D Day + Seventy

D Day + Seventy

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Dad was in the 95th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force. He flew two tactical support missions on D Day. But it wasn’t until a 50th anniversary trip to the  beaches of Normandy that he realized what the ground troops had endured.

“I don’t think the American people appreciate what some of those men did,” Dad told a newspaper reporter interviewing him about the offensive. “Those guys, they deserve all the honors.”

Typical of Dad to say the other guy gets the glory. But he knew as well as anyone what it meant to climb into the cramped tail gunner’s compartment of a B-17 bomber and take off in darkness for the battlefield continent. He did it because it had to be done. They all did.

Now Dad is gone, and D Day has become less a personal war story and more a historical event. But it was a historical event Dad was part of — and he never forgot it. “You were part of this great, massive undertaking,” Dad said in that same newspaper interview. “You were part of history.”

(Photo: Lloyd Wilson Collection of the 95th Bomb Group Horham Memorial)

Ran Right Past It

Ran Right Past It

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Yesterday was National Running Day. Since this fact escaped my notice until after posting time, I’m celebrating it now.

In the last year I’ve become more of a runner in the suburbs than a walker in the suburbs. This has its good points and its bad points. In the plus column, I exercise a little more rigorously and finish a little more quickly.

In the negative column, well, I’m not walking. And walking sets the brain to spinning. It’s about the pace. The clip-clop instead of plod-plod. It’s about exerting one’s self enough to jostle the gray matter — but not so much that huffing and puffing is all I do. Walking gives me a chance to notice things; with jogging I might run right past them.

The best days are when there’s time for a run and a walk.  One for the body and one for the soul.

Details

Details

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Last night, a conversation about writing. About finding the time, setting deadlines, asking for help. Setting scenes, learning dialogue — these things aren’t easy for the journalist turned memoirist or the short-form writer turned long-form writer, my friend and I agreed.

But there are universals. The scrap of paper a child played with today in her stroller as her mother wheeled her up the Metro elevator. The bald woman in the flowered dress who waved to the conductor. Every day, a barrage of details finds its way into our brains. How to preserve them? How to honor them?

The details we seek as reporters are within us, and it’s up to us how we use them. One day they may surprise us.

Fern Forest Floor

Fern Forest Floor

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A walk yesterday in the late afternoon. Copper and I ran down Folkstone Drive, then ducked into the woods. It was cool and quiet there, and what struck me first was the filtered light. This is a second-growth forest, maybe third- or fourth (if that’s possible). The oaks are 70 to 80 feet or taller, and the birch and hickories and other trees in the canopy shade the smaller plants, give them a vaulted ceiling beneath which to grow.

I take off my sunglasses, hold them in my leash hand. The colors are even more intense now — the dark greens of the holly and the brilliant hues of the newly unfurled ferns. In places the woods are carpeted with ferns. It’s a fern forest floor.

I look more carefully at the delicate fronds, watch them as they wave slightly in the breeze. There is something satisfyingly primordial about ferns, something soothing in their longevity on this planet. They thrive in the indirect light.

As I think of writing about ferns today, Copper tugs at his leash. The ferns are the height of his sturdy little shoulders; he swishes through them when he ventures off the path.

Busting Out

Busting Out

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It’s what June is doing. What the song celebrates. What you can feel in the morning air, the promise of warmth but not humidity.

The hydrangeas that were thinking about blooming in April and beginning to leaf in May are finally getting serious now.

Tomatoes and herbs are planted, annuals are potted. And the climbing rose is showing its stuff.

I can live with this. 

Accidental Bouquet

Accidental Bouquet

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Yesterday on a walk I spotted chicory, daisy and buttercup growing in a clump beside the road. If I had planned a garden in that spot, those would not be the plants I’d choose. I notice this especially in spring: purples and yellows, pinks and blues. Colors I wouldn’t pair in my wardrobe or on my walls.

The most stunning bouquets are the accidental ones, the ones nature throws together randomly, the seeds floating to earth, bedding down together on a whim, finding beauty in their togetherness.

Holly Blossom Time

Holly Blossom Time

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I drive with the windows down now. Not just because I like the wind in my face but also because the air smells like honeysuckle and holly blossom.

The former is a well known harbinger of summer; the latter has taken me a while to recognize. It is subtle and tender, not as overpowering as honeysuckle but just as redolent of warm weather and freedom.

Here is the holly flower, blurry and slightly past peak. A blossom hidden under the canopy of this prickly, upright tree.

We think of the holly around the holidays but it’s just as important now, when it sweetens the air with its scent.

The Company

The Company

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We are all shapes and sizes. All ages, too. Some of us are in high school. A couple of us don’t even have kids in high school anymore.

But for one hour every Wednesday, we are one. Slapping, flapping, bouncing, turning. We are the beginning tappers at Ballet Nova.

It dawned on me tonight, driving home from class, that we are a company. OK, we’re not Alvin Ailey or the New York City Ballet. Fame and fortune have so far eluded us. But we are a group, a troupe. We “work together to perform dances as a spectacle or entertainment.”

The spectacle is what we’re making of ourselves and the entertainment is how much we laugh when we can’t execute a perfect buffalo. We look nothing like this picture, but we have fun just the same.

Yeah, I’d say we’re a company. Earnest, ragtag, trying hard. But a company just the same.

(Photo from “A Chorus Line” Timeout.com)

They’re Back!

They’re Back!

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“I don’t like hummingbirds,” said Celia as we finished up dinner on the deck a couple nights ago. “They look like big bees.”

And they do. In fact, it often takes me a moment to figure out which one I’m seeing — a big bee or a  tiny bird.

For the last few weeks we’ve had plenty of both as the wood bees (their fat bottoms wiggling into holes in the pergola so they can chew it to pieces) and the hummingbirds (back from southern climes) flit around the house.

Hummingbirds winter in Central America, I learn, and often return to the same feeder on the same day. They gorge themselves on insects beforehand, often doubling their body weight (which still isn’t much, of course) for the 500-mile (18- to 22-hour) flight across the Gulf of Mexico.

So this little bird and its ruby-throated mate are world travelers, intrepid souls that whir and wing their way thousands of miles in pursuit of nectar and insects.

With knowledge comes admiration.

The Grass is Shining

The Grass is Shining

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Because it’s new. Because it’s well-watered. Because it’s May. These are some reasons why the grass is shining.

I’m not really sure, you see. It may just be the way I look at it, the way the wind bends the spears. The angle of the sun, the time of day, planetary alignment.

But I walk around, examine it from all sides. It’s shining no matter where I stand.

I don’t remember it shining like this other years. But it was a long winter, a long spring. The grass was biding its time. We all were. But now it’s summer and the grass is shining.