The Details

The Details

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Sometimes all it takes is a short stroll to open the mind and senses to the day ahead. Today I took the long way around to the newspaper — out the back door, down the deck stairs, around the garden and through the gate and side yard to the driveway where it lay, double-bagged in orange.

The ground is hard and cracked, given two weeks without moisture, which made it easy for me to amble out there in my (sturdily-soled) slippers. Weather folks say we need the rain, but I say we need the dryness. The yard is finally not a lake anymore.

On my short expedition, I found several sticks that I broke over my knee and stuck in the bin for tomorrow’s yard waste pickup. I noted the fine pruning of the hollies, which no longer graze the garage. I heard the tiny peeps of birds fluttering awake in the azaleas. And I spotted swollen buds on the forsythia.

It’s a new day, these details said. Embrace it!

Grateful Balance

Grateful Balance

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On Saturday, I met my brother and sister for a walk, all three of us fully and gratefully vaccinated. We gathered in a park near the river on a day that seemed ordinary but was a long time coming. 

It was just a walk, a simple walk, but we hadn’t been together without masks on in over a year, have hardly been together at all, so it felt both new and old at the same time. 

It’s a challenge to balance the emotions — being mindful of those who still suffer while celebrating my own return to semi-normalcy — but one I’m happy to undertake. 

(A photo from an earlier walk: I was too much in the moment to take one on Saturday.) 

 

Farewell to the Spinet

Farewell to the Spinet

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When the moment finally came, it was nothing at all like what I thought it would be — as moments  seldom are. I worried that my dear, sweet Wurlitzer spinet, the piano Mom and Dad had bought on the rent-to-purchase plan when I was a kid, would have to leave here in the instrument equivalent of a body bag, bound for what I’ve heard described as “that great concert hall in the sky.”

I’d been dithering over this for years — knowing that if I was to continue to play, the spinet would have to go, but being unable and unwilling to get rid of the instrument on which I plunked my first scales, practiced for hours a day in high school, and accompanied the girls when they were young musicians. 

It finally dawned on me that I was going about this the wrong way. To get rid of the spinet, I would need to fall in love with its replacement. So last Saturday I ventured out to a piano showroom in a mall not far from here, intending only to look and see what was there. 

What was there was a used Schimmel studio with a top you can prop up like a baby grand and a tone and touch that sent shivers down my spine. It was more than I was planning to spend but they were willing to take the spinet on trade! That clinched the deal, and the day before yesterday, the spinet left the house in a piano truck safely belted and blanketed, perhaps on its way to another young pianist.

Meanwhile, I can’t stop playing the new piano, which fills the house with its sonorous sound. I would say I don’t know what took me so long — but, of course, I do. 

Shorn

Shorn

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The men who climb trees were here last week, and they left our oaks and gum and hollies tidy and pruned and shorn. 

It was a long-overdue task, given the branches that were hanging over the house and scraping the garage. But it leaves me feeling bare and exposed and doubtful of the shade we’ll have this spring and summer.

It’s all part of growth and renewal, removing the deadwood, but it reminds me too much of the way life is now: cutting back to the quick, to the most essential, learning how much we can do without. 

Which is why I’m hoping that the haircuts the trees received leave them with thicker and more elegant tresses come summer. 

Last ‘Normal’ Day

Last ‘Normal’ Day

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On this same equivalent Thursday last year, I rose early, dressed quickly and left the house. It was the last day of a three-day conference that I had first dreaded but had warmed to because it brought together people I work with but seldom see. We met at a downtown location, and on the last day I went in early so I could take a walk beforehand. 

Though the coronavirus was much on our minds — the bathrooms were mobbed at every break with people obsessively washing their hands — there was much yet we didn’t know. We didn’t wear masks, we didn’t practice social distancing, and we took our lunch in a common room, all 80 or so of us scooping our salads and fruit from common bowls and eating together at small, cocktail-sized tables. 

Since Thursday was the finale, at the end of the day many of us went across the street to a watering hole where we huddled even closer to each other. In retrospect I would kick myself for that, especially when I learned that at least one of the attendees came down with Covid right after the event. 

We knew something was coming, and in fact we learned that day that we would be working remotely the next week, but we could never have known that a year later we would still be hunkered down in our houses and apartments, waiting to resume a normal life we’re not sure will come again. 

Early Walk

Early Walk

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There was time for an early walk this morning, a chilly start to a day that has already warmed considerably. But a few hours ago, I bundled up and crunched along the gravel berm, thinking about the hours soon to be unfolding.

It had been a while since I walked early, preferring the lunch-time stroll when temperatures are below freezing. But with warmer air and earlier dawns, that is shifting.

The day is different when you walk in the morning. It stretches out endlessly and without complications.  At noontime, the work of the day is very much in my mind. But the morning belongs to the half-awake brain and the thoughts that weave in and out of it.

Robins in Winter

Robins in Winter

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Yesterday I watched two plump robins hop around the backyard by the witch hazel tree. It was the first in a string of warming days, and it would have been tempting to see them as harbingers of spring. But I’ve been seeing robins off and on all winter, stepping out of the house into air brisk enough to tickle my nose only to hear their distinctive spring-like sound. 

So I did what any self-respecting modern person would do. I googled “robins in winter?” in hopes of learning that their presence in January meant warmer days would soon be here. 

Ah no, it meant nothing of the sort. The “first robin of spring” saying, at least in these parts, is just a saying.  Robins winter in these climes, so seeing them doesn’t mean much of anything. 

But what I learned warmed the heart if not the fingers and toes. In cold months, robins are much more likely to be found in large flocks. They have learned to stick together when the pickings are slim. Would that we humans could follow their example. 

(Photo: Wikipedia)

The Point of ‘PossibiliDay’

The Point of ‘PossibiliDay’

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Today is International Woman’s Day, one of the 31 days that comprise Women’s History Month, and one of many observation days we celebrate at Winrock International.

It is also a day I dubbed “PossibiliDay” back in 2017, when I’d been at my then-new job almost a year and was celebrating the freedom of my new work and an awakening to the power of possibility. 

This year, March 8 feels far more International Woman’s Day than “PossibiliDay,” a fact I attribute to almost five years in this position, the last one spent working entirely at home. 

But this is okay, I tell myself. Because the point of “PossibiliDay” is not to mark it every year. It’s to remember that possibilities lurk where we least expect them — and to take heart from that fact. 

Cake for No Reason

Cake for No Reason

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It was near the end of a fascinating Zoom book group conversation — which moved from the book itself to a discussion of memoir — that one of us mentioned having just sampled the best white cake ever. 

Baking the perfect white cake is something of a holy grail for me, the attempt to duplicate the most delectable wedding cake-like texture, dense and fine of crumb. I don’t have much time to devote to this quest, but I have experimented with several recipes over the years and was delighted to have another one to try. 

When I saw the King Arthur Flour “Tender White Cake” recipe I was immediately encouraged. I had all the ingredients in my pantry and fridge — or so I thought; it turned out I was missing almond extract. But a quick stop at the grocery store remedied that, which is how I found myself up to my elbows in flour and sugar at the end of a long work week. 

Thanks to my power mixer, though, I was able to cream the unsalted butter with the (sad to say not King Arthur brand) flour, add one egg white at a time, and finally whip in the cup of yogurt laced with vanilla and almond extracts. 

The cake was as exquisite as advertised, with a rich, old-fashioned flavor that my mother would have said reminded her of a cake my Aunt Mary made. Beyond the taste, though, was the experience.  It was fun to bake a cake for no reason — that is, for no reason other than the cake itself. 

In Praise of Clippings

In Praise of Clippings

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This morning’s newspaper included an article about books on D.C. I did what I do with all helpful articles I think I might want to read again — pulled it out and saved it. 

We live in a digital era, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at my files. They are stuffed full of newspaper and magazine clippings, everything from recipes to book reviews to especially fetching columns I want to read again. They are messy and unwieldy — but essential, too.

I could find the same articles and bookmark them on my computer. But there’s something to be said for the physical presence of the article itself. For the touch of the paper,  complete with ripped edges and, sometimes, with notes I scribbled in the margin. 

Clippings are outdated, I suppose. But I keep them around. They are tangible reminders of the ideas they hold.