Pollination Station

Pollination Station

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It finally felt like winter when I took my lunchtime walk yesterday. A brisk wind made the 40-something-degree air bite more deeply into the bones. But I warmed up quickly and was once again ready to walk past the Botanical Gardens without going in.

I’m so glad I didn’t!

This year’s holiday show was as magical as the others I’ve seen. The theme was  Pollination Station and the scenes were full of bees, bats and butterflies and the fruits and flowers they pollinate — all made of tree bark, willow shoots, grapevine tendrils, acorn caps and pine cone scales. An H gauge train chugged through the scene crossing ravines on rough-hewn trestles.

You could bend down and peek through little porthole windows into the winter homes of bugs, complete with twig-fashioned rocking chairs and mossy coverlets.

It was, in the best sense of the word, transporting. Full of wonder and whimsy.


(Photo: DConHeels.com)

Taking Stock

Taking Stock

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On my last office day for two weeks I revel in the quiet. I have stories to edit and projects to complete but I find myself pruning the fern and peeling a clementine.

I think about the writer’s need for time and space and how little of it I’ve had. I think about a new year coming and what it will bring.

How easy it is to stay put, to walk the same paths and think the same thoughts. How comforting and deadening it can be. It requires great effort to chart a new course, to seek perspective.

I’m hoping my time off will give me a chance to take stock, to search for new routes and trails. It’s not a long time, but it might be enough. I’m hoping that it is.

TubaChristmas!

TubaChristmas!

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It had been five years since my last TubaChristmas concert — which I learned by checking the archives of this blog (now there’s a scary thought!)  — so that when I arrived at the Kennedy Center last night I looked for a crowd at the Millennium Stage, the free performance venue where the event had been held in the past.

That corner of the place was dark, though, because this year TubaChristmas made the big time. Still free, still an hour long, but gloriously housed and staged in the Concert Hall. There were tubas and sousaphones and euphoniums on the stage. There were tubas and sousaphones and euphoniums in the balconies. There were tubas and sousaphones and euphoniums everywhere.

Tiny lights glistened from their ample bells. Wreaths bedecked them. There were Santa hats aplenty, too — these on the players rather than their instruments. And the carols played by these lower brass were a spirited and at times out-of-sync cacophony.

It was Appolinaire’s first concert at the Kennedy Center, his first American concert of any sort. (Just about everything is his first these days!) No stern, snooty longhairs for him. Now he will think that all concerts are free, all concerts are singalong — and all concerts are joyful. Not a bad introduction!

Good News

Good News

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Good news from the heartland: A nephew and cousin — a young father battling cancer — has just learned that he is cancer-free. After months of grueling treatments and countless prayers to spare him, he has received the best news anyone can — that he is healthy, that he will live.

Now he can get back to his new wife and baby son, to his plans and dreams. He can get on, too, with the petty problems of life, which are now seen for what they are, no more than sticks and pebbles along the way, nothing like the chasm, the void, he has just traversed.

And for a while his experience will be a beacon to us all — until once again the sticks and pebbles seem like boulders and logs, and we let them bog us down; until the next time the world tilts crazily and we see that what we thought was important isn’t and what we seldom think about is all that really matters.

Half Hidden

Half Hidden

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This is a good year for ornamental cabbage, its creamy centers unblemished by frost spots or drought. I noticed a stand of these plants on my walk yesterday. Light pink shading to ivory, edged by sage green.

I stared hard at them as I passed, lost myself momentarily in their spiky beauty so that I could re-create them on the page this morning. A type of stillness in their leafy flower. “A violet by a mossy stone, half hidden from the eye,” in Wordsworth’s style.

Later I would stroll past the Capitol and the Supreme Court, philosophies etched in stone, all the grandeur of official Washington.

But what stayed in mind were the cabbage plants, their quiet beauty, their brave salute to winter.

Mind Travel

Mind Travel

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I whiled away some Metro wait time this morning staring at a map in the station. This is one for Reston-Wiehle, the current (but I hope not forever) western terminus of the Silver Line. I fixate on the southern exit,  how I could cross Sunrise Valley Drive at Commerce to Wethersfield then cut through the golf course to Durand and Purple Beech.

From there I’d take Soapstone all the way to Lawyers, Steeplechase and home.

It’s a walker’s fantasy. An hour-long walk at best. It would involve the kind of time I don’t have anymore.

For me, for now, the route is for mind travel only. A way to let the walker’s imagination wander while the walker’s body is doing what it has to do.

Remembering

Remembering

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A lunchtime walk on Monday, heading south on First to the Mall, then turning back north at Seventh only to find myself at the Navy Memorial …  at noon … on Pearl Harbor Day.

There was a brass band, a color guard, music, salutes and a bugler to play Taps. So I stayed a while, listened to the invocation, put my hand on my heart for the National Anthem.

I had forgotten. And it is important to remember.

The Archaeology of Grief

The Archaeology of Grief

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“The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten.”

I’m more than halfway through Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and the dogeared pages are growing. More and more often I find myself holding her phrases in mind, turning them over, searching for the invisible strings that tether them to the page, so light are they, so deft at plumbing the dusky chambers of the human heart.

This one today came after a description of a dying rabbit and how adept Macdonald became at the coup de grace, at putting the bunnies her hawk, Mabel, killed out of their misery. “The serious, everything puzzle that was death and going away.”

Macdonald was grieving her father’s abrupt passing as she tamed her hawk; she was learning to be a participant in life rather than just an observer. That’s what gave her the “momentary shouldering of responsibility” that allowed her to kill the rabbit.

And she was ruminating, always ruminating. She didn’t feel regret for the killing but for the animal itself. “It wasn’t a promising sorrow,” she says. “It was the sorrow of all deaths.”

I bought this book because I thought it would be a companion in grief. It has become just that. It is  the spade, but it is also the salve.

Foggy Start

Foggy Start

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A foggy start to this December morning. Moisture beaded up on the car windows, so I took extra care backing down the drive. From such cautious beginnings come slower, less urgently paced days.

Today’s Metro ride on the Silver Line took me through bands of gray clouds with neon signs flashing: “Walmart,” “Exxon.” Tyson’s Corners were softened by the mist.

Clouds had engulfed the city, too, graying the red-brick Building Museum and hiding the pockmarked steps at Judiciary Square.

I hurried to the office, energized by the anonymity, seeking the quiet that comes with still weather, a place to sit down, open the book, call up the screen — and write.

Fulfillment

Fulfillment

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Advent is the season of waiting, of ancient chants and plainsong. It is the season of patience and hope and muted gladness, a glimpse of distant mountains, the lure of the promised land.

Advent is, therefore, a good time for new beginnings, for celebrations of all kinds, planned and unplanned.

I write today on one of the latter. Unless you count the two years in a dusty African village, the nine months awaiting a visa, the long years before that.

It is, for my family, a day of fulfillment and rejoicing. To which we all say “Amen.”