Strange Beauty

Strange Beauty

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A crisp blue sky today but I keep my eyes on the ground, on the ghostly traces of slurried salt, the feeble fist we shake against winter. Today is cold but clear, snow contained but not yet melted. It feels as if we might win this battle.

But I look closer, see the rimed crust of last week’s skirmishes, recall the slick side streets. We’re only where we are because the weather has cooperated.

What struck me on this morning’s walk was the beauty of whitened cracks in the pavement, what’s left from last week’s treated roads. The residue is most visible along the shoulders and in crevices once hidden, now outlined in white. It ought to be ugly, but is not. It reminds me of the vulnerability of the modern world, of how, despite our bluster, we fumble and we fail. And there is beauty in the failure.

Dinner Before Breakfast

Dinner Before Breakfast

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This morning I was up before daybreak preparing a crockpot dish for dinner tonight. It wasn’t like I had to rake the coals and start the fire, but the recipe did require a prodigious amount of chopping, and given the attention it gave to a meal hours away, I did feel a bit like a pioneer woman.

This is veering dangerously close to an earlier post about the habits of cookery. But it also brings to mind the fact that time spent in the kitchen is often time spent in one’s own head.

I don’t mind spending time in my head, depending upon what’s rolling around in there. This morning it was mostly thoughts of how I was making dinner before I even had breakfast. Luckily, donuts have arrived, so all is well.

A Fresh Coat

A Fresh Coat

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Here in the mid-Atlantic snow usually falls and melts within days. This year we have the frigid temperatures to keep white stuff on the ground a little longer. Long enough for reinforcements to arrive, in other words.

Last night we received a fresh coat of snow. Once again, tree branches are outlined in white, ghostly arms reaching toward the sky. Once again, holly leaves hang heavy with their burden.

Once again, there is shoveling to do (though I’ve largely escaped the duty this year), paths to carve, steps to sweep.

Once again our wan gray world is made new again, if only for a few hours.

Out of the Cold

Out of the Cold

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Last night I stepped out of the cold and into a gallery, from the elements into the elemental. It was one of the chilliest nights we’ve had for a long time, and I was beginning to question the wisdom of taking a bus and a Metro into D.C. then walking for blocks in the subfreezing windchill.

But once we stepped into the gallery, all hesitations vanished. Here were portraits and landscapes, collages and sculptures. Here was a thoughtful still life, the surprise of two metal hands hanging from the ceiling, a tiny macramé-like canvas of punctured threads. Here was the human imagination in all its weirdness and glory.

It wasn’t just the art that banished the cold. It was the warmth of visiting with a friend I hadn’t seen in years, and finding her just the same except, I think, more content. And that was the loveliest sight of all.

The Axial Age

The Axial Age

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A new semester has begun, sooner than I thought it would and undeniably here. I have readings to do, notes to study and a syllabus to consult. But after the first class last evening, I also have new thoughts to think, which is why I’ve gone back to school in the first place.

So far, the professor seems to be asking the big questions. One idea that stuck with me from last night’s lecture is learning about what some call the Axial Age, a period of incredible intellectual growth and curiosity that lasted from the 8th to the 3rd centuries BCE. As the professor said, “People kind of woke up and started questioning and looking for answers about almost everything in a very rational way.”

It was a parallel awakening of consciousness across civilizations that’s hard to explain, and it resulted in the development of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, and Taoism, among other religions and philosophies.

The Axial Age gave us the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Homer, Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, and the prophets Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah. It was a paradigm-shifting age. No one one is exactly sure why it happened, but we live in its amazing wake.

(“A Reading from Homer” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1885, courtesy Wikipedia.)

“Fast Food”

“Fast Food”

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With a new year and the pace of life picking up, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for weeks: I made granola. Nothing earth-shattering about this except the way I felt when I was making it, which was hungry. Very hungry.

It dawned on me as I stirred the oats, nuts, flaked coconut and other ingredients, that if I lived even 100 years ago, certainly 150, I would usually have had to bake, boil or toast my breakfast. There would have been no instant oatmeal, no cold cereals to pour into a bowl with a splash of milk (or not), no containers of yogurt at the ready. I would often have been hungry while preparing a meal.

As it stands now, much of my food is “fast food,” since I often get by with salads assembled or leftovers reheated. And if I’m preparing a meal and already starving, I just dip into the cupboard for a handful of almonds and the pangs are staved off until hot food is on the table.

What struck me this morning is how instantly gratified I am in the kitchen and how rare this condition is throughout human history. It’s an awareness I’d like to keep in mind. And I will … once I dig into the granola.

Farewell, Underground

Farewell, Underground

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It took months to figure it out, but once I did, it was a constant marvel. The Crystal City Underground was a part of my life for five years, and now it will be no more, at least in its funky, mom-and-pop style.

When I worked across the street from one of its entrances, I would dash into the underground to mail a package, pick up lunch or check out a library book. The maze of tunnels also came in handy on rainy or snowy days, when I could walk warm and dry from Metro to within feet of my office.

But now, I’ve learned, no leases will be renewed in the buildings that comprised the underground (though most of it is above ground, it does give off a subterranean vibe). It’s been likened to a futuristic invention, but to me it always seemed more like the past, a place where you could get your shoes repaired and chat with the cobbler while it was happening.

Amazon has moved into the neighborhood and may have plans for the underground’s future. All I know is that, for now, one more bit of real, hands-on life is disappearing from view.

Transformations

Transformations

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What to do on a snow day? There are the outdoor activities — shoveling, snow sculpting, or just trudging to the end of the block and back. There are the indoor activities: making soup, cleaning closets and curling up on the couch to watch the flakes fall.

And then there is the modern, plugged-in version of a snow day: blogging and spreading the word about my latest book review, which entailed setting up a profile on Blue Sky Social (an X alternative). Yikes! That has taken up more time than I’d like it to this morning.

With that box checked, I plan to sink more deeply into the day, to enjoy all the transformations that snow can bring.

Rumors of Snow

Rumors of Snow

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It’s not just that we’ve had little measurable snow these last few years, it’s that for the most part we’ve lacked even the promise of it, that delightful drumbeat of suspense that can accompany a snowstorm.

One of my favorite ways to enjoy blizzards in the past would be to complete all out-of-the-house errands before the first flakes fell, then plop myself down in front of a local news broadcast and watch cheerful reporters decked out in their most stylish parkas and hats, telling us what we could expect.

I’m out of practice in that area. Besides, a new forecasting powerhouse is in town: the Capital Weather Gang, the Washington Post‘s coterie of meteorologists. I think it’s fair to say this crew is pro-snow. Which is not to say their forecasts aren’t accurate; they are usually spot-on, and they cite the models (who knew there were such things?) upon which they’re based.

Still, I detect a barely-restrained glee when there’s white stuff in the forecast. And why not? It’s been a while since we’ve had a good dousing. But from what I’ve read, that may change … soon.

(This snow photo was taken almost five years ago.)

Half-Mast

Half-Mast

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I see them in the neighborhood, flying halfway up the three flagpoles that grace our block. I saw a large one yesterday, what I think of as a “highway flag,” which I typically associate with the lonely off-ramps of midwestern interstates but which, for some reason, was flying over a car dealership on Route 7 in Loudon County.

Whether small or super-size, the flags have one thing in common: they are all flying half-mast. And for once I know why. I know that they honor the 39th president of the United States, the president who lived the longest, the only one to reach the age of 100.

I’ve read much about James Earl Carter Jr. these last few days. I’ve remembered his many accomplishments, recalled his trials and failures, his rich and noble post-presidency, including a Nobel prize. Here was a president who was alive at the same time as William Howard Taft and has only just gone to his reward.

So often these days I don’t know who or what half-mast flags are about. This time I do, and I realize anew the importance of this tradition, its invitation to remember, to grieve. American flags will be flying at half-mast for 30 days for President Jimmy Carter.

(A flag flies half-mast at Ball’s Bluff Battlefield Memorial Park in Leesburg, Virginia, last Memorial Day.)