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Improbable Home

Improbable Home

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It’s a day of hauntings, of swirled fog and footsteps in the night. But here on the tip of the Olympic peninsula (actually, a map tells me that it’s called the Quimper Peninsula), it’s bright and clear. 

I arrived here yesterday when the sun was streaming in the windows of the house that will be my home for the next two weeks. There were just two hours left of daylight. I had to explore.

There was a road down to the beach and a lighthouse at the end of it. There was a single sailboat moored in the waves. There was Mount Baker and the North Cascades on the horizon. 

I walked until I was hungry, then came back here, to this most improbable home. 

Blanker Canvas

Blanker Canvas

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I’ve removed the standing desk from my office, a large black metal contraption that sat atop the scarred apple-green desktop. The standing desk was helpful when I spent more hours sitting. Now I’m free to jump up and down scores of times a day — and I do so, probably more often that I should.

But that’s another matter.

What I wanted to mention today is the geography of my workspace, how the terrain has changed. A vast, flat expanse has emerged now that I’ve removed the two-tiered standing desk. And with it gone, I realized I could shift the desk lamp from the far corner to the exact midpoint of the surface, between the windows, so as not to block the view of trees and sky. 

It’s a blanker canvas. A more open vista. It suits me now. 

(The prism that hangs between the windows makes rainbows on the walls.)

Bottom Lines

Bottom Lines

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For many years my professional goals were closely tied to the wages I needed to earn. I made a living from writing articles, editing a magazine, telling the stories of an organization. 

Now I’m glimpsing a different way of being, one where pen and keyboard are no longer expected to bring home the bacon. 

Both ways are worthy. Both ways work. They’re just very, very different, that’s all. 

(To be continued…)

Shoulder Seasons

Shoulder Seasons

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What is it about shoulder seasons? Are spring and fall truly more poetic or do they just seem that way? 

“Margaret are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem “Spring and Fall to a Young Child.”

Autumn and spring are times of great beauty, times when it’s easier to notice the underpinnings of things: the uncoiling of a fern, the thinning of leaves. 

I wonder, too, if spring and fall aren’t times of greater yearning, when we see outside our small worlds to what lies beyond. 

Author Susan Cain would call these seasons bittersweet, “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.” 

Good Words

Good Words

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Today is the birthday of Eleanor Roosevelt, mother, teacher, writer, wife, first lady and activist, whose 2020 biography was unputdownable. 

One of Eleanor’s many noteworthy traits was her capacity for growth. She was not afraid to plunge in, assess, take action, and, when necessary, reverse course. She was ahead of her time. 

Perhaps this quotation helps explain some of her courage: “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you,” she said, “if you realized how seldom they do.”

Good words to take into the day. 

(Writing about Eleanor gives me an excuse to feature a Washington, D.C. photo.)

A Reckoning

A Reckoning

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The furnace came on this morning. I smelled the heat before I felt it, slightly acrid but warm and comforting, too. The aroma of thick bathrobes and steaming kettles and stepping inside from a cold rain. 

We could have held out longer, but why? It’s inevitable. The cold is coming. Toughing it out won’t keep it away. 

As befits a day of forced air heat, clouds dominate, and the stillness they bring is welcome. They promise seclusion and concentration and a long writing session. They promise cold, too. 

Vintage

Vintage

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It just dawned on me that my blog is like my kitchen: both are vintage. Although I cook on a gas stove  manufactured in this century, the cabinetry, Formica and wallpaper hail from the 1970s. 

The template I use for A Walker in the Suburbs isn’t that old (it couldn’t be!), but in tech terms it’s a woolly mammoth, held together by random HTML code and the good will of Google (ahem). 

In both cases, I’m playing for time, hoping that if I hang on long enough, what’s old will become classic.

(Apparently, I take no pictures of my own kitchen. This is from a house we rented at the lake. It’s dated, but not as old as mine.)

The Unmentioned

The Unmentioned

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I’m thinking about travel blogging, which I’ve done a bit of these last few months. Writing and traveling are natural partners because they’re both about exploring and discovering. But there’s at least one major difference — when you write about a trip, you edit out the embarrassing, extraneous or just plain boring.

A week ago, for instance, I was packing up to leave a motel room where I worried I might have picked up bed bugs. I know these critters can lurk in swanky establishments as well as lesser ones, but this place was most definitely the latter. 

I’d chosen it because it was cheap, and fresh from three weeks in Scotland I was all about saving money. But from the first glimpse of the dingy hallway I remembered an important lesson I often ignore: you get what you pay for.

It’s always good to be reminded of that reality. It’s even better to leave it behind in the detritus of trip details I generally leave unmentioned. 

(I have no photos of the offensive motel, which did not have bedbugs, by the way.)

Saving Posts

Saving Posts

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For the most part, I write a post, read it over once or twice to check for typos, then pretty much let it go. But today I’ve been making sure I have all the posts I’ve ever written, grouped in months, in PDF files on my computer. 

I couldn’t help but read a few as I went along: There was the round-the-world trip of 2016. 

And something much smaller: riffing on journalism after seeing the movie “Spotlight,” and remembering how my daughter said the film was “a little slow.” That made me smile.

And then there was the couch sitting in a field in the Rocky Mountains. There’s a story behind that one, as you might imagine. 

Singing Chicken

Singing Chicken

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For years I stored my oldest journals in metal boxes tucked away on the highest shelf of my closet. I had to stand on a step ladder and move so much stuff out of the way to reach them that it was as if they didn’t exist. But now they’re placed spine-side-up in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet next to my desk, so they are ripe for exploration.

Before my discovery of Moleskine notebooks I gathered my thoughts in a hodgepodge of blank books bound in everything from leather to corduroy. The journals are a motley crew, but they served the purpose, which was connecting the dots, remembering, as Joan Didion wrote, “how it felt to be me.” 

Sometimes I dip into them for a fact: When exactly did I leave for that trip to Yugoslavia? How long did I work for the lovable but crazy family on West 94th Street? But I always read more than I intended. 

The other day, I discovered an encounter I had with a singing chicken. The “chicken” had been hired to serenade a friend and colleague on her birthday. My job was to meet the chicken and escort him to my friend’s desk. In his other life, the actor who took on this second job was playing Theseus in a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Or at least that’s what he told us.

You can’t make this stuff up. But, if you’re lucky, sometimes you write it down.