track

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When I don’t have time for a long walk at lunch I “just” walk around the Capitol. This can be an exercise in frustration, as I thread my way past bomb-sniffing dogs, bicycle-riding police officers, sign-toting protesters and press-conference-giving legislators.

Most of all, of course, there are tourists. They stroll, they dawdle, they pose for photographs. As well they should. That’s what they’re here for, and our city is enriched by them, really it is.

But when the Capitol loop is your lunchtime walking track, and you want to round it twice before going back to your desk, well, it’s easy to stew and fume at the congestion.

Whenever that happens, I try to step back and remind myself where I am. And if I have a phone in hand (as I did one day last week), I become one of the picture-taking multitudes, too.