This year our Christmas tree needs a drink of water each morning and sometimes one at night. It’s not stalling at bedtime; it’s a genuine requirement. And I’m genuinely happy about it.
I’ve always known there’s a window of time in which to water a tree that if missed pretty much guarantees an early demise. Last year’s tree was neglected in those early hours and never recovered.
It’s hard not to see in this some lesson about needs and timing, that we apportion to the people and the causes in our life the sustenance they require when they require it. Easier done with a Christmas tree than less tangible entities. Still, I’m glad this tree is still thirsty days after it was decorated.
(Last year’s tree. If you’re quiet you might hear the needles dropping.)
I’ve barely had time to tie my shoes lately, let alone nurture my creative self. But yesterday I found myself at an appointment close to the W&OD Trail, the rails-to-trails path that leads from suburban D.C. to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The section I usually cover is between miles 16 to 19, the Reston area. But yesterday I ventured west, past mile 20, walking through the town of Herndon, with its old-fashioned downtown and fortnightly library (named for a group of 19th-century women whose study club met every two weeks).
I meandered off the trail a few times to see a neighborhood, enter the library, and browse in a thrift store. In other words, I explored. I went places I hadn’t been in a very long time and, if only for a few minutes, lost myself in them.
It didn’t take long for the to-dos to crowd back in again, but for two hours yesterday, I was free.
(You never know who you might meet on the W&OD Trail.)
This morning I’m watching a scene that is as old as time: the dance of predator and prey. It’s the hawk, perhaps the same one who attacked the parakeets a few weeks ago, and he’s hungry for breakfast. From my office window I have a bird’s eye (make that a raptor’s eye) view of the backyard and can watch him just as he is watching others.
The hawk perches on the low-lying limbs of the witch hazel tree and scans the yard looking for signs of movement. Several times I’ve seen him swoop down to earth, responding to the slightest rustle. So far he’s been unsuccessful, but it’s only a matter of time before some small critter is his forever.
As for the critters, they dart back and forth. Squirrels burrow through leaves looking for acorns. Woodpeckers and sparrows flit from branch to suet block seeking their own sustenance.
Here I am with my own stomach growling — but I don’t want to leave this elemental enactment. There is some ancient wisdom in it, some explanation for why things are the way they are — and I want to take it in a little longer.
(Rather than trot out my one blurry hawk photo again, here’s a beautiful but creepy shot of a 2016 Renwick exhibit.)
I read an essay the other day about Aldo Leopold, which got me thinking about the great conservationist and some writing I did about him a few years ago.
At first glance Aldo Leopold’s book ASand County Almanac (1949) seemed to be like other evocative writing about place — books by Annie Dillard or Henry David Thoreau, for example, books that shed light not only on cities or rivers but also on the author or the human condition, books in which the landscape is a vehicle to the self.
What I got was much more. It was not just a book about the transformation Leopold and his family underwent as they fixed up an old chicken coop in Wisconsin and lived there on weekends. It was in this place that Leopold wrote the essays that became his masterpiece, A Sand County Almanac, a book that encapsulates the philosophy of place that makes him one of our earliest prophets of ecology and wilderness preservation. This book, like the twisted little apples of Winesburg, Ohio, is the hard-won fruit of the deep thinking Leopold brought to the land on which he chose to live.
“There are those who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot,” writes Leopold in his introduction. But from such big pronouncements the work quickly becomes more specific: the winter awakening of a skunk, the trail of a meadow mouse, the fate of the passenger pigeon, the life of a downed tree, the difference between a shovel (which makes us givers) and the axe (which makes us takers).
To Leopold, place is much more than a vehicle for self-discovery. It is essential to the health and welfare of our planet. The landscape is not here for our amusement or to further our self-awareness; we are working parts of it. Leopold sings of the wilderness, the wild creatures, the original grasses and grizzlies and wolves and weevils that are born and nurtured by a particular soil and rainfall. Here is the moral work of place, the ecology of belonging.
I was so full of the lessons and carols yesterday morning that I forgot what day it was. No matter, the radio soon reminded me that it was Beethoven’s special day. And that meant it was also the birthday of our very own, dearly departed Copper. So as I listened to the Seventh Symphony, the Coriolan Overture and the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, I was also thinking of a certain sweet doggie.
We never knew his real birthday, but December 16, 2006, was the day we brought him home from the Loudon County shelter. His debut performance involved slipping out of his inaugural collar (after that, he always wore a harness) and dashing down the street with a frantic parade of humans in his wake. He was eventually retrieved and brought into his new home. From then on, there was never an open door he didn’t try to rush, never a closed one he didn’t try to open by grabbing the knob in his mouth.
I make light of it now, but at the time it was terrifying. Here was this beautiful creature with silky hair, strong shoulders and big brown eyes, a canine we adored from the moment we saw him, and he seemed determined to leave the only loving family he ever had. This was not from ingratitude but from anxiety. The little guy was a bundle of nerves. Later in his life he cowered when thunder pealed. Sometimes he even barked at his own tail thumping.
Yesterday was the second December 16th that’s come and gone without Copper. Is life simpler without him? Yes it is. But it’s poorer, too.
The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols I know is the one that takes place in King’s College Cambridge on Christmas Eve. It’s the one that begins with these words “Once in Royal David’s City,” often sung in the dulcet tones of a boy soprano.
It’s also the one that the famous Groton School of Groton, Massachusetts, holds or used to hold, which we once foolishly attended with newborn Suzanne. She didn’t cry … much. But I spent most of the service worrying that she would, especially during the agonizingly long minutes when the solemn procession blocked our exit.
The Festival of Lessons and Carols last night was a different matter. It was beautiful and earnest, not a flame in the darkness but a well-lit performance featuring the choir and its new director, an organist extraordinaire. The reading and songs weren’t the exact ones I was expecting but they checked all the boxes.
Afterward we went up and talked with the director, congratulated him on the success of the event and asked some questions about the organ. Turns out, it’s a hybrid instrument, part digital, part real pipes. I had no idea such a combination exists and am doubly amazed now at the sound that comes out of it.
To hear “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” on that instrument is to hear the carol in all its ancient and aching wonderment. A suiting accompaniment to the words of Isaiah: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”
There was a hush abroad in the land when I woke this morning. All I could think about was that there’s a new little person in the world who wasn’t here this time yesterday. On any given day this is always case. But yesterday was special because this little person is our newest granddaughter.
When the pandemic began in 2020 we had no grandchildren. Now we have six. Not that I feel old or anything. Okay, maybe just a little bit old. But mostly I feel blessed.
What we have here is an embarrassment of riches. What my daughter has is her newfound status as mother of three. As I helped her out yesterday, scrambling like crazy to get a preschooler and toddler out the door, dealing also with two large dogs and a cat, I wondered how she will ever manage with a third. But she will. I did (minus the two large dogs), and many manage much more with far fewer resources.
Our job as grandparents is to support the family however we can. Which is what I’m planning to do, starting … yesterday.
(Between them, these two “babies” now have six kiddos.)
Up before dawn this morning staring at this screen, which I’ve done all too often of late. I think about the legions of writers before me, also up early plying their trade. Down through the centuries they go, scribbling by fireside and candle flame and lamp light.
And then you have us modern folk. Our tablets are illuminated. Our laptops gleam. We need no lighting source save the one upon which we type.
There’s a lovely scene in the most recent film version of “Little Women” where Jo writes in the attic of her home in Concord. She has just lost her dear sister Beth, for whom she began writing tales of their girlhood, and now it has dawned on her that these stories, humble and homespun as they originally seemed, are the real thing, the stories she’s meant to tell.
She writes in soft candlelight, dipping her pen in and out of the ink. She wears her old writing jacket and scratches out the words as if in a trance. Days pass. The manuscript pages pile up, and she moves them around on the attic floor.
She writes in light and in darkness. When she strikes a match it sounds as if she’s setting the house on fire. But it’s she who’s on fire, penning the words that even after all these years I can still quote from memory: “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”
And here I sit, as the day lightens around me, as the screen glows.
(Saoirse Ronan as Jo in a still shot of “Little Women,” 2019, directed by Greta Gerwig, Sony Pictures Entertainment)
I think, I hope, that I’ve completed one of the two research papers due this weekend. This is welcome news since I have another one to go. The other one is well along but by no means finished.
The dilemma now is what to do while the first one “marinates.’ I learned long ago not to push send too quickly. It does any written work good to sit a while, to settle, much like a cake cooling on a wire rack after you take it out of the oven. Cut into that cake too soon and you’ll be sorry.
Should I plunge immediately into the next project? It takes some time to shift gears, to remember where I was when I knocked off working on the other one late Monday. There’s always lunch and the newspaper to while away an hour or so, to punctuate the time. A midday finish should mean taking a complete break, but today the break will be mini, with promises of a longer one to come.
(No picture of a cake cooling; this one will have to do. It’s making me hungry!)
The fog was so pleasant this morning when I walked outside to pick up the newspaper that I almost took a walk then and there. But duty calls, brain work beckons, and the walk will be postponed.
It will not always be this way, I remind myself. But these days I must harvest every bit of brainpower I can, and that harvest is best begun in the morning.
There was a time, though, when locomotion came first. For many years, I rolled out of bed right into my running gear, laced up my shoes and dashed around the reservoir in Central Park. What a way to start the day! It was bracing, it was beautiful, it was always a pinch-me-I’m-living-in-New-York moment.
When I ran the reservoir I forgot about the cramped room where I lived, the money I didn’t have, the extra work I did to make my editorial day job possible. My heart and lungs were full of the park and of the city that surrounded it. The run was only two miles, but at the end of it I could tackle anything.
