Checking Boxes

Checking Boxes

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This morning, for the first time in more than six weeks, I did not tip back my head and squeeze drops of medicine into my eyes. Drops are a part of many cataract surgeries, or at least they were in mine. I’ve gotten used to the routine, the slight sting that tells me the fluid has actually hit the target and is not going to run down my cheek.

Also, and more to the point of this post, I’ve grow accustomed to checking the box on the handy chart the surgeon’s office supplied. Doing this has reminded me how much I like checking boxes. It must be the sense of completion I enjoy, of “mission accomplished.” And then there’s the tidying-up, organizational aspect of it all.

Imagine the fun of ticking off a box first thing in the morning. I’m barely awake but I’ve already completed a task. It’s enough to make me coast the rest of the day.

Checking boxes makes me think I’m in control. And even though I know I’m not, sometimes it’s fun to flirt with that illusion.

Have a Heart

Have a Heart

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I like wild things. At this house we feed birds and hummingbirds and our yard is full of weeds so fireflies flourish. But earlier this summer, a little terrorist prowled the deck, upending flowerpots, digging out bulbs, knocking over light fixtures.

We hauled out the have-a-heart trap to see what we would catch. Surely it was a raccoon or opossum, something large enough to perpetrate these crimes.

After just one night the trap had done its job. There was a varmint, all right … but it was a chipmunk. How could this one little guy do all that damage? Maybe he had a partner in crime?

Doesn’t matter. Some questions have no answers. We quickly let the critter go in the common land. Less than an hour later I saw him guy running across the deck. It’s his home, too.

8:05 p.m.

8:05 p.m.

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Shortly after dinner last night, the northern hemisphere shifted from summer to fall. It has been raining here for three days, so for once the weather fits the season. The world is still green but it has tilted.

I feel a certain betrayal acknowledging this. Shouldn’t I hold summer close as long as I can? Perhaps. But I also believe in knowing when to exit, when to change, when to say “enough.” And by the end of last week, with temps once again edging up to 90 and this summer’s trademark high humidity, it was time.

Don’t get me wrong. I know what fall means, the cold, dark days. But I also love lamplit afternoons, permission to stay inside and write. I appreciate seasonal change, what it provides the restless soul. Today is the first full day of autumn. I plan to embrace it.

The World Not Given

The World Not Given

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I live 20 minutes away from an international airport. In fact, I hear a plane right now, a long, low sound as a jet takes off in the leaden skies we have today.

Despite the proximity, Dulles is mostly out of mind. That is, of course, until I enter it. Then I step into its impressive lobby with my heart in my throat. I’m anxious because I’m rushing to make a flight, wondering how long the security line will be. But mixed in with the nervousness is always excitement. No matter how short the trip I almost always love making it. I am, you might say, enamored of travel.

I was even on Sunday, with several hours to kill at O’Hare, the busiest airport in the world. (Did I know this? I do now. Banners and promos proclaim it.)

Yesterday, I found someone else who feels the same way:

“How many times I’ve relished the private thrill of a foreign place where you know no one, speak a handful of words, where even the street signs throw you off balance,” writes Frances Mayes in A Place in the World. “How you feel your mind open to the new. How you set forth, all synapses crackling with curiosity. … Travel is a privilege because it gives you the world you were not given.”

The world not given. That’s it, exactly.

Layers of Place

Layers of Place

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I flew to Chicago and back over the weekend, with the ultimate destination a family wedding in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. As it turns out, we stayed at a former gangster hideout once known as the Lake Como Inn. The hotel’s out-of-the-way location made it a favorite of Baby Face Nelson, Bugs Moran and other members of the Dillinger gang.

That this homey, sedate hostelry (now called the French Country Inn) once featured a speakeasy in the basement and crawled with mobsters reminds me that places can morph through the years.

Much of what we see is conditioned by our expectations. Once we know even a smidgen of history we see places not just as they are, but as they used to be.

Places have layers. Discerning travelers try to plumb as many of them as they can.

(The mug shot of Lester Joseph Gillis, aka Baby Face Nelson. Courtesy Wikipedia.)

Just Right

Just Right

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What to call a walk that becomes longer than you originally thought it would be? It seems like there should be a name for a stroll that becomes a hike, for an outing that takes on an extension, an add-on, a bonus.

The other day I hit the Glade Trail mid-afternoon, imagining it would be a simple out-and-back. But the air was pellucid and smelled of crushed leaves. The old body wasn’t as creaky as usual. I had nothing I had to do when I returned. So when I reached Twin Branches I knew I had to keep going, had to see the light sparkling on Lake Audubon.

Just an eighth turn around the lake, I told myself. But that was not enough. I kept going until I reached the big green dam and the steps up to the shady part of the trail I love best. After that, I knew I could sidle up to a neighborhood where I amble past houses and pretend I live in them. Couldn’t resist that.

By that point I was invested enough that I had to do the entire hour-and-a-half loop. It was more than I bargained for, but it was just right.

Annie Dillard: 1945-2026

Annie Dillard: 1945-2026

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Late yesterday, I learned that Annie Dillard died Tuesday at the age of 81. Losing her so soon after Wendell Berry leaves me reeling. Two of my literary heroes, two poets of place, gone within 15 days of each other. I’ve quoted Dillard often in this blog. Here is a post I wrote on April 30, 2012, Dillard’s 67th birthday, which I titled “The Poetry of Pittsburgh.”

When I began this blog more than two years ago, I didn’t think long about the quotation I would use across the top. I knew it would come from Annie Dillard’s book An American Childhood.

“When everything else has gone from my brain — the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family — when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”

A few years ago, on our way home from visiting Tom’s family in Indiana, we stopped in Pittsburgh, where Annie Dillard was born on this day in 1945. It was a literary pilgrimage for me. Our first view of the city (where I had lived as a toddler, pre-memory), came at dusk, as we drove through a tunnel and suddenly there were the three rivers and the bridges crossing them all lit up with white lights. It seemed magical to me, this old city of groaning steel and trestles.

Was it the place itself that exerted this magic, or was it because I was primed to love it by Dillard’s words? “I will see the city poured rolling down the mountain valleys like slag, and see the city lights sprinkled and curved around the hills’ curves, rows of bonfires winding.”

It was both, I think. The place of poetry. The poetry of place.

(Photo: Downtown Pittsburgh viewed from the Duquesne Incline, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Give Sleep a Chance

Give Sleep a Chance

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Nothing warms my heart more than bounding up at 6 a.m. and attacking the day. I will never stop looking at the wee hours as found time.

However, I have learned to respect my need for sleep, to give in to it sometime. If I wake at 5, as I originally did today, and think I could make a go of it (even though my head was foggy) I will at least give sleep a chance. I will read for a few minutes and see if consciousness wins out.

Today, it did not. I had two more hours of peaceful shut-eye and have lots of energy now … all because I gave sleep a chance.

(This newborn may be snoozing peacefully here, but she has little need for rest now that she’s a toddler.)

Muddy Trail

Muddy Trail

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Yesterday’s walk took me through the woods to another street in the neighborhood, one I seldom visit. It held novelty and a sense of escape. It also held something I haven’t seen in a while: mud.

Though we’ve had rain through the warm months, we’ve been in drought conditions until recently. The water table has been low and the soil parched. Drops that fell were quickly absorbed. But now there’s a bit of water flowing through the creek and soggy patches on the trail.

I thought about wearing hiking boots, but since my walk was only partially in the woods, I decided against them. My tennis shoes would have to do. And they did. But not without detours. And tiptoeing. And searching for the high, dry ground.

A muddy trail is good for the earth, but it makes walking more complicated.

(A muddy trail in Bangladesh.)

Spring Up; Fall Down

Spring Up; Fall Down

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Something in the air this morning said fall. I’m not sure what it was, a thinner atmosphere, a brisker breeze, the few leaves that have fallen making a collage on the driveway.

In springtime, change starts at the top of the trees and works its way down. I look up to see where things stand.

In autumn, it’s the reverse. I look down at the path, the pavement, to notice the acorns, whole and crunched, the scrim of leaf-meal that collects along the trail.

It’s kind of like “spring ahead, fall back,” only in directions instead of time. “Spring up, fall down.” Something like that.