Segments

Segments

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Walking home from the Silver Line yesterday and driving to the Orange Line this morning, I noticed the journeys have something in common.

Like any trip, they are not just one long sweep of motion; they are segments cobbled together by time and movement.

I hadn’t driven to the Vienna Metro (Orange Line’s last stop) for almost four weeks, so I saw it with fresh eyes: the Fox Mill Road segment, up one hill and down another; the Vale portion, before the big turn and after it; the straightaway that is Hunter Mill Road; the short stretch of Chain Bridge; the newly repaved and bicycle-laned Old Courthouse, then the turn onto Sutton, Country Creek and right then left into the parking garage.

Walking gave me these eyes, let me see the drive in segments as I would a stroll. I’m grateful for that.

A Run to the Bus Without Tea

A Run to the Bus Without Tea

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I gave up caffeine nine months ago, but when I don’t have time in the morning for a cup of my special decaffeinated blend, I am brain-fogged, blindfolded, cobwebbed in the head.

Can there be a tea addiction without caffeine? Could I have a taste addiction?

There is something about the warmth and the flavor and the sweetness on the tongue. Something bracing and forward-thinking about it. Something settling and stilling about it, too.

I check the hours of the cafe on campus. They open at 8. Yes! My blog post will be short; my tea break will be long. The answer to the questions above: yes and yes.

Winning the Match

Winning the Match

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With a daughter in Benin, West Africa, I’ve been reading a lot about Ebola, especially the cases in neighboring Nigeria. So far, that country seems to be staying on top of the disease, but health experts are watching it closely because the nation is so populous. If Ebola spreads there, loss of life could be catastrophic.

Learning about the doctors fighting Ebola and dying from it — in some cases without even gloves to protect themselves and stem the contagion — brings to mind a favorite novel, The Plague, by Albert Camus. Its central character, Dr. Bernard Rieux, tends the plague-ridden in the town of Oran, Algeria. On the night of his friend Tarrou’s passing —Tarrou who had helped fight the plague and was its last victim — Rieux seeks to understand human suffering:

Tarrou had “lost the match,” as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match.

At the end of the novel, the reader learns that Dr. Rieux has been its narrator, that “he resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people, so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in times of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

Photo: Katie Esselburn

Mockingbird’s Place

Mockingbird’s Place

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On vacation I finished reading Marja Mills’ The Mockingbird Next Door: My Life with Harper Lee, a memoir about living next door to the reclusive writer in Monroeville, Alabama.

Nelle Harper Lee and her sister, Alice, were already up in years when Mills met them while reporting an article for the Chicago Tribune. From those first contacts a relationship formed, and in this book Mills tells the story of the sisters’ old-fashioned life: visiting friends, feeding ducks, and living with the books and memories of decades in their hometown.

Although Lee quickly denied having authorized the book (a controversy that has probably boosted sales), I read the memoir enthusiastically anyway. Not just for a glimpse of the author but also for a portrait of the place that she enshrined as Maycomb in her novel.

“It’s the old Monroeville — the old Maycomb — that lives on in the imaginations of so many readers,” Mills wrote. “It’s the people and the places the Lees saw out the windows of the Buick all those years later.” Mills refers here to the drives she took with the Lees and their friends, expeditions that helped her appreciate a vanishing way of life.

“Nelle’s portrait of that community was so richly detailed, so specific and true to the small-town South during the Depression, that something universal emerged and, with it, the remarkably enduring popularity of the novel.”

I like thinking that what makes To Kill a Mockingbird great us is not just the characters — but also the place they inhabited.

Commuting on Foot

Commuting on Foot

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Yesterday I walked once again from the Wiehle Metro station to my car in a parking lot four miles away. Why is this worth mentioning? Only for this — that I am, finally, commuting on foot in the suburbs.

This is not an accomplishment to be shrugged off. And I don’t mean it’s my own personal accomplishment but an evolution in the way we live. That I can step off the train and travel on my own steam to the next destination is a marvel, given the way I started living here 25 years ago.

Then I couldn’t leave the neighborhood on foot because of cars barreling down narrow, un-shouldered roads. Now sidewalks and bike lanes take me to the grocery store and pharmacy; let me tap into Reston’s trail system, which used to be a tantalizing but unreachable distance away.

So to all forms of walking I celebrate here  — ambling meditatively through the woods, running pell-mell through the meadow, strolling briskly through the city — let me add the walk which is not a destination in itself but which has a larger purpose. It not only takes me out of myself; it takes me home.

Canopy Walk

Canopy Walk

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As walks go, this was a short one, only about 80 feet. But it was 25 feet above ground — and it swayed as I moved. Up there amidst the live oaks and cabbage palms, I was not just in the foliage but of it.

Florida’s Myakka River Canopy Walk was modeled on canopy walks in the South American rain forests. It’s humble and natural and sturdily built (or at least I pretended that it was).

A 76-foot observation tower on one end let me climb up through the trees to glimpse a panorama of forest and river. I was above the canopy rather than under it.

My knees quivered and I thought about the fear that comes not just from height but from exposure. I felt a kinship with creatures that hide under rocks or brush.

Enclosure is safe. Exposure is dangerous — and exhilarating.

Drenched Garden

Drenched Garden

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Spongy mulch, dripping ferns, glistening flowers.

The summer garden got a good soaking yesterday, and this morning it is renewed, refreshed, restored.

I’m still thinking about the tropical gardens, though, the orchids and bromeliads, how they draw their sustenance from rainfall cupped and gathered, how they use it to make food.

Plants of the air, plants of the earth — water common to both.

The Return: Some Perspective

The Return: Some Perspective

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A rainy-day return to the office. Low light, lowered expectations; today’s goal to survive. Grateful for a certain rainy-day coziness and the quiet required to work hard and long to meet deadlines.

Just coincidentally, I was reading a passage from  Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus as I disembarked in D.C. “Girls were getting up all over London. In striped pyjamas, in flowered Viyella nightgowns, in cotton shifts they had made themselves and unevenly hemmed … They were putting the shilling in the meter and the kettle on the gas ring. … “

Ah, I’m feeling better already. I have a store-bought cotton nightgown. I have an electric tea kettle. I pay for gas by the month not the morning.

Hazzard continues: “It is hard to say what they had least of—past, present or future. It is hard to say how or why they stood it, the cold room, the wet walk to the bus, the office in which they had no prospects and no fun.”

Oh dear. Have I ever thought like this? Of course. Poor me, back from a lovely vacation to my comfortable office! Poor me, paid to write and edit!

Hazzard has put it in perspective: It could be worse, and it has been.

“Poor me” better get busy.

Backward Glance

Backward Glance

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I was out early today, pounding the hard pavement instead of the hard sand. Hard sand softens footfall; hard pavement does not.

But here in the suburbs hard pavement is often the only choice.

I’m glad my thoughts are not yet hard. They are still vacation thoughts — dreamy, slow and in no hurry to return to reality.

So here, in their honor, a vacation photo.

Beach Traffic

Beach Traffic

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Foot traffic on a beach goes two directions— up and down along the strand and back and forth from towel to surf.

When I walk the beach I take the former. I’m a woman on a mission, moving quickly, arms swinging. I’m not alone in this purposeful movement. There are bikers and runners and beachcombers, all of us with goals in mind.

The bathers, on the other hand, amble easily toward the waves. They stop and start. They turn back. They pose for photographs. They brake for sand castles. 

Yesterday on the beach a man performed the slow, intricate steps of tai chi. He summoned up the calm of the ocean into his arms and legs. He was going neither up and down nor back and forth. He wasn’t going anywhere at all. He was simply being.

This is what I take with me from the beach.