Binge-Watch Weekend

Binge-Watch Weekend

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The Oscars are less than a week away. The Netflix movies had been piling up. It was time for a binge-watch weekend.

It began with “Under the Sand,” a French drama with Charlotte Rampling. I’d like to see “45 Years” before next Sunday, so this was a Rampling appetizer of sorts. Next up was “Bridge of Spies,” a best picture nominee already available for rent on Amazon. It was long, as advertised, but because I was watching it in the basement, I could pause and come back an hour later to finish it.

“The Revenant” was the only film I saw in a theater last weekend. It was also long, as well as beautiful and brutal (also as advertised). After an evening of “Foxcatcher,” a 2014 film for which Steve Carrell was nominated for best actor, I ended the day with an hour of “The West Wing” with Celia and Suzanne.

Yesterday was the Steve Jobs biopic, also available to rent, and just before bedtime, the second-to-last Downton Abbey. It, quite frankly, made the whole binge-watching weekend worthwhile.

A Vital Process

A Vital Process

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In The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood, author Kathryn Aalto takes us through Ashdown Forest, past Poohsticks Bridge and to the top of Gills Lap, with its panoramic view of England’s South Downs.

These are real places — but they are also places of the imagination, where A.A. Milne traveled with his real-life little boy, Christopher Robin, and perhaps saw peeking from the trees there a chubby bear and a winsome piglet.

Like many writers, Milne was a walker. And Aalto’s words describing that here could double as a mission statement for A Walker in the Suburbs.

A lifelong joy and habit for the author, walking sets the mind adrift, clarifying and organizing thoughts — a vital process for writers. Walking allows a pace for discovering small, new things: how gorse has the faint smell of coconut in spring, that the red dragonflies hovering over bogs are actually rare, and that the nocturnal bird calls are from the threatened nightjar.

Sets the mind adrift … clarifies and organizes thoughts … allows a pace for discovering small, new things …  Yes, yes and yes.

A vital process? Vital, indeed.

Anne Frank Tree

Anne Frank Tree

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I usually walk right by it when I stroll around the Capitol, but for some reason yesterday I did not.

It seemed like nothing more than a fenced-in stick, so slender and insubstantial. But the fencing told me something important must be within — so I took a peek. I learned that the young tree is a sapling from the white chestnut that  grew outside the window of the Secret Annex of the Frank House in Amsterdam.

In May, 1944, less than a year before she would lose her life at the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp, Anne Frank wrote, “Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It’s covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.”

The tree was brought down by a windstorm in 2010, but its chestnuts were gathered and germinated and the saplings donated. This little twig of a tree was one of its progeny. Here is what its parent meant to Anne:

Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my
lungs, from my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and
the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine,
appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I
thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies,
while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.

(Photos: Wikipedia, Architect of the Capitol)

Good Walking

Good Walking

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The day began early, but the only walking I’ve done is what was needed to take me to and from Metro. Which got me thinking about the difference between walking and good walking.

Walking is like writing. Both are humble and utilitarian occupations, something most people do all the time.

But like good writing — in which words are strung together in a way to arouse sympathy or disgust, beauty or ugliness — good walking elevates the pedestrian. It is more than just a way to move from one place to another. It is a conscious and reflective exercise.

Good walking wears out the body and fills up the soul. It turns otherwise dreary and muddled days into clear and purposeful ones.

Good walking — I hope to do some at lunchtime.

Rowing Thoughts

Rowing Thoughts

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When weather makes walking impossible, I use the rowing machine in the basement. It’s a noble form of exercise, full-bodied and bracing. The first few minutes are agony.

But like most activities that require intense exertion, rowing eventually settles the mind. Arms pull forward, legs push back. The rhythm takes over.

And it’s only then, ten minutes in, that the mind can begin to roam. Rowing thoughts are bulleted and basic. They are not walking thoughts. But they are better than not-exercising-at-all thoughts. And yesterday, they were all I had.

Monochromatic

Monochromatic

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More snow last night, a few inches, enough to coat the mud and the leaves, the daffodil and crocus shoots. Enough to make it clear that it’s still winter.

Temperature-wise there has been no doubt of late, with single digit wind chills. But palette is important, too, and today February looks the part.

We are back to a monochromatic world. Black trees, leaves, lamp posts and pickets. White everything else. It’s better this way, I think.

Ten!

Ten!

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On February 13, 2006, my children were in fifth, ninth and eleventh grades — all still at home.  My parents were alive and going strong. Copper the dog had not yet come to live with us.

On this day, a Monday, I got off  Metro three stops closer to home, walked into a new office and started a new job. I was editing a magazine, which meant not only writing and line editing but also working with designers and a printer. I’d never done anything quite like it before.

The months and years have passed, the magazines have gotten to the printer (on deadline!) — and the job has remained.  It’s changed, of course. Now I edit web stories, press releases and media advisories; I keep tabs on videos and tweets and Facebook posts. I’ve adjusted, I guess you’d say.

I try not to think about what I would have done instead. This job has given me an income and security. It has given me the flexibility I needed to raise children and tend parents. But I’m a freelancer at heart and don’t always measure success in the conventional manner.

Still, today I raise a glass — a bit tentatively and not without irony, but I raise one just the same. Ten years is a long time to be at a job. It’s a milestone worth celebrating.

Ripples in Space

Ripples in Space

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Yesterday’s announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves, a phenomenon that Einstein  predicted but which had not been observed until now, does not exactly make me slap my forehead and say, “I knew it, I knew they were going to figure that out one of these days.”

I had no idea that gravitational waves were even in the maybe column. Physics for me will always be a high school class I somehow registered for without the required calculus and Mr. Taylor peering over his glasses to say, “Miss Cassidy, WHY are you in my class?” 

But after reading about the “chirp” scientists heard after converting gravitational waves to sound waves, a “chirp” that had for decades eluded them, I wanted to learn more about gravitational waves, these “ripples in the fabric of space.”

“Gravitational waves provide a completely new way of looking at the
Universe,” Stephen Hawking said upon learning of the discovery. “The ability to detect them has the potential to revolutionize
astronomy. This discovery is the first detection of a black hole binary
system and the first observation of black holes merging.”

Black holes merging. Ripples in space. Kinda puts everything else in perspective, doesn’t it?

(Photo: Phys.org.)

The Climate of Reading

The Climate of Reading

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The Wind is Not a River is not a book to read in the winter. When his plane is shot down, journalist John Easley bails out and lands on Attu, the westernmost of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and the site of the only World War II battle fought on U.S. territory.

Easley has come to report on the war but instead finds himself in a damp, cold place known as “the birthplace of winds.” He survives by eating mussels and coaxing fire out of grass and driftwood. He wraps up in a parachute to sleep.  He is never really warm.

When I read this novel I find myself pulling up the covers or tightening my scarf. Such is the power of fiction to take us out of one place and plop us down in another.

But I must choose books more carefully. Read in the warm months, this book would be a cool breeze. Read in the winter, it’s yet another nail in the coffin of cold.

Passage to Spring

Passage to Spring

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Lent arrives early this year — before Valentine’s Day. This is cruel timing for those of us contemplating a 40-day ban on chocolate.

But if it gives us an early Easter and an early spring (not that those two necessarily go together … ) then bring it on.

Meanwhile, the wind is howling in from the west and roads are slicked from last night’s freeze. This will be the coldest week of the winter. A fitting time, then, to begin a spiritual pilgrimage, a journey, a passage.

I always remind myself that “lent” comes from the word “to lengthen.” Seen this way, then, lent is a passage to spring. It is a time of lengthening days, of birds on the wing. A time of promise that soon we’ll be green and growing again.