A Walker in the Suburbs

I saw them the day before yesterday, a flock of robins in our front yard. I haven’t been organized enough to notice if they were here earlier, or to note their first appearance in years past. But there they were on a cold blustery winter day, pecking in our winter-wan grass, nibbling the holly berries and flitting about the leaves and wood pile.

There were more than a dozen of them, with their red breasts and trim beaks. I wondered where they had come from and if they would stay.

It’s too early to think about spring. I know that. But seeing those robins, hearing their call, feeling the warmth in the air this morning as I walked — it all has done my spirit good.

Yesterday I was driving west when I came upon a flyway. It’s a left exit that swings over two other roads on its way back to earth. Looking at such a monstrosity from below fills me with dread and anxiety. Is it safe, well built? Will I go too fast and fall off?

But these are the worries of the land lubber. Once I’m on the flyway I am in awe of the view. I can see the front line of the Blue Ridge as it extends from north to south. I am escaping the quotidian. I am, for a moment, flying.

A cold start to the new month. I drive to Metro in darkness, only the faintest lightening of the sky. I think about parking on the street and walking to the subway, as I have the last two days, but I decide on the garage instead. A train is waiting, I hop on only minutes before it leaves the station.

The day begins, as it often does, with a rattle down the tracks, the descent underground to Ballston, the switch to the Red Line at Metro Center, the quick walk to the office from Judiciary Square.

On the way I count blessings: The smooth logistics of the morning. Our celebration last night, the balm and joy that is family. How good it felt to laugh together over a book of silly pet photos. Work that busies me and pays the bills, and other work that inspires me and doesn’t pay the bills. The view from my office window: the alley, the buildings, the reflections in blue glass across the street. The view from our back deck as it looks on a winter morning.

In the library this weekend I picked up a book called Listening Below the Noise by Anne LeClaire. I’ve almost finished it, would have already had I not decided to savor the final chapter. The book grew from the author’s decision some years ago to spend a day in silence. The day brought her such peace and creative energy that she decided to spend every other Monday without speaking.

LeClaire has since become a prophet of silence, giving workshops, writing the book. The compromises she proposes — making time for a quiet morning, shutting off e-mail, slowly eating a juicy apple — graft a monastic habit onto a hectic modern life. They seem realistic enough that most any of us could finagle them.

For me they reaffirm the connection between silence and creativity, the need to withdraw in order to produce, to quiet one’s self in order to speak.

Today I almost missed my Metro stop because I was engrossed in a newspaper article about a young man chronicling endangered post offices. Evan Kalish has visited 2,745 post offices in 43 states since 2008. Yesterday he wrote about the closure of a post office in St. James, Maryland. It was tucked away in a general store and featured an imported (from Pennsylvania!) postal facade that looks like something out of a movie set.

When we lived in Groton, Massachusetts, we mailed our letters and packages from a dignified old brick post office with friendly New England clerks. It was the sort of place where people lingered, chatting about when the first snowflakes might fall. It was part of the magic of that village, a component of its character.

When we first moved to Virginia, our post office was a corner of the local hardware store. I’d wait in line there, one baby or the other on my hip, to mail an article to one of my editors in New York. Though far less picturesque than Groton, it had its own madcap charm.

Years passed, the Internet arrived, and I sent my articles by email, my letters too. And that, multiplied and magnified hundreds of thousands of times over, is why post offices are closing.

But understanding the reason isn’t the same as agreeing with it. As the post offices shut down, the small towns and hamlets lose their postmark, their centerpiece, their community center. And the world becomes a little more homogenized, a little more boring, a lot less placed.

Photo, Gosselin Group Realtors

Last night in class we talked about how place is being challenged by globalization, population growth, global warming and other challenges. When places must compete for resources they have to sell themselves. They are essentially in competition with each other.

On the surface that would seem beneficial to places, because it would prompt them to sharpen their competitive edges and make them more attractive. But what makes places more attractive, the marketplace says, are jobs, commerce and convenience. The marketplace is not very good at recognizing, creating and delivering the ineffable something that makes, say, San Francisco, San Francisco. And why should it be? What makes certain places sing out to us is far more than the sum of their parts.

So when places have to compete for jobs or big box stores, they sell an image of themselves. I’ve seen this happen with Lexington, which pushes itself as the “horse capital” even as racetracks are dying and horse farms struggling to make it. Once the real place is gone, it resurrects itself as a carriacture.

The real placeness of a place can only bubble up from below. It can’t be superficially imposed from above. End of sermon!

It took a glimpse of winter to scare us into fall. Oh, I know the chemical explanation. Or the lay version of it. Leaves need a shock of cold air in order to change color.

But look at it another way: The trees still clothed in summer green, shivering in the snow, telling themselves, this isn’t working. We need to strip down, and fast.

Overnight, we have autumn. The trees I know, the dependably flashy ones, have burst into yellow and orange. The air smells both acrid and sweet. And on a hurried walk, I spot an artful arrangement of crimson maple leaves snagged in a net of spent clematis. I relax my shoulders and move on.

My walk day before yesterday was what Julia Cameron would call an “artist’s date,” a break in the routine, something that you do for yourself once a week to shake yourself out of lethargy.

I do it once a month if I’m lucky. And I’ve written about it in this blog before. But it was a year ago, so it bears repeating.

It is humbling to notice how much we become creatures of our own habits. My interest in the history of our area, the rolling hills and crossroads of what is now called Oakton, stems in part from a random decision I made about 14 months ago to drive home from work a new way, along some of the roads I now want to comb and investigate.

From such small acts come benefits beyond measure.

Yesterday I took a new route to my class in old White-Gravenor Hall on Georgetown’s main campus. I meandered my way from Foggy Bottom up the Potomac. On my left was the river, full and flowing, the trees just starting to change color on the opposite bank. On my right were restaurants, a plaza, fountains. Directly ahead of me were the grand stone arches of the Key Bridge. Sculls skimmed the river like large insects, gliding down it impossibly fast.

As I walked upstream the gray day turned to mist, then rain. I ignored it for a while, then gave up and opened my umbrella. Crossing under the elevated highway a few blocks down, I meandered eastward to the C&O Canal then up and over a bridge to Cady’s Alley.

Here was a cobblestone street lined with small shops. It was narrow and intimate with an attractive, manageable, pedestrian scale (ah, the scale of roads and buildings, that’s a topic I could never tire of). It reminded me of old towns in Europe.

To celebrate I stopped in a cafe, ordered tea and cookies. I found this place by accident. Who knows what lies around the next bend?

It’s not exactly the Innere Stadt of Vienna, pictured above, but Cady’s Alley is still quaint.

Consider the flowers of late summer. They are both delicate and strong. They bloom as if there is no end to summer. And their friends, the mushrooms, mimic their bravado. Look at us, they say. We’re pretty too.

It is another cloudy, humid morning, only this time with a rumble of thunder and a patter of rain. We are damp and clammy here. We have our windows open and our minds, too. We are in no hurry for the cool sharp weather of fall. We are in a lull, a gracious interlude, and I for one am glad of it.