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Roses in December

Roses in December

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It was almost 70 degrees yesterday as I made my way along New Jersey Avenue to the Capitol. A small wind was whiffling the pansies, stirring the purples and yellows and the dark green leaves.  I moseyed down a section of tree-lined street that reminds me of Paris, with the U.S. Capitol winking through what’s left of the leaves.

The broad plaza of the East Front entrance was filled with shirt-sleeved tourists snapping photos, but noon light drained color from the scene. I turned left down East Capitol, passing the Library and the Folger and a bookstore I always intend to visit but never do. Roses were still blooming, tumbling along fence posts and garden gates. In the air, the smell of new-mown grass.

Everyone was out in the warm weather — dog-walkers and nannies pushing prams and office workers on a lunchtime jog.  There’s a park where I usually turn around, and today I strode right through the middle of it. I never knew what it was called until I checked a map after my stroll. It’s Lincoln Park — and not at all like its Chicago counterpart — but now I’ll never forget the name.

Before the Walk

Before the Walk

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Before the walk comes the poem, a verse or two to take along the path.

I see more clearly with downcast eyes, pondering a private line.

Words tilt the sky, straighten the trunk, unmask the liquid

line of the horizon.

There is still much more unnoticed than revealed.

Walker Eats Words

Walker Eats Words

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I walk daylight paths and share (mostly sunny) thoughts, but I walk because I want to, not because I have to. Most of the time there is a car at my disposal. Most of the time, but not last night.

It was a long day with a complicated automotive choreography involving three people and two cars. I was driving one vehicle in the morning and another in the afternoon. It was dark when I stepped off the commuter bus, and I had car keys in hand, ready to slide into the seat and drive home. But I couldn’t find the car; I walked up and down the lot, looking in vain for the distinctive luggage rack of our sedan.

I would have called and asked for guidance but I had no phone and the pay phone was out of order, probably has been for several years. Never mind, I told myself. There must have been some confusion. I’ll just walk home.

Walking home from that distance wouldn’t be daunting in the daylight, but it was at night. I found myself tripping on cracked pavement and dodging cars, even when I crossed with the lights. It took me 45 cold unpleasant minutes in my dark coat and too-tight work shoes. The only thing I could think about was how much I wanted to be home.

I hadn’t been in the house more than five minutes when Tom and Celia walked in. The car was in the lot (sans luggage rack); I had just missed it.

What I hadn’t missed was this: It’s easy to rhapsodize about walking when you don’t have to walk.

Intermittency

Intermittency

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A problem with our wireless network has changed my blogging habits. I write quickly, post quickly, before I’ve timed out.  At least for now, I’m learning to live with intermittency, with stopping and starting, with that which cannot be controlled.

A valuable lessons to be reminded of from time to time.

My pace has been intermittent lately, too, as bursts of running punctuate my usual fast-walk cadence. I try for a steady pace but can’t help but respond to the music in my ears and the feel of my joints.

Even the weather has been singing this tune — blustery and cold one weekend, calm and warm the next.

Bedrock is necessary, that which is solid and predictable. But what gets us through the day is the lighter, looser loam on top.

Mall Walk

Mall Walk

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Yesterday’s mall walk: Brisk wind, hands stuffed in my sleeves and looking, always looking. The mall belongs to
everyone and holds everyone and when you walk through it on a clear fall day, it’s the people you notice first. They stroll, they stare, they move slowly. Sometimes they stop, right in front
of you. And then you (or at least I) roll my eyes and stride impatiently
around them. But the place is for them and of them and they make it sing, they
make it make sense.
Usually they come in groups. Families with toddlers who careen
down the broad gravel walkway. Tired mothers with purses worn across their
chest to leave their hands free for pushing a stroller or wiping a nose. Groups
of school kids with backpacks and more energy than seems possible. Tourists were everywhere yesterday — forming
lines at the Capitol, taking a break at the carousel, buying
hot dogs and ice cream in front of the Smithsonian Castle. 

And there I was, a reluctant
resident of our nation’s capital, someone who  routinely disparages the
traffic and the lack of place — until I take a walk on the Mall.
Until I see the people. And not just the tourists but people like me, office-dwellers with keys around their necks and tennis shoes on their
feet, all of us out for some air on a sunny afternoon. Runners and footballers and Frisbee throwers and people sitting quietly on a
park bench munching a sandwich and folks
strolling through the Botanical Gardens, learning to recognize the
switch grass from the blue stem. 
I know it’s probably just the endorphins from the walk, but these people, all of these people, the tourists and the residents, all of them seem glad to be alive on
this day and in this place. It’s easy to be one of them.
After the Rain

After the Rain

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I could tell the difference before I reached the first dip in the road. A day earlier I had misjudged, found myself trudging through rain, my socks damp, my hair wet. But yesterday, I stepped into a drenched clean world.

On my way, an empty mail truck. An early lunch for the carrier? We on his leeward side were still waiting, but those whose letters had arrived were slowly shuffling to their mailboxes, sweaters pulled tight, suspicious glances at the sky.

In the new section of the neighborhood a worker swept the wet street in front of a construction site. He seemed only to be moving mud, but he greeted me cheerily.

Down at the corner the cars zoomed by, as they always do, and the dying sycamore dropped its leaves. The rain came too late for that poor tree. And the big white house that was abandoned for so long, it still looked abandoned, even though someone seems to be living in the place. So a good soaking doesn’t solve everything, but it did put a spring in my step.

On the way home, I waved at the cars I passed. People do that here.

On the Beaten Path

On the Beaten Path

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It’s my second post in as many days with cliches (or slight alterations of them) for titles, as I pause for a moment to praise the beaten path. Not being off it — being on it. This year, this dry summer, the paths in our woods are especially beaten. Tough, cracked; not dusty but springy and elastic (thanks, I suppose, to the clay in our soil).

Since I’ve lately been exploring unfamiliar trails with my head down to look for the errant root that could send me flying, I’ve become familiar with the beaten path, have even reached down to touch it. The surface is smooth and clammy and imperturbable, like marble in its coolness. But unlike marble, it is a living, breathing thing. It shrinks, expands and cracks. When the weather is dry it becomes a dusty brown powder.

Traipsing these beaten paths makes me wonder what it was like when they (or slightly wider versions of them) were roads. Of course, they would have lacked the layered toughness and impermeability of a paved surface, would have been a mire of mud on rainy days and a cloud of dust on dry ones, but one can see that, at least part of the time, they would hold up their end of the bargain. That one would want to be on them. That to be off them was to be lost in the wilderness.

Valedictory Frame of Mind

Valedictory Frame of Mind

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I hadn’t meant to wind up at the girls’ elementary school, but that’s where our walk took us. Copper and I had crossed Fox Mill Road, taken a dirt path down to the creek, tiptoed over the spillway (thanks to the low water), trotted down what seems to be an old road along the stream and then trudged up a steep path along a ridge line and (pant, pant — that would be both Copper and me) arrived at the school grounds.

Even though we live less than two miles from the place, it’s tucked away on county parkland and I hadn’t been there in months, maybe years. Only a few days earlier I had gone to my last back-to-school night ever, what was probably my 36th, give or take a few (three children times 12 years), so seeing the old school so soon after that event put me in a valedictory frame of mind.

I kept seeing ghosts of the girls’ former selves, the field days and plant sales in the big field to the east of the school; the playground on that side, too, where we used to come on still summer afternoons (before most of the equipment was deemed unsafe and replaced with boring, innocuous stuff), the mornings when we’d walk to school or I’d drop the girls off at the kiss-and-ride lane.

How big the place once seemed, how imposing. It was a first foray into the real world for them, and such a gentle, loving entry into that world. Almost a decade of dealing with the high school (with its thousands of students and a sign-in process that seems modeled on that of a maximum-security prison) have made me forget what school was like when it was close and comfortable and small-scale.

I miss those years. But I wouldn’t want to live them again.

A much older, smaller (one-room) schoolhouse in our neighborhood.

Fair Weather Crossing

Fair Weather Crossing

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There are several of these along the length of the Cross County Trail, raised concrete cylinders across the width of a stream. The bold strider takes them easily, one foot to a step. The timid one (that would be me) navigates the creek with a mincing two-step.

I think of these pillars as fabricated steppingstones. No hollow log or moss-slicked surface to send one sliding. The suburban safety net is in place here. Nothing really difficult or bold will be asked of us. We will be killed with — if not kindness (because “kind” is not an adjective that comes to mind when describing this part of the world) — then with inordinate padding.

The irony is that I successfully crossed the creek only to stumble half a mile later. It was nothing but a root that tripped the tip of my toe as I fast-walked the packed-dirt trail. But it was enough to send me careening in what I can only imagine was a cartoon-like near-fall. Somehow, I caught myself, my arms flapping beside me like the wings of an errant glider.

Fair weather crossings are a good start; what we need next are cushioned paths.

Pink Cloud

Pink Cloud

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Sunsets are earlier these days. What would have been a late-afternoon amble a few weeks ago is now an early-evening stroll.

Yesterday was like that. The air thinning and without the moisture that has become a second skin. The sun already down though still plenty of light for walking.

I found a beacon for my trek, a solitary pink cloud. I followed it from one end of the neighborhood to the other. It was a cheerful presence, a spot of color in a darkening world.