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Out of State

Out of State

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Over the weekend, I took a brief trip to the state of Maryland. It was only a quick visit, I was home in less than five hours. Yet so homebound have I become that it felt like I was taking off for a cross-country expedition.

While the go-go-ness of my life up till March has meant no time to process the people and places I was visiting, recent stay-at-home mandates haven’t given me much time to digest things, either. Because there’s never a shortage of work and chores, and low-level anxiety has a way of gumming up the gray matter.

Still, even a short sojourn helped. There was a new path, familiar beneath the feet — but it had been more than a year since I strolled it. There was fresh air from the river and bay, and, most of all, there were the dear faces of people I love but hadn’t seen since wintertime. 
It was a short trip but a good trip, proof that even a little break makes a difference. On the way home I sang in the car.  
Drippy Walk

Drippy Walk

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A drippy walk last week had me dodging raindrops. When I left my parked car I thought the sun would burn the clouds away, but the farther I walked the less certain I was of that. 

Still, it was a grand way to spend an early summer afternoon, making my way along moss-slicked paths, inhaling the rain-spun air, exploring an unfamiliar corner of the neighborhood.
My shoes and shirt were growing soggier by the minute but I couldn’t bear to turn around. The canopy was catching the worst of the weather, and the moisture seemed to accentuate everything — the leaves were greener, the air was fresher — and I was walking through it, gladly.
One-Day Getaway

One-Day Getaway

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A drive west today, out to the Blue Ridge Mountains, the great ridge that runs down the eastern spine of this country, out to where the sky meets the land.

It’s been a while since I’ve been more than 20 miles away from home. Half a year, I think. And while it is true that one can travel widely without ever leaving home, at least for this wanderer, an occasional glimpse of the world beyond helps maintain sanity.

So a drive west it will be, out to the ridge I took pains to see yesterday on my walk. The Shenandoah — the shaggy old hills that mark the beginning of the rest of the country.

Treading Lightly

Treading Lightly

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To be a walker in the suburbs means, at times, to be a trespasser. There simply is no other way to get around out here than to (occasionally, and with great care) tiptoe through someone else’s yard. It’s the British right-of-way, the right to pass and repass, that I invoke here, if only to myself.

I’ll admit, I don’t have the best track record in this area. But on the whole I’m a respectful interloper, staying to the edge of property lines when the woodland trail I’m on suddenly leads me right into an alien backyard.

One of my solutions is to determine if a house looks currently habited. If owners are out of town, they won’t mind if I walk up their long driveway instead of staying longer on the busy thoroughfare.  Now, of course, no one is out of town.

On yesterday’s walk I suddenly found myself in a ferned forest with muddy paths and the only way out (rather than back) being along the side yard of a yellow split-foyer.  I just squeaked by on that one, seeing the owner out with a mower only 10 minutes after I’d skirted his lawn.

It was a close call for this trespasser.

Mapping My Walk

Mapping My Walk

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Inspired by The Writer’s Map, which I mentioned here a couple weeks ago, I embarked on a map-making project of my own. The result is “May 16th Long Walk,” an amateurish work if ever there was one, but the first in a series, I hope, as I record the walks I take not only in words but also in cartography.

It was an interesting experience, chiefly because I haven’t done anything like this since, oh, about seventh grade (I can’t recall drawing any maps since high school other than ones scrawled on the back of envelopes in the old pre-GPS days) and also because, as is quite evident, I can’t draw.

Creating this map called on that other side of my brain, the one that involves spatial relations (a perennial worst score on the SATs) and whimsy (which, though not tested, is far too often neglected).

But once I began creating this little map, I realized I could put anything on it —even silly things like the chain-link fence I had to climb and the large drainage pipes I call Snake Eyes. I realized I could be creative in a way I hadn’t been in a long time. Mapping, like writing, is a way to make a place your own.

Brilliant Air

Brilliant Air

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Up early for a walk in a luminous fog that seemed to be glowing from the inside out. It was as if the pinpointed radiance of a rising sun was smashed and diffused throughout the air.

Air we now see differently than we did a few months ago. A miasma, virus drops in an aerosol of danger.

But this morning the air was an invisibility cloak, a brilliant one that hid me (or at least I pretended it did) in a mantle of unknowing, so I could stride beneath the dripping oaks and into another day.

Blue and Green

Blue and Green

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When walking on clear days I lift up my eyes and am startled by the contrast, the deep beauty of the line where where sky meets foliage. It is a combination only nature could pull off — shades of azure and emerald so brilliant that they would be considered tacky in any other setting.

As I admire the colors I wonder what this place is called. It’s not the horizon because it’s not where earth and sky meet. It’s more of a tree-rizon, where treetop meets firmament.

Whatever it is, it’s looking gorgeous these days.

Still There

Still There

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Yesterday, I escaped again. This time to walk with another daughter, in an inner rather than an outer suburb —an old neighborhood with houses tucked into hillsides. The iris had popped there, and the dogwood and azaleas have bloomed longer than usual this year, thanks to cooler weather, so they were still in fine array. The flowering trees gave each house and yard the enchantment they deserved.

I’ve said this often (here and elsewhere), but the Washington, D.C., area is at its most beautiful in spring — and this year spring has lasted months.

This particular walk took us to the bluffs above the Potomac River, where we clambered on rocks and rain-slicked trails, through tunnels of foliage colored an eye-popping green. How lovely to be in that place in that moment. How good to have gotten out not once but twice (both for valid reasons, I feel I must add — for exercise and food drop-offs), to see a little more of the world that’s out there. It’s a good reminder, six weeks into quarantine, that it will all still be there when we emerge.

The Land of Other

The Land of Other

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Yesterday I escaped home and yard for a brief sojourn in the Land of Other. The Land of Other is not some mythical place far away. It is simply any place other than my own.

I hadn’t been in this land for two weeks, and it felt good to be there. It’s not that I mind being home all of the time. Mostly I don’t. But as the weeks wear on, and family members remain tantalizingly close, I can’t help but visit them.

Interactions were brief and mostly took place outside. There were two long walks, three frisky dogs, a daughter, a brother and — at the end, a box of take-out fried chicken.

Simple pleasures, deeply enjoyed. The Land of Other — it’s still out there. And knowing that makes me uncommonly happy.

Elevated Apes

Elevated Apes

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“It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes.”  — William Winwood Reade

I thought of this quotation while on a recent walk with Copper. The little guy is old now and seems to have lost most of his hearing and much of his sight. But there’s nothing wrong with his nose. He must retain most of the 300 million olfactory receptors dogs are reputed to have because he seems to enjoy sniffing now more than ever.

But he’s not the only one. Every day on our strolls together (and on my solo walks), I take a deep whiff of lilac. Say what you will about stopping to smell the roses, it’s the lilacs I walk across the street to inhale.

Savoring their delicious aroma gives me a hint of the pleasure dogs take in their own frequent sniffing. It is, then, a unifying activity, one that reminds me that we are “elevated apes” rather than “degenerated angels.”


(I first read this quotation in the book Love, Sunrise and Elevated Apes, by Nina Leen, a volume I treasure for its wisdom and photography.)