.jpg)
It was late enough in the day that dinner was no longer a vague thought. There wasn’t time for a long hike. Luckily, it’s a five-minute drive to half a dozen paths.
Yesterday it was Beckman’s Trail, an easy two-mile loop that wound up and around itself. There were boulders and grass and a strange yellow fungus foaming around the base of a tree.
The climb was mellow and the air was bracing. It was over far too quickly.
I woke this morning, as I did yesterday, to the scamper of little feet and the noise of life being lived, hard, above me. It’s the configuration of this shambling old cabin by the lake that the deck that runs the length of the main floor also runs above where I sleep.
It’s not until the respectable hour of 8 a.m. that the little ones are let loose, but once they are, further winks are impossible.
They scamper, they giggle, they push plastic kiddie chairs across the floor. If there is a quiet moment, it’s when bowls of cereal are being offered, fuel for further activity.
I’m writing quickly because I don’t want to miss a minute of it.
I imagine the walk when I’m falling asleep. It’s not just the lake that makes this place so magical. It’s the landscape around it. And I plunged into it this morning.
Down the lane, across a field still wet from dew, right at the road and up to the intersection, then back onto the peninsula. There are dips and curves, green fields, and glimpses of lake water through trees.
It’s highly walkable, this spit of land where the family has gathered, and I’ll be walking as much of it as I can.
I’m of the paper-towel school of house cleaning. Though I also employ a vacuum, dust cloth and broom, the humble paper towel is one of my chief weapons against dirt and grime.
Is it the most sanitary? Absolutely, you just throw it away when you’re done.
Is it the most environmentally sound? I’ll plead the Fifth on that.
But when you need a smudge remover, counter cleaner, or spill picker-upper, it can’t be beat. I’ll be taking six rolls to the cabin tomorrow, and I’m not sure it’s enough.
(Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tittlemouse, who would never use paper towels.)
Music matters. I believe this always, but especially when choosing the soundtrack for a walk. Today’s choice was Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.
I started with Number Two, remembering the story my long-ago piano teacher told me about the physical rigors of playing the trumpet solos of that piece. Her husband played the trumpet, she said, and the second Brandenburg was so difficult, even when played on the smaller piccolo trumpet, that one could pop a blood vessel with the effort.
Apparently, she did not make this up. A quick bit of research today tells me that the second Bach Brandenburg Concerto is “a trumpet player’s Everest.”
For a walker, though, it’s an energetic beauty of a piece. It revs one up and keeps one going. And this morning, it kept me bouncing along.
(One of my favorite music-themed photos, shot May 2010 in Vienna’s Musikverein.)
I’ve been waiting months to nab a library copy of Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis. I’ve read most of Robinson’s fiction (incandescent!) and some of her nonfiction (always erudite and thought-provoking). In fact, she’s one of my favorite authors.
When I cracked open her latest, though, I wasn’t sure I was up to the challenge. Nothing against Robinson, but Reading Genesis deserves a more clear-eyed reading than I can give it now. This is a book for cuddling with on a cold winter’s evening. It’s about concentrated mental effort, the kind I don’t have much of when days are long and nights are short and the mercury is topping 90 every day.
Feeling this way about the book makes me wonder about the seasonality of our reading choices. Might I have finished Ulysses if I’d attempted it in September, with the crisp attentiveness of a new academic year? After all, that’s when I finally completed The Power Broker.
On the other hand, it’s good to take the measure of a book before you start reading it, to save its revelations for another day. I’m sorry to pass on Genesis. But — at least for now — I will.
(Photo: Detail of Sistine Chapel ceiling, courtesy Wikipedia)
Summer has hit its pinnacle. We have almost as much ahead of us as we’ve left behind. If we fudge it a little we can still call this mid-July.
Which is all to say that the season has reached maturity. Greens couldn’t be greener. Fledgling cardinals are coming into their own, flitting around with resolve, no longer with the wobbly flight of juveniles.
And the cicadas! Their calls are the soundtrack of the season, wafting over me in waves. I omit earphones on my morning walks, the better to hear the summer bugs.
Always I think: Let this last.
A return yesterday to the coolest weather I’ve experienced in weeks. No heat wave, no subtropical humidity. Instead, a pleasant warmth and weight to the air. I can’t say I miss the heat, but I do miss the beach, the breeze, even the sand.
Yes, it sticks to the back of the legs and collects in the shower drain despite best attempts to wipe it off at the door. But sand is a most amazing element.
I think of my beach walks, striding across the fluffy stuff to find the hard-packed sand at water’s edge, constantly adjusting my route based on wave reach and tide.
I think of the bounce in my step sand provides: what a wonderful striding surface it is.
My beach trip may be over, but the memories remain. And a little of the sand does, too.
I had just walked into the house when I heard a familiar piece on the radio. It harkened back, far back, into memory. It was a Brahms Rhapsody, a piece I never learned completely but mastered the first few pages well enough to play — effusively but ineptly — long ago.
I’m in a funny place with what I still think of as my new piano. I love playing, but I don’t like practicing anymore than I did in fifth grade.
What’s an adult musician to do? Playing a la fakando — the faux musical term my stand partner Greg and I penciled in above impossible runs when I played string bass in high school — is hard to pull off on a solo instrument.
When I heard the Brahms, though, I remembered. It’s the music itself that makes me practice. Give me a piece I’m itching to master and I’ll put in some time. So I’m rekindling the rhapsody.
Every year when I’m in Florida I see the tiny lizards known as anoles. They’re cute little critters with big eyes, holes for ears and long tails that detach if you pull too hard on them.
These small reptiles scamper and dart. They puff up and slim down. When frightened, they freeze and hide themselves among the scrub.
I’ve had time on this trip to observe anoles up close, to watch them do what appears to be pushups but I’m sure is not, to wonder what they eat. (The answer: crickets, flies, mealworms and ants.)
Today I spotted an anole camouflaged on the bark of a palmetto plant. He was missing the fingers of his right hand. It wasn’t slowing him down, though. He was clinging tightly with his remaining digits, and taking life as it comes.
