Lit From Within

Lit From Within

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Walking after dark, which I’m increasingly more likely to do these days, gives me the chance to observe neighborhood houses lit from within. 

I see the glow of bedroom lamps behind drawn shades, the flicker of television screens in living rooms, the laser-like beam above a desk in front of a window. 

While some families draw every blind, others leave windows open for all to see — the fishbowl approach to living. I try to give everyone their privacy, but I can’t help but notice the lights … and the lives lived within them.

(The turkey teapot is out-of-season, but it’s the best lamplight picture I can find right now.)

Public Transport

Public Transport

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My world changed dramatically on March 12, 2020, the last day I commuted into Washington, D.C. for my job. With my company having decided that the earliest we will return is January 2021, and the openness to telework after that, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that I probably won’t have to work in an office full-time again.

This is amazing in many ways, one of which is that is that I’ve gone from riding public transport three to four times a week to … not at all. And I’m not the only one. According to statistics in this morning’s Washington Post, ridership in one local transit system dropped by 95 percent. Similar shifts are happening in cities all over the country. 

I’m sorry about this, sorry because I think public transportation is the way more of us should be getting around. But I’m happy too, because my commute was a grueling, often three-hour roundtrip. I imagine I’m not alone in these mixed feelings. 

It’s only one of many challenges created by the strange new environment in which we live. Only one of many models, ways of doing things, that are crumbling, morphing, transforming, becoming a new world, seemingly overnight.

Part of the Furniture

Part of the Furniture

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Yesterday, a hummingbird dive-bombed me, flew around my head several times, then hovered right in front of me, as if to announce herself. Of course, I couldn’t get my camera ready in time to take a closeup shot (though I did snap the one above of her or one of her compatriots sipping nectar last week).

Hummingbirds aren’t the only animals who are becoming nonchalant about my presence. A six-point buck was grazing in my backyard this morning shortly after dawn. Foxes trot through the tall grass that needs mowing as if they owned the place. A few weeks ago, there was a tree frog in the wind chimes; his croaks were highly amplified.

But the birds are on a completely different scale. Because I’ve been working outside on the glass-topped table all summer they have begun to treat me like part of the furniture. They flit, they flutter, they feed. They completely ignore me. 

Because they do, I can observe their tiniest rustlings, the way a slender stem bends with their weight, or the chirps and peeps of goldfinches, cardinals and chickadees as they congregate around the feeder and gone-to-seed coneflowers. 

Amidst all this bounty, my task is simple: I sit and take it in. I am, after all, just part of the furniture.

A Tree Falls…

A Tree Falls…

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I had just finished the last chapters of The Library Book — which chronicles the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library fire, which reached temperatures of 2,000 degrees F. and glowed with a white-hot light — when I was awakened by a thud and a pop. 

The thud was a 90-foot maple, its trunk leaning for years and its roots weakened by this summer’s frequent rains, finally giving up the ghost and toppling over. Next-door neighbors felt their house shake when it hit the ground. (Luckily no houses were damaged and a car that appeared to have suffered severe damage got off easier than it would have originally appeared.)

The pop was the transformer the tree took out on the way down. By the time I joined the crowd of neighbors milling around in the rainy darkness with umbrellas and flashlights, the transformer had burst into flames and half the street had lost power.

The fire fighters had to wait on the power company, and everyone had to wait for the chainsaw crew, which arrived, oh, about 3 a.m. Trucks are still idling on our street. 

A tree falls, a transformer blows, a neighborhood awakens. It was an interesting night, to say the least. 

The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others

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I am, as you might expect, mostly a solo walker. I savor the quiet time I have when pounding the pavement in my neighborhood or on nearby trails. I mostly walk alone. 

But oh, the joy of walking with friends! Last week I planned two socially distant strolling excursions, one to see a buddy who spends most of her time away from home and I have trouble catching in town, and the other a walking meeting with a colleague who’s also a friend. 

Taking these walks reminds me how much I enjoy the other kind of walking, the kind that drives me not further into my own mind but pushes me out, into the lives of others. 

RIP, Lord & Taylor

RIP, Lord & Taylor

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A few days ago it was announced that Lord & Taylor is going out of business, shuttering the 38 brick-and-mortar stores it owns, holding sales in person and online, then closing its doors forever. 

It already shut down its flagship Fifth Avenue store, whose windows would delight me every Christmas when I lived in the city, and whose shop clerks always seemed to know a little more about their merchandise than your average retail worker. At almost 200 years of age, Lord & Taylor is the oldest department store in the country.

For some time I have felt sad entering my local Lord & Taylor. It has been emptier than the rest of the mall, its days more numbered. I knew it wasn’t long for this world, but I continued to shop there because its goods were quality and its demeanor was dignified. 

But soon it will be gone, following Hecht’s and Woodward and Lothrop (D.C. area stores) and Wolfe-Wile, Purcell’s, Stewart’s and Lazarus (Lexington, Kentucky-area stores) and hundreds of others across this land. 

What went wrong? Just about everything, but most of all the boxes that “smile.” I wonder how long we’ll be smiling when all the department stores are gone.

Slower Walk

Slower Walk

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It’s the kind of day I’d like to bottle, to store it up for a cold gray March morning. The humidity has broken and the breeze is blowing in a different season. It’s still solidly summer, but with a hint of the autumn to come.

It is, in short, too glorious a morning to rush through … so I took my time on this morning’s walk.  I eschewed my usual fast pace for a more leisurely stroll. I looked up more often, found a big fat cloud to keep in my sights, enjoyed the view of the Blue Ridge I can see from the top of West Ox Road.

And on the way home, I ogled the three new houses that have shot up in the development across the road, noted all their windows, wondered how you will get to them since their backs are to the street. 

Idle thoughts for a lovely morning, a morning just now turning to afternoon. 

Stretch Marks

Stretch Marks

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This is a house that has expanded and contracted so often during the last few decades that I almost wonder it doesn’t have stretch marks. 

After so many comings and goings you develop a feel for the ebbs and flows. There is the excitement when it fills again, the sense of life returning to the old place. And when that life departs for other climes, there is, of course sadness but also calmness and stability. 

While it would be easy to call the house emptier after one of these leave-takings, I know that the old place is really just holding its breath. There will be visits and returns. There will be grandchildren crawling on these floors (goodness, I’d better mop them!). 

There is life in this old house yet.

The Grandparents Among Us

The Grandparents Among Us

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Within the last week, moving vans have twice lumbered down our sleepy street. In one case to move a grandma into a family’s home; in the other, to move a family with a resident grandma out to a roomier place west of town. 

The disruptions of the pandemic, including virtual school, have put a new spin on resident grandparents, on their helpfulness and the value they add to nuclear family functioning. 

I wonder if some of these changes will become permanent, if we will move back to an older way of living, one where three generations living under one roof was the rule rather than the exception.

Now that I’m a grandparent, I wonder more about these things. 

(The old Vale Schoolhouse, which itself harkens back to an older era.)  

Like a Sundial

Like a Sundial

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My once-shaded morning spot is now striped with sunlight as greenery thins and light lowers. To listen to the cicadas you’d never know that summer is winding down. They’re as whirring and wonderful as ever. 

But to this stationary human, it’s all in the angles and shadows: not just a later sunrise and an earlier sunset, but countless other reminders based on known shadow points.

Sometimes I feel like a sundial, my movements charted and parsed, my dial controlled by a vast, uncontrollable force.