A Walker in the Suburbs

On a walk Sunday evening, a last-minute stroll at the end of the weekend that wasn’t, I reveled in the sheer perfection of the air. Neither too hot nor too cool. It’s taken two months, but summer seems to have finally hit its stride.

The crepe myrtle are sending shoots of color along the lanes and the begonias have flourished with all the rain, filling pots with big, fat bouquets. Goldfinches flutter from coneflower to coneflower, hunting for seeds. The strange bird that we cannot identify continues to tantalize us with his song, which consists of a click then a tone.

Out by the street the flower box has produced one tall zinnia. Better luck next time on that score. But it’s hard to complain with the weather I walked through last night.

It was summer sublime.

Arriving at the beach brings a giant exhale. Here is the hotel where it always is, the bikers and walkers, the crowd outside the ice cream parlor. Here is the tropical air, the palm trees swaying, the lizards darting.

The rhythm of the surf is the rhythm of life. To walk beside it is to feel alive again, tasting salt spray and dodging sea birds. Finding my pace beside the waves, advancing as they retreat.

This time of day I’d be settling into my desk for the day, opening files, penciling in priorities, gearing up for our Monday morning meeting.

But not this Monday. Today is the first day of a week without days, without beginnings and endings. I’ll tell time by the slant of sun on water, hunger by a growl in the stomach.

I brought a journal and books, bathing suits and sun screen.

What more do you need?

In the last few weeks, I’ve been making more of an effort to stretch after running or walking or bouncing. This is something I always mean to do but never have time for.

Now it’s time. Past time, if you want to know the truth.

Stretching not just the body but the mind and heart.  It’s one of the best ways I can think of to stay  limber, to keep growing and changing, not to ossify with age.

It’s a personal goal for my own personal new year, which starts … today.

I’ve been working with Winrock for two years and am finally at headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. I flew here Monday morning, looking out the window at the bright sun and clouds, at  the green patchwork below.

When I lived in Arkansas years ago, I wrote an essay called “Out of Arkansas.” It was a play on Out of Africa, the memoir by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen).

My move from Manhattan to a mountaintop in Arkansas seemed as radical to me as Karen Blixen’s trip to Kenya must have seemed to her. And when I looked from the plane and saw the vast landscape below, I thought of the breadth of Africa and of the American West.

It’s a liberating landscape for those accustomed to more cloistered, forested Eastern environs.

Children need roots and wings, says one adage. They need the security of home and family and the confidence and freedom to fly away from it.

It occurs to me today, riffing on this, that what I need now is headspace and legroom.

Headspace so I can vanish into a world of my own creation, beyond home, family and work.

Legroom because as much as I need the mental space, I crave physical movement, too.

It’s freedom I’m after, both literal and metaphorical.

I can’t let April slip away without a nod to Virginia bluebells. I went to see my favorite patch of them last week.

The bluebells cluster near a trail, which winds around and through them.  It was a sparkling spring afternoon when I took this walk. A little later I spied some deer along the trail — or they spied me.

I kept walking until the wildlife trail turned into a paved path and then, finally, into the Cross-County Trail. Parts of it took a hit during the March windstorm. 

I finished off the stroll with another peek at the bluebells. Ah, that’s better. That will last me a while.

After two bounce-less months, I finally ordered a new trampoline last Sunday. Two days later, there were three boxes sitting outside the garage when I got home from work.

They were heavy and compact, a tidy package.

After a few days in the garage and hours of labor yesterday, the three boxes have become — a trampoline.

Limbs and branches from last month’s storms may still litter the landscape, but in one important way, the backyard is back in business.  Once again, the lady has a tramp.

Yesterday I found myself with a windfall, a three-hour window without meetings or interviews.

I also found myself in Patan Durbar Square. Durbar squares (I’ve just learned) are plazas opposite old royal palaces. The Patan one is, according to the guidebook “a marvel of Newari architecture.”The Newaris are the original inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley.

The square was filled with stupas and temples … and rubble. The 2015 earthquake is still very much in evidence here, with piles of gravel, half restored buildings and blue tarps everywhere. The town is also getting a new water supply, which means even more digging and dust.

None of this stops anyone, though, least of all the ubiquitous and death-defying motorcycle taxis, which whizz around corners with complete abandon.

Luckily, I found a car taxi to take me home. All I  had to do was share it with the driver’s brothers and a 100-pound bag of concrete.

It was the perfect way to wind down a wander.

Yesterday we learned about some agricultural innovations. There’s the nutritious spirulina (aka algae), which is being grown on a Thai rooftop, collected, semi-dried and added to pastas, puddings and more. It tastes like whatever it’s in, but it packs an impressive amount of protein into a tiny package. Maybe it will help feed the world’s burgeoning population in 2050. Or at least that’s the hope of its producer.

Spirulina is much more appetizing than another idea we heard about today: black soldier flies. Though no one was proposing that we start eating them — yet —the critters are being dried and used for fish food. So if you eat the fish … well, you know.

One more drying story is that of Rhino beads, ceramic beads that absorb moisture, keep seeds fresh and reduce spoilage, where farmers lose an impressive percentage of their crops.

As I sat there taking notes, my mind was full to bursting with the possibilities of it all. After the presentations and interviews, I walked down the street to a nearby park, where runners were making the circuit. From mental energy to physical energy.

It was an energetic whirlwind of a day. I want to capture and store it — not unlike seeds or spirulina —and save it for another day.

National Geographic is one of those magazines that comes into the house, lands on the coffee table and stays there. When the pile of glossy magazines is tall enough, I take it to the basement. Every so often, I read one of them. This time, it’s “Why Birds Matter” from the January issue. I unearthed it this morning after hearing its author, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, talking about it on the radio yesterday.

Turns out, National Geographic and the Audubon Society have proclaimed 2018 the “Year of the Bird.” It’s the centennial of the 1918 Migratory Bird Act, the nation’s oldest conservation law, and in its honor the magazine has given us a rapturous piece about raptors, hornbills, parrots, owls, doves, crows, you name it.

“When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain whey I love my brothers,” Franzen writes. Birds are diverse as the world is diverse, they are also a link to our evolutionary past. They are smart and beautiful and playful (you can apparently watch a Youtube video of crows sledding). They sing, nest and raise their young and, most of all, they fly.

“The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value,” Franzen writes. “They are always among us but never of us.”

In the words of Henry Beston, who I’ve quoted several times in this blog: “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of time and life.”