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Vienna Waits For You

Vienna Waits For You

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Yesterday, for the first time since March 12, I drove to the Vienna Metro Station. Though assured that the money I’d had taken from my paycheck would remain on the flex account charge card past year’s end, I wasn’t going to test it out. I needed the funds from the credit card to be on the Metro card — and drove there to make the transfer.

It was my first trip to Vienna Metro in nine months, and I relished the old twists and turns of the drive there: Fox Mill to Vale to Hunter Mill to Chain Bridge to Old Courthouse to Sutton and on to the station. 

The lighting was all wrong, of course. I usually did this leg of the commute in darkness or early morning shadows. And the traffic was much lighter, as it is most everywhere most all of the time.

But once there, it was not at all like the Vienna Metro Station I know.  I found myself improbably alone, like the survivor of a nuclear apocalypse. There were no cabs idling, no buskers singing, no harried commuters rushing to and fro. The place was as lonesome as a schoolyard in summer.

Here was a place I knew like the back of my hand. Here was a round-trip I took most work days in my former life. It was a place and a practice that changed abruptly last spring. And I doubt it will ever be the same. 

Getting the Tree: 2020

Getting the Tree: 2020

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I worried it wouldn’t be the same this year. No girls along, for the first time in decades. And, more to the point, no Snickers Gap. The little cut-your-own place discovered in the early aughts and now a juggernaut of traffic jams and parking woes.

So instead, it was the tree lot on the corner. Ah, but what a lot and what a corner. The latter an old crossroads with a picturesque white church on a hill. And by going after dark, there was magic at work: piped-in carols, icicle lights in the trees, happy volunteers slapping their mittened hands together to stay warm. 

We found a tree within a few minutes, an aromatic Douglas fir — probably the earliest Christmas tree we’ve ever purchased — and got it home and into a bucket, where it now sits drinking happily. 

Like so much else this year, it’s closer to home, stripped down … but memorable just the same.

Blue Moon Halloween

Blue Moon Halloween

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Last evening’s moonlight made striped shadows of newly bare trunks and lit the backyard with its wan glow. 

Tonight’s blue moon (the second full moon of the month) will rise on little ghosts and goblins who, instead of ringing doorbells, will grab treat bags from tables placed at the ends of driveways. 

If clouds stay away, moonlight will be their companion. But even if they don’t, these kiddos will see houses more decked out for the season than any year in recent memory. Giant spiders climb ropes that span most of a yard. Skeletons dangle from doorways. And webs spread from hedge to hedge. 

It’s a creepy, crawly little world folks have created for children this year. A fun, faux-frightening one set amidst the very scary real one we are, at least today, trying to ignore.

Plague Lit

Plague Lit

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Call me strange, but for some reason I’ve gravitated to pandemic fiction these last few months. I re-read The Plague by Camus, tried Jose Saramago’s Blindness but only got a third of the way through it, and just finished the historical novel Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. 

Though The Plague was more profound, Year of Wonders was more enjoyable. I was pulling for Anna, the protagonist, who suffers loss upon loss but emerges the stronger for them. 

I was whisked away to a 17th-century English village (based on a real place), which decided when faced with the Black Death to keep the disease contained within its boundaries. The citizens voluntarily quarantined themselves, suffering much greater loss of life than if they had run at the first sign of illness. 

Knowing that once, long ago, a group of ordinary folk decided to take this step, to give up their own lives to save others, makes this an especially powerful moral message to contemplate. 

Lessons from the Pandemic

Lessons from the Pandemic

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We received word late yesterday that the earliest the U.S.-based employees in my organization (which is most of us) will return to the office is April 1, 2021. By then, it will have been a full year of remote work. 

As it stands now, we are well into our eighth month. Almost long enough to make a baby. In fact, here’s a thought: infants conceived at the beginning of the pandemic will soon be out in the world. The Quarantine Generation. Gen Q?
What else has been gestating? Fear and confusion, to be sure. Divisiveness, absolutely. But also, as many have noted, a renewed closeness with the natural world. 
What I was trying to get at yesterday, but didn’t quite, is that the outside office, my “deck desk,” is not just a bucolic retreat; it’s at the mercy of the elements. I’ve dashed inside to avoid raindrops, wrapped up in a blanket to withstand the cold. And soon, perhaps even today (I’m writing this an evening ahead), I will be forced inside. 
Being more attuned to the natural world is instructive, though; through it, we can better understand what the pandemic is so rudely teaching us: that we are not in charge. That can be ugly, true. But it can also be beautiful. 
The Deck Desk

The Deck Desk

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For the last many months my desk has been a glass-topped table on the deck. It’s where I’ve scattered my notebook and planner, where I’ve carefully placed my laptop and phone after wiping the glass to remove even the tiniest drop of dew. 

It’s a table that gives me a front-row seat on the natural world. Squirrels and chipmunks scamper a few feet away from me, searching for acorns. Cherry tomatoes still cling to the vine. The hanging basket of New Guinea impatiens has thinned and browned, but there are still enough bright flowers to remind me of summer.

Even as the leaves turn from green to yellow — and power tool sounds from lawnmowers to leaf blowers — I sit here still. This is my workplace, my deck desk.

Unsettling

Unsettling

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I write this only minutes after learning that the president has tested positive for coronavirus, as a year we thought could not be more unsettling has suddenly become more so. 

I look back to my earliest posts on the new order and think about how much has changed since then: our notions of disease and contagion, the reality of remote work, the way this virus has infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives from how we shop to how often we see our dearest family and friends.

And now this. 

Is there anyone who has not suffered from the disease and the social and economic havoc it has caused? Some, of course, so much more than others. A prayer and a hope today for our country, that it emerge from this stronger, healthier and more civil. 

New Month

New Month

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The witch hazel tree, first to bloom, is also the first to turn. But this year, other trees are following suit. Cold evenings have also tinged the maples and oaks. 

In the garden, the weeds I haven’t pulled are thinning and retreating on their own. Summer is giving up the ghost.

It’s a new month, an autumnal month. And months matter more in this time of few markers. 

Recess at Home

Recess at Home

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Fairfax County may be holding virtual classes, but there is no such thing as virtual recess. That is being held in backyards, on street corners and in cul-de-sacs across the area. 

For those of us lucky enough to work out of our homes, lunchtime and recess happen outside our windows, where a fleet of bicycles and a chorus of young voices serenade us during our humdrum workdays. There are scooters and chalk art, shovels and buckets, games with their own sets of rules that we adults can never fathom. There is childhood on full display.

I’m not so far removed from child rearing that I don’t appreciate what’s going on here. All romanticizing of recess aside, parents of young children must be pulling their hair out. 

All the more reason to smile when youthful exuberance spills out onto the streets. Or at least that’s how I’m feeling now. It’s not quite time for recess yet. 

Six Months

Six Months

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I snapped this photo of an empty movie theater after watching a film during Oscar season last winter. I didn’t know then that it would be my last visit to a theater in a very long time. 

A lapse in theater-going is only the tip of the pandemic iceberg, of course. It dawned on me yesterday that today would mark six months since I last worked in my office. I had a conference elsewhere that week, so I put in a full day in the office on March 9 and attended a conference downtown March 10-12. 

Everything changed on March 13. Shutdown orders were flying, quarantines were closing in. I managed to squeak in some errands, and even went to church that Sunday, March 15. But after that, I climbed inside and closed the hatch. Millions of others did the same. 

And where are we now? There have been almost 6.5 million cases in the U.S. alone, and almost 190,000 deaths. Global cases are topping out at 27,615, 676, and the numbers are on the increase in most parts of the world. 

Someday we will better understand this disease, someday we will have a vaccine for it. But until then, we isolate, mask and clean. It’s a new world — and we’re six months into it.