Drive-Through Winter

Drive-Through Winter

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The season has been mild for us, so I’m glad I took the mountainous route home yesterday. The road winds from Intestate 79 to Interstate 81 on two-lane roads with drop-dead views.

The drop-dead part is not entirely metaphorical. Guardrails are few, elevations are high, descents are steep. Some of the hairpin turns make your stomach drop, especially heading east, when you’re on the one-foot-more-and-I’d-be-over-the-edge side.

My heart was pounding extra hard about this route yesterday, because the road was still sloppy and gritty from a nighttime dusting. I almost turned around, but am so glad I didn’t.

New snow had whitened each branch of each tree, freshened the ground cover, softened all but the craggiest mountain peaks. For miles I drove through tunnels of white under a blue, blue sky. And then, I crossed some divide, descended to some height and the snow was gone.

It was winter without the work. Drive-Through Winter.

Epiphany

Epiphany

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Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, the traditional end of the Christmas season and the point at which I begin to be faintly restless that our tree is still up.

But no matter, because today is about something bigger. Revelation, the ah-hah moment — sudden clarity.  Indecisive by nature (even my zodiac sign is Gemini, the twins), I find few moments of clarity in life. So I value them more.

Today I learned we have James Joyce to thank for this definition of “epiphany.” This morning’s “Writer’s Almanac” tells us that Joyce “used the word to mean the ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing,’  the moment when ‘the soul of
the commonest object […] seems to us radiant.'”

The soul of the commonest object radiant. Something to think about today.

Thoroughbred Park

Thoroughbred Park

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I worry about my hometown, worry that it has lost itself. Known for horses and horse farms, it has allowed some to be enveloped or developed — one into a mega shopping center. Meanwhile, it erects shrines to the thoroughbred.

Like so many places, it may not know what it has, what if offers, just as itself. No need to market or develop. Just leave alone.

How many other places, small hometowns across the country, need the same?

Double Vision

Double Vision

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To walk the streets of my hometown is to see not just what is but what used to be. Vacant storefronts, open blocks, streets moved and one-wayed and changed beyond recognition. They are overlaid with the bustle of the past, with people and places no longer here.

It’s double vision, a condition only open to natives. Here, and here only, I have special powers.

That street, it used to end at the field. I remember when it was cut through. That corner, it was the epicenter of downtown. A dog hung out there, Smiley Pete. He was mean but everyone loved him. When he died, the city put up a plaque to honor him.

Now, even the plaque is gone.

Resolutions

Resolutions

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The usual ones are out for me this year (exercise! don’t worry so much! get organized!). In their place a more subtle yearning: to be centered.

Is this a resolution or a mantra? Can those be one and the same?

A new year, a blank slate we can write on with our actions and our choices. Probing this new year tenderly still, getting a feel for it.  The cartilage still soft and bendable. Intentions still pliable.

Here we are in the cold, hard winter — with the new year all soft and malleable around us.

Tolerable

Tolerable

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For the last few years it’s been postponed, softened. New Year’s Day has landed on a Saturday or Sunday so we’ve had a day or two to cushion the blow, the return to work or school.

This year, no such luck. We’re out of holidays. The vast tundra that is January stretches before us — not just 30 days but 31.

If the holidays have been good, restful, this is tolerable.

Wishing all of us a tolerable January.

Happy 2013!

Happy 2013!

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In our neck of the woods the new year starts off with good news. A football championship, the lowest murder rate in years and a last-minute agreement to avert the fiscal cliff.

More to the point for a walker: No snow or ice on the ground and a lighter, balmier feel to the air this morning.

Before I amble out the door, a look back at the blog: 308 posts on everything from autumn to Africa to the retirement of my late, great flip phone. (Every year my family composes a funny “out” and “in” list — a shameless rip-off of a Washington Post “Style Section” tradition — and one of the 2012 items is “OUT: The flip phone Mom never answers” and “IN: The smartphone Mom never answers.”)

 Which is to say that some things never change. Not exactly what one wants to be reminded of on this day of resolutions (more on those later). But worth a thought or two just the same.

Happy 2013!

Scattered

Scattered

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This year none of us will be together as the clock strikes midnight. We are scattered from California to Arizona to Virginia to Africa. And the two of us still at home will be at different places tonight (as is only to be expected when one of us is a teenager).

Another stage. Another adventure. A backward look, surely one won’t matter. A photo that captures the spirit of this year, a spirit of departure and of what many parents see of their children as they leave home. Their backs, their luggage — their faces toward a future we can scarcely imagine.

But a new year dawns for all of us, the young, the old, the somewhere in between. And surely this is good. Just the fact that it’s happening for us, for all of us, is good.

Photo by Claire Capehart

Snowy Morning

Snowy Morning

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The snow was late, as snow often is in the mid-Atlantic. When it shows up at all. Let’s just say we’re accustomed to disappointment, to sprinkles instead of flurries, to sleet that “holds down the total.”

Snowmaggedon and Snowpocalypse, those were aberrations. A dusting on the grass, that’s our fate.

So when I woke this morning to dry pavement, I didn’t think much of it. Another false alarm. 

Twenty minutes later it began. Not flurries, nothing tentative about it.

Snow falling as straight as rain.

Week Without Days

Week Without Days

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What day is it, anyway?

Feels like a Wednesday,  third day after the “Sunday” that was Christmas.

Or a Saturday, with the same open spaces and relaxed demeanor of that end-of-week day.

It’s certainly not Monday or Tuesday. No back-to-workness about his day. None at all.

Ah yes, it’s Friday. With Saturday and Sunday still to look forward to.

There’s nothing automatic about this realization. Which means we’re living through a week without days.

It couldn’t have come at a better time.