It’s almost bedtime here on the second-to-last day of full-time employment. Perhaps I won’t have bedtimes in this new life. I’ll live so freely that I’ll be beyond diurnal schedules.
But I doubt it. I imagine I’ll wake up pretty much the same time as I always do. And, truth to tell, I’ll be doing much the same sort of things, too — writing, walking, reading.
It might sound boring to many, but oh my, not to me!
The hummingbirds are back! Once again, for at least the fourth time, exactly on April 28. Where have they been? And how do they make their way from other climes and latitudes right back to this suburban backyard? I don’t understand them — and perhaps that is part of their charm.
Seeing them again — at first just a flicker of movement from the corner of my eye — completes the season in a way no blooming tree or flower can.
Because these tiny creatures aren’t rooted here; they return voluntarily. And they bring with them the jewel tones of the tropics, a whiff of the faraway.
(The photo is my own, but not from this year. And because it’s a female, not as jewel-toned.)
My desk accessories and headset are in the car. The monitor is parked in the basement, ready to go. I’ll wipe my computer on Friday and take it into the office, too. Then all that remains will be … the annual reports. They were in the car, stationed for return along with the stapler and the tiered folder rack, but I had to bring them back inside because I needed to research a scholarship that began in 1993.
Now that they’re back in the house (and a heavy load they are, too!), I don’t want to let them go. I’ve built a complete set, you see, from 1985 to the present, which ranges from the time when Tom worked for Winrock to the time that I do. It’s a history of the place in a nutshell, a place I first experienced when I moved from Manhattan to a mountaintop in Arkansas right after we married and which has enriched my own career and life experiences beyond measure.
So I asked Tom last night: “Do you think it’s a bad sign that I can’t let go of the annual reports?” He just smiled and said to do whatever I think is right. He can’t really quibble about my packrat tendencies since he’s a primo packrat himself, and he knows this is about more than being a packrat. It’s about loving an organization I’m about to leave.
I do love Winrock. And yet on Friday I’ll type my last words for them and sign off the network for the last time. Because there’s something I love more, which is the freedom to write what I want when I want. It’s an awesome and a terrifying freedom, but I’ve earned the chance to try it, so I will.
As for the annual reports, they’re sitting in the hallway. I’m still thinking about them.
It was a different kind of Academy Awards ceremony last night, but I still watched the whole thing. Set in L.A.’s Union Station, the nominees and their guests sat around little tables, as if at a supper club. All of which made the event seem warmer and more intimate, though admittedly strange, without the usual glitter and fuss.
With no host and no big song-and-dance numbers, the event focused our attention on what matters most: the awards themselves and the people who receive them. Though a few recipients went on too long and there were the usual political diatribes, I enjoyed the relatively unscripted moments. You could tell people were speaking to a small audience (only 170) from the way they talked.
By now most of us are ready for a return to normalcy, watching movies on the big screen — something Frances McDormand urged us to do when she accepted her Best Actress award — and maybe even the four-hour-long extravaganza every year that honors those films. But the performances at this year’s Oscars make a case for small over large.
(Info booth at Union Station, pre-transformation. Photo: Wikipedia Peetlesnumber1
More than a quarter of the U. S. population is vaccinated. With warm weather and outside gatherings on the horizon it’s easier to feel hopeful about Covid than anytime in the last 15 months. But several sobering articles in this morning’s newspaper are clouding that sunny outlook.
The crisis unfolding in India is one. A record jump in the U.S. death rate last year is another — it was the highest above-average rate since the 1918 flu.
And finally, tucked away on an inside page was this headline: “Measuring a Nation’s Loss by the Years Covid Stole from Its Families.”
Public health researchers are pushing to include the measure of years lost rather than lives lost as a full measure of the virus’s impact. On average, victims of the disease lost nine years of life. While Covid-19 has attacked the old more than the young, it steals time from everyone it fells.
We’ve only begun to come to terms with the enormity of our loss from this disease. One way to begin is figuring out how to measure it.
The last few days of paid employment are flying away like paper pages from a calendar in an old movie, the gimmick directors used to show time passing. Which is to say quickly.
But that’s now. A few months ago time was hanging around my ankles. I kept paging forward in my desk diary, looking at the day I had appointed for notifying management of my decision — it seemed as if it would never arrive.
So in a way, my experience of time recently has mirrored its journey through our lives: the languid days of childhood, the accelerando of adulthood, the spin-crazy way the pace picks up as we age.
By that reckoning, next week will be quite a whirl.
A wild wind blew in from the west yesterday, bending the bamboo and sending Kwanzan cherry petals flying over grass and street.
It was a veritable petal storm, as the wind continued through the night and into today, sending overnight temperatures below freezing and forcing us to bring in the few plants we’d set outside.
I’m telling myself that it’s only a temporary retreat. Spring is on the march this Earth Day, and it will persevere in the end. Until then, I’m watching the petals as they fly. At least they’re not snowflakes.
Writing a blog called A Walker in the Suburbs means I’ve become familiar with all the lovely synonyms for walking: strolling, ambling, rambling, trekking, treading and wandering. By far one of my favorites is sauntering. But until yesterday I never thought much about its derivation. It was while looking up Thoreau on another quest that I found this, from his essay “Walking”:
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.”
Although some would say the word “saunter” comes from “sans terre,” without land or home, Thoreau continues, this is fine, too, because being without a home can also mean being equally at home everywhere — and that in fact is the secret of successful sauntering.
I’m looking forward to more sauntering and more Thoreau.
Morning on the Hunter’s Woods Trail: Mozart in my ears, details in my brain, details I hoped would filter away like a dusting of snow through trampoline mesh. And the rhythm of footfall did clarify the day; it reminded me of what is most important, which is to live fully when and where we are.
I was aided in this by the appearance of wildlife: first, a fox sauntering down the trail ahead of me and then, on the drive home, a wild turkey beside the road, bobbing its head as it fled into the woods.
The critters pulled me into the present and away from the fact that this is a departure day, which is not nearly as nice as an arrival day.
But the warmth is finally here, and the day is as perfect in its way as the cold, windy Thursday that brought her here. Both days are required, one for coming, the other for going — with the walks a constant between the two.
Ever since I saw Edna O’Brien on Ken Burns’ “Hemingway” I’ve been reading her books. I finished the Country Girls trilogy a couple days ago and am now enjoying her memoir, Country Girl.
It’s the proper order in which to read these books, I think. Not only because the latter came 52 years after the first of the trilogy volumes, but also because it’s interesting to see what she did with the raw material before actually getting to know the raw material.
I say this because I started reading them in the opposite order and wasn’t happy about it. So I saved the memoir for last — and am glad I did. Here’s a passage from it about Drewsboro, where O’Brien grew up:
On either side of the track there were grassy banks full of wildflowers and burdock and flowering weed, bees buzzing and disporting themselves in and out of these honeyed enclaves, and the smell of the nettles so hot. Birds swooped in random gusts, and butterflies, velvet-brown, maroon, and tortoiseshell, their ravishing colors never clashing, never gaudy, moved in the higher strata, like pieces of flying silk.
“