A Walker in the Suburbs

This is the time of year when amateur singers around the world gather in church sanctuaries and basements to belt out “For Unto Us a Child is Born,” “His Yoke is Easy” and other choruses from Handel’s “Messiah.” 

This year, you can probably find some Zoom version, but that won’t do the trick, not with this piece of music. Beyond the loss of life and livelihood, which is of course what we mourn the most, one of the pandemic’s other great casualties is how it has banished group singing.

Singing aloud is one of life’s great joys, and doing it with others a great joy heightened. But that pleasure has been denied us since early last spring, when we learned that singing spreads the virus more efficiently than almost anything else. 

There are many ironies here, including this one: that an activity that helps us banish our troubles is not here for us when we need it most. 

I don’t know about other once-a-year choristers, but this one will be singing the Hallelujah Chorus aloud anyway. It will be in my house, the stereo cranked up high.  It will be fervent and spine-tingling. But I will be doing it … alone.  

One of the joys and hassles of a long-lived blog like this one is that I sometimes repeat myself. I feel relatively certain I’ve written of “Roses in December” (ah yes, there it is!), so I must find a new title for this one. How about “A Rose in December.” (The change is duly made.)

Having settled on a title now, then what about the meaning. I’m happy to announce that it’s a straightforward one today — the joy of seeing this bloom so late in the season, of feeling that it’s a slap in the face to subfreezing overnights and brisk western breezes. 

And yes, it brings back the long ago memory of a walled garden and its promise of warmth. But it is also a joy in and of itself. 

This year’s rose, no doubt fueled by a wet spring and moderate summer, has supplied me with blossoms from May to December. I’ve taken a rose to my just-born granddaughter and her mother in late October and could have given one to my November 30th-birthday daughter, had I the ability to ship it across the country. But that, alas, is beyond my power. 

One thing I know about these roses is how delicate they are, how fragile to the touch. They, like so much else in life, are better off the less they are disturbed. 

It’s easy to be morose when the great trees fall, as indeed they have done, over and over and over again. 

But when they come down, they free up a spot of sky. 

I snapped this shot yesterday, returning from a walk in what I’ve now come to think of as tree-falling weather: rain-saturated ground with a stiff wind from the west. 

This empty sky used to be filled with a tall tree. Not it’s open, free, giving us all a patch of blue.*

(*Writing this reminds me of the lovely film by that name, a 1965 flick staring Sidney Poitier and Shelley Winters. One worth watching.)

A few days ago it was announced that Lord & Taylor is going out of business, shuttering the 38 brick-and-mortar stores it owns, holding sales in person and online, then closing its doors forever. 

It already shut down its flagship Fifth Avenue store, whose windows would delight me every Christmas when I lived in the city, and whose shop clerks always seemed to know a little more about their merchandise than your average retail worker. At almost 200 years of age, Lord & Taylor is the oldest department store in the country.

For some time I have felt sad entering my local Lord & Taylor. It has been emptier than the rest of the mall, its days more numbered. I knew it wasn’t long for this world, but I continued to shop there because its goods were quality and its demeanor was dignified. 

But soon it will be gone, following Hecht’s and Woodward and Lothrop (D.C. area stores) and Wolfe-Wile, Purcell’s, Stewart’s and Lazarus (Lexington, Kentucky-area stores) and hundreds of others across this land. 

What went wrong? Just about everything, but most of all the boxes that “smile.” I wonder how long we’ll be smiling when all the department stores are gone.

It’s the kind of day I’d like to bottle, to store it up for a cold gray March morning. The humidity has broken and the breeze is blowing in a different season. It’s still solidly summer, but with a hint of the autumn to come.

It is, in short, too glorious a morning to rush through … so I took my time on this morning’s walk.  I eschewed my usual fast pace for a more leisurely stroll. I looked up more often, found a big fat cloud to keep in my sights, enjoyed the view of the Blue Ridge I can see from the top of West Ox Road.

And on the way home, I ogled the three new houses that have shot up in the development across the road, noted all their windows, wondered how you will get to them since their backs are to the street. 

Idle thoughts for a lovely morning, a morning just now turning to afternoon. 

Watching Tom recover (and nicely!) from knee replacement surgery makes me appreciate my own joints even more. That doctors can go in there, take out the diseased cartilage and bone and create a new knee (or shoulder or hip) from metal and plastic is amazing enough. But the originals are even more miraculous. 

I thought I had prepared well for yesterday. I would be waiting most of the day in a surgical center, so I packed a light jacket, took plenty of books and settled in for the duration. 

Returns still go in the chute, and holds can still be delivered to an outside table in a plastic bag. But for the bold and restless, you can also now enter the Fairfax County Public Library branches in person. I took the plunge … and I’m so glad I did.

Here in the outdoor office, where I just completed several major tasks and am taking a brief breather before starting another, I often find my eyes wandering to the hummingbird feeder.