April crept up on me this year. I’d started thinking it might always be March — a month of unpredictability and extremes. A month of forced gaiety — of green beer and basketball.
But time has worked its magic. Thirty-one days of earthly rotation have brought us to a day of foolishness and frivolity.
There’s been no chance to construct elaborate pranks — or even simple ones. It’s a day for relief and gratitude. No fooling!
Yesterday I threw caution to the winds and took my usual route around the Capitol. I thought about what happened there two days before — but walked anyway. It is, of course, what we have to do, which is nothing. Not alter our course in the slightest.
The reward: a picture-perfect almost-April day. Trees just greening on the Mall. Tulips in the Botanic Garden. The sinuous curves of the Indian Museum outlined against blue sky. And in that sky, twin contrails.
Everywhere I looked, everything I saw, spoke of possibility and fresh starts. Winter is truly over; spring has just begun.
For me, most days, the trip home begins with a walk west. Yesterday it was a walk into wind and sun. Both specialties of the season. One warms the ground; the other lifts seeds aloft and sets them down oh so tenderly a hundred feet away.
Overlooking for now that those seeds have swollen my sinuses, that the wind whipped my hair and the glare made it almost impossible to look where I was going. Still, with all those things, the walk into wind and sun was surprisingly satisfying.
Maybe it’s the freedom. Maybe it’s heading west, always the way to go. Or maybe it’s the trudge factor: putting one foot in front of the other, staying the course, if you will.
And I will. That’s for sure. I will.
Yesterday I didn’t take my usual walk around the Capitol. And it’s a good thing I didn’t. A man brandished a gun at the Capitol Visitors Center and was shot by police. A bystander was reportedly hit as well, and the whole complex was put on lock down.
I wonder if I’ll take that walk again. Will I vary the route? Go another direction entirely?
A crazy world is a limited world. It’s a world of fences and walls and bollards; of keeping things at a distance. It’s a world of “see something, say something,” a message I hear repeated on the Metro approximately once every four minutes.
Most of all, it’s a world of suspicion and distrust and fear. It’s not an especially pleasant world — but it’s the only one we have right now.
The story is the same, but each year has its revelation. This year’s was something I’ve noticed before but not with as much intensity:
On the first day of the week,
Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning,
while it was still dark,
and saw the stone removed from the stone.
“Early in the morning.” “While it was still dark.” Of course! She was up in the wee hours tending to those who needed her. It’s how most women I know make everything work, by getting a head start on the day.
I no longer juggle a job with young children, but I’m always trying to balance competing duties, to find time not just for the work for which I’m paid but the work for which I’m not. Time for family and friends; for shopping, cooking and cleaning; for emails and phone calls; for connection and solitude.
The early morning hours are my ally in this quest. They are the great elastic clause. They are when I catch up with others — and with myself.
Walked out of the office into a perfect early spring afternoon. Jackets slung over shoulders. Tourists everywhere. A long weekend beckoning.
I was exhausted at my desk but quickly readjusted outside. There was a destination, a goal: the Tidal Basin, the cherry blossoms.
It was crowded, as usual. Picnickers, strollers, photographers, all with separate purposes but one mission — to celebrate spring. I thought then as I often do how the walker can take heart from the people she passes — some just coming alive to the world, others happy just to be in it.
I had forgotten the lightness one could have — not just in the air but in the heart.
We are all aflutter because Vice President Joe Biden is speaking here in a few hours. Preparations have been underway since late last week, and after a sneak peak at the venue upstairs I can say … what a transformation.
The primary agent of change is what is described in events planning lingo as “pipe and drape.” Tall velvet panels — in a lovely, rich, presidential blue — hang all along the room and route. They both soften and ennoble the place.
Instead of being crammed with students sharing outlines, discussing torts, sipping coffee, the room is now filled with black chairs in neat rows. In the back, camera crews are setting up shop. Every department — events, facilities, audio visual, communications, public safety — is doing its part to make sure the speech goes off without a hitch.
We have become a stage set, an empty theater waiting for its star.
These are the crazy first days of spring, capricious and erratic. The thermometer appears to be broken, so profoundly do its readings vary from morning till night. All we can do is hang on.
That — and figure out what to wear. Should we dress for morning or for afternoon? Or more precisely, should we be comfortable at 6 a.m. and sticky at 4? Or the other way around?
For me, it’s the former every time. I’ll wear a turtleneck even though it’s going up to 70. But when I walk out the door and feel the first cold blast of 30-something-degree air, I’ll pull the sweater up to my chin and luxuriate in its warmth.
I work in a law school. Every day I use words to build articles, web stories, press releases and emails. The work I do is achieved with a click, a flick of the wrist.
Meanwhile, a block away, guys are roofing a major highway. For more than a year they’ve been moving utility lines and driving pillars into the ground. Now they’re using a giant crane to hoist huge steel beams. Eventually, they will entunnel this stretch of I-395 and build a small neighborhood on top of it.
And I — I will continue building towers of words, the sometime dwelling place of ideas but often just ephemeral constructs that vanish the moment they’re sent.
For the last decade or so I’ve been writing down in the back pages of my journal the author and title of each book I read. This makes, if not for a perfect list (scattered as it is among a bunch of well-worn black books), at least a start at a disjointed one. A year or so ago I began to annotate the list, jot down a detail or two that would help me identify the book without googling the darn thing.
Which is all to say that reading is one of my pillars, one of the things I need to do in order to feel, well, right about the world. And the book I’m reading now offers an explanation for why reading is so important.
In The World Between Two Covers, author Ann Morgan writes of books’ “transformative” effect, in particular the chemistry between reader and writer, how the reader completes and embellishes the words on the page.
“As co-architects of a book’s imaginary universe,” she writes, “we do not merely register the events of a story: we create and feel them too. They are ours even as they are the author’s, and without us they would not exist exactly as they are.”
What else could explain the thoughts exploding in my head when I read Middlemarch or The Great Gatsby or another favorite? What else could explain the wonder and the addiction?
The World Between Two Covers describes Morgan’s year of reading books from all 195 U.N. recognized countries. But the title also gets at the miracle of reading itself. From one minds, many; and from many minds, one.