Warm in the Morning

Warm in the Morning

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The temperature this morning is 37 degrees, the warmest it’s been in a week. It’s all downhill from here. Tonight a wave of arctic air rolls into town just in time for another frigid Tuesday morning.

But today is a better story. Today reverses the normal winter order of things: It will be warm in the morning, colder later on. That’s a relative “warm,” you understand. Two layers instead of three. A run at 9 instead of noon.

Still, today’s thaw is a reminder that we will not always have winter, that the ground will soften and slender green shoots will emerge.

Even thinking about this sends my internal temperature up a couple of degrees!

Twin Contrails

Twin Contrails

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Gray skies today but last Monday, on a warmish morning (40s instead of teens), I took my cup of tea out on the deck, wrapped up in a blanket and watched the birds at the feeder.

There was a softness to the air, and I could hear the sound of traffic from a busy road miles away. As the day warmed and brightened, I looked to my left. And there, emerging through the trees, twin contrails.

I bet they’re around most every morning. The 7 a.m. flights out of Dulles. I let my eye follow those white streaks as they emerged from behind the trees. I imagined I was aboard one of those jets, looking down at the rolling Virginia countryside, heading west.

Hesitation

Hesitation

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These are cold days in Northern Virginia (emphasis on Northern)! A person (or a dog) might have every reason to bound out the door, trot across the deck but then screech to a full stop at the top of the stairs.

Hesitation is in season.

“Do I really want to go out in this?”is what I imagine Copper is thinking.

Which is similar to my thoughts this morning:  It’s 6 a.m., 4 degrees F. — and, of course, it’s dark. “Do I really want to go out in this?”

And the answer, for both of us, for different reasons, is yes!

High Fidelity

High Fidelity

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It’s been years since the turntable was hitched up to a stereo receiver. But it is again, and for the last few days I’ve been playing records I haven’t heard in years.

John Klemmer’s Touch. The Antiphonal Brass Music of Giovanni Gabrieli. Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Switched on Bach.

Time capsules, all of them. I remember who I was when I listened to these albums — and what I thought about when I played them.

And then there are those timeless movements I’d almost forgotten: slipping the records from their sleeves, holding them by the edges with flat palms, lowering the arm so the needle glides gently onto  vinyl. Slow, careful, mechanical motions.

The music that emanates (at least from my down-on-its-heels collection) is not an audiophile’s delight. It’s snap, crackle and pop. Scratchy. A sound that’s known better days.

High fidelity? Not really. Except this: It’s music the way I remember it best.

Tale of Two Railings

Tale of Two Railings

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Yesterday’s snow meant business. Right from the start, the flakes flying only briefly before they touched and stuck. And unlike recent, more iffy snows, this one light, dry, easier to shovel and scrape.

It piled up slowly but inexorably, and by late afternoon, snow on the deck railing looked about three to four inches. After several more hours of steady precipitation (minus a little from the blowing), this morning’s total looks closer to six. And if today’s temperature is any indication (3 degrees F), it will be with us for a few days.

Gee, I guess it’s winter or something. It hasn’t been for a years, so we’re out of practice.

Company Town: Closed

Company Town: Closed

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Living in a company town produces some funny situations. Like today. The federal government is closed and so is my university. No complaints there, although deadlines being deadlines, I’ll be working anyway.

The funny thing is the unanimity of opinion. And the reliance on experts, in this case meteorologists. There’s not a flake of snow flying but we’re all hunkered down. The reason, of course, is traffic. In the last few years late-breaking snow storms have produced jams of biblical proportions, people arriving home seven, eight hours after they left for what they thought would be an hour-long commute.

So we’re taking no chances. We’re playing it safe. We’re grinding the wheels of government and commerce to a halt. We’re calling it a snow day.

Now all we need is the snow!

Bluebirds!

Bluebirds!

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They visited us on Saturday, several of them, including a persistent pair that hung out on the deck railing, the feeder or nearby branches. At the slightest sound (especially when I opened the window to take their picture), they would flutter away.  But I waited — and they returned.

Maybe they were driven here by the northwest wind. Or more likely the suet — a high-calorie treat to fuel their winter rambles. I hope they checked out the real estate while they were here: there are a couple of dandy bluebird houses in the neighborhood, and this time of year they’re open for takers.

Mostly I wondered where they had come from and where they were going. I’d like to think they were the proverbial bluebirds of happiness, come to pay us a visit on this cold midwinter day.

Mountain Views

Mountain Views

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This morning is blustery and cold. I look out the French doors into the backyard, with its dusting of snow, its wind-bent boughs.

It’s a familiar view, a treasured view. But for some reason this morning I notice how the bare tree branches across the street come together to resemble a peak. If I didn’t know better, if I looked quickly, I could be staring at a mountain.

So now I’m dreaming of mountains I’ve seen — and the views they’ve given me.

The Un-Resolution

The Un-Resolution

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Midway through January and resolutions are falling away like petals off a full-blown rose. Stretching — I do that about half as much as I should. The perennial “don’t worry so much” — there’s a reason it’s a perennial.

But one resolution snuck up on me — giving up caffeine. I didn’t make it official on New Year’s Day because I didn’t think I could. Give up the cups of strong black tea that wake me every morning, the Diet Coke that revives me in the afternoon or the iced tea that refreshes at dinner? Water, sparkling water, juice — what are those? For me, for years, it’s been caffeinated beverages from morning till night.

But on January 2 I woke up with yet another headache. I perused the dietary chapters of Heal Your Headache, by Dr. David Buchholz, which I’d read in the fall but hadn’t the nerve to try. I saw the list of triggers, including some of my favorite foods — yogurt, nuts, chocolate, even sugar snap peas! But one culprit stood out above the rest. If you can banish anything, Buchholz wrote, make it caffeine.

And so I did. Quit cold turkey. Haven’t had a cup of “real tea” in more than two weeks. I limp by with two cups of de-caf black in the morning and a mug of herbal brew in the afternoon. In between I drink water — more than I used to.

And … so far so good. After four or five days of feeling jittery and headachey, a worse withdrawal than I’d expected, I emerged relatively headache-free. The verdict is still out, but I like the way I feel, which I can best describe as “clean.”

I sit now with my second cup of de-caf. It tastes far more like cardboard than I’d like it to, but that doesn’t bother me anymore. It’s what comes next that matters.

Body in Motion

Body in Motion

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Here is a brief hymn to the body in motion, a passage from the memoir Winter Journal by Paul Auster. I read the book a few weeks ago and marked this page:

Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs …

leaning back in chairs with your legs propped up on desks and tables as you write in notebooks, hunching over typewriters, walking through snowstorms without a hat …

feeling the different sensations of putting your feet on sand, dirt, and grass, but most of all the sensation of sidewalks, for that is how you see yourself whenever you stop to think about who you are: a man who walks, a man who has spent his life walking through the streets of cities.

To which I will add … and along woodland trails, suburban lanes, the paved paths that run beside busy roads, the strips of sidewalk that show up unannounced when I least expect them — and across streams on cylinders of concrete, the water rushing beneath my feet.