Coatless

Coatless

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The first time each season always feels strange, like jumping off a high dive or setting off in a tube on a fast-moving river. There is a similar lack of control. The coat will not be there if the weather takes a nasty turn. There is no turning back.

Today I took a jacket from the house but left it in the car. It was that balmy this morning, with the promise of more warmth to come. The wrap would have been superfluous. It would have been wadded up in my tote bag before I even reached the office.

So off I went, with only a sweater between me and the elements. No jacket, no coat. It wasn’t until I reached Metro that I realized I’d also left my umbrella. So now I’m coatless — and umbrella-less, too. It must be spring.

Baby Shade

Baby Shade

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As I’ve mentioned before, spring is farther along downtown and in Crystal City than where I live. Which means that when I strolled down the tree-lined stretch of Crystal Drive that leads to my office this morning, I was not seeing winter-wan trunks without a hint of green. Instead, I was walking beneath baby shade.

Baby shade comes from trees just leafing, still unsure what they’re meant to do. They are uncurling, unfurling, making themselves useful not just to the plant in general but also to the pavement below.

We on the pavement are remembering what it’s like to amble beneath a great arched umbrella of greenery: how it cools us and calms us, how it intercedes between heaven and earth.

Baby shade is wan and tentative, but it is all we have now, and it is precious in its fleetingness.

The Feeling of Clean

The Feeling of Clean

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The urge to spring clean is a real one, I think. As nature renews itself outside, there’s a strong need to spruce things up inside, to scrub and pound, to throw open the windows, to air things out.

The other day I washed bed linens, right down to the mattress casings. I dusted and vacuumed in a more deep-cleaning way than usual. As I fell asleep last night under a freshly laundered duvet cover, I pondered the feeling of clean.

There seems to be a tightness to it, as if fibers loosened over time have suddenly been compressed again, are back to their normal connections and boundaries. And there’s a lightness to it, too. Those compressed fibers take up less room.

The feeling of clean should motivate me to scrub and scour more often than I do. But, alas, it must always compete with the feeling of too-much-to-do.

Birds, Waking

Birds, Waking

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The birds wake to the crescendo of the kettle boiling. It is one of those sounds they have come to know means humans are nearby. They also thrill to the toilet flushing and the hall door squeaking.

What they love best, though, is the sound of water running. Does it remind them of some avian past when their relatives roosted near brooks and springs so they could sip small drops in that way birds do, a way that is more of a splash than a drink?

Or do they simply love the sound of it best, as I prefer Brahms and Mendelssohn? I’ll never know, of course. But I do know that I thrill to the sound of their waking, to the warbling and the rustling, to the   peeps and songs of these feathered creatures, so small, so delicate, so alive in every way.

Procession of Bloom

Procession of Bloom

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According to my favorite weather site, the cherry blossoms may last as long as 10 days this year. Though I haven’t checked on the Tidal Basin flowers since Monday evening, I can tell by the hordes on Metro that hanami is still in full force.

As the blooming season moves out to my neighborhood (always a few days later than the city trees), my ho-hum daily drives are taking on a hanami quality of their own. I’m slowing down, seeking out the streets I know from years past.

There are the Bradford pears in Franklin Farm, the redbuds on Folkstone, the Kwanzan cherry in my own front yard. All of this, if the weather cooperates, in a slow steady procession through dogwoods and azaleas — a riot of bloom that takes us from the gray trunks of winter all the way to the vivid fuchsias and scarlets of  mid-May.

Happy National Walking Day!

Happy National Walking Day!

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It’s the first Wednesday in April, which the American Heart Association has deemed National Walking Day. You can go on their website and read about the health benefits of walking, the best warm-up stretches and how to prevent injury.

Notable to me is the word “National.” Most countries don’t need a Walking Day to get their citizens up and moving. In many parts of the world, if you don’t walk you don’t work and you don’t eat.

I see no need to extol the benefits of walking more today than other days. There’s a reason why I named this blog A Walker in the Suburbs. But I will point out that in one of my favorite cities in all the world, walking is not just popular on National Walking Day but all year long.

New York City is a walker’s paradise. It’s the place Alfred Kazin describes in A Walker in the City, to which this blog tips its hat. It’s no coincidence that lively walking cities are lively cities, period.

There is something about a human that loves a walk. And what better day to remind ourselves of that?

Hanami

Hanami

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I just happened upon the ranger talk at the Tidal Basin last evening at 6 p.m. I’d decided to see the cherry blossoms after work, and then, impulsively, walked counterclockwise instead of the other way around. And there, at the FDR Memorial, was a green-suited ranger with a Smokey the Bear hat.

He was speaking of L’Enfant when I arrived, but went on from there to cover the flood of 1881, the creation of the Tidal Basin and the ugly construction-site look of the land around it at the turn of the 19th century. He described National Geographic writer Eliza Scidmore’s 24-year campaign to plant Japanese cherry trees around the basin, a quest that finally took root, so to speak, when President Taft’s wife, Helen, became interested in the project. (The lantern above commemorates the spot where Taft planted one of the first cherry trees.)

There are other twists and turns to this story and how cherry trees came to dominate the landscape around the Washington and Lincoln monuments. But my favorite part of the talk came when the ranger talked about the Japanese custom of hanami or “flower viewing” of the sakura or cherry blossoms.

The sakura represents a “short life, well-lived,” the ranger said, and for that reason was revered by both samurai warriors and kamikaze pilots. Hanami celebrates the fleetingness of the blossoms, the beauty that is ours just for a moment — and more lovely because of it.

The Overdog

The Overdog

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Yesterday, I watched my first and last University of Kentucky basketball game of the season. Such is the hubris of this Kentucky fan that she missed the first two rounds of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, figuring she’d tune in only if her team made it to the Elite Eight.

There was a not-so-subtle assumption here, of course … which is that her team would make it to the Elite Eight. Not such a crazy assumption given that they’ve been there 34 times. Heck, UK has played in 17 Final Fours. Auburn, the team that beat us yesterday, has never been to the Final Four. Which means that, as usual, many people were pulling for our opponent to win.

I understand this emotion. In fact, I usually pull for the underdog, too — except when the underdog is playing UK. My rationale is that Kentucky is not the first in much else. US News ranks the Bluegrass State 34th in education (which is an improvement from when I was in school) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis lists us 42nd in per capita income.

The fact that we’re not the the underdog in basketball — that you might even call us the overdog (no fooling) — seems only fair to me. But that never stops me from pulling for the boys in blue. I want them to win every time.

(“Underdog” cartoon photo courtesy Wikipedia) 

The Volunteer

The Volunteer

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In so many ways, the name doesn’t fit. When I hear “volunteer,” I think of a smiling face with a hospital tray, or a badge-wearing angel at an airport information desk. There is a lot of goodness in the word, to be sure. But the word also a martial implication, young men marching off to war. How odd, then, that trees that spring up where they aren’t planted are also called volunteers.

But they are, and I can now stand amidst the branches of one — a weeping cherry that was spared at birth by our neighbors the Morrisons, the same neighbors who are more than halfway through their around-the-world cruise. Decades ago, they left the cherry alone while it spread its roots, enlarged its trunk and sent its branches down in a cascade of blossoms, larger and more fulsome every year.

The tree sits far too close to the street, is off-center, is too big for its footprint. But it has thrived, just the same. And watching it bloom this year makes me wonder at the wisdom of natural selection.

According to the itinerary they left behind, the Morrisons recently left Sri Lanka for Indian ports. These will be followed by a long string of sea days, then Jordan and the Suez Canal. The Morrisons aren’t in Virginia to see the small pink flowers bud from the hanging stems. For this, they will need a stand-in — and  I volunteer. 

Remembering the Light

Remembering the Light

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Traveling with a photographer for 10 days as I did last month in Cambodia has made me more attuned to light, to the waxing and waning of it, the quality of it. I’d heard of the golden hours, the ones early and late in the day, when light slants low over the landscape and casts a glow. But I was unsure of how far you could push it, how little light you could have to still capture a shot.

Our last full day in the field had us racing to reach a family before dusk. Even I, non-photographer that I am, was biting my nails. Would we get there in time? Would there be enough light left?

I’ve seen the photographs … and there was. The couple we wanted to capture stand arm and arm in the setting sun, the brickyard slag heap reflecting its final rays.

The young woman wears a red checked dress. She’s changed into it for this photograph, though her husband still wears his work clothes, which are streaked with grime and brick dust. This touches me greatly, the efforts she took, her simple gold necklace and flip flops, the way she cupped her stomach, cradling the baby she carries, due next month.

Life goes on; light goes on, too.