Frost has nipped the begonias, colored the maples, brought a dignified end to the tomato and basil plants. But it has not yet conquered the knockout roses in our front yard.
They have continued to bloom red and pink, their colors out of place with subtle autumn russets and gold, their freshness unexpected and sublime.
To see them still waving in the breeze is to believe that all will be well, that winter will pass and spring will come again.
A problem with our wireless network has changed my blogging habits. I write quickly, post quickly, before I’ve timed out. At least for now, I’m learning to live with intermittency, with stopping and starting, with that which cannot be controlled.
A valuable lessons to be reminded of from time to time.
My pace has been intermittent lately, too, as bursts of running punctuate my usual fast-walk cadence. I try for a steady pace but can’t help but respond to the music in my ears and the feel of my joints.
Even the weather has been singing this tune — blustery and cold one weekend, calm and warm the next.
Bedrock is necessary, that which is solid and predictable. But what gets us through the day is the lighter, looser loam on top.
In The Merry Recluse, the late Caroline Knapp writes about finding home. It wasn’t a grand “ah-hah” moment, she says. “I figured Boston would be an interim city, a place to set down my bags until I moved on to some bigger, more exotic locale … I figured I’d be transient, my sense of place fluid, my attachments focused on people and jobs rather than on location. And then, not long ago, I looked up one day and thought: Oh, my God. I have a life here. I’m not moving. I’m home.”
Her point is that many of us don’t choose our place; our place chooses us. It’s not so much a decision as a non-decision. A not-moving rather than a staying put.
What helped Knapp stay put is the Charles River, “one of the longest, best stretches of flat water for rowing anywhere in the U.S.” and where Knapp would scull four or five times a week.
If we stay here (and it’s always “if”), it will be because of the hollow tree along Little Difficult Run, the one Copper always has to stick his nose in on the days he’s lucky enough to get a walk. It will be because of the mossy hill and the view of treetops I can see from there. It will be because of this one ancient knobby tree stump I always look for because more often than not it trips me up.
It will be the little things that keep us here.
I thought I knew the way, so I headed out with no map, no directions, no GPS and no phone.
The first part was easy. Down Lawyers into Vienna. I knew that much for sure.
But when I turned into the neighborhood it was dark and alien. I recognized the median but not the turnoff. I drove slowly down the suburban lanes, turning every time I thought I’d found the road. But nothing looked familiar.
I realized then that I had never arrived at this house in darkness, only in daylight. In the light, the houses were large, solid, knowable. In the darkness they were too close to discern differences. More cars were parked on the street than I recalled. I drove so slowly I could have been walking, peering into windows with one eye while keeping the other on the road.
At one point I found myself retracing last Saturday’s local history tour. And then I laughed out loud. I can’t find my friend’s house but I can locate the site of an 1862 Civil War encampment.
It was then that I turned toward home. This time I knew the way: right on Lawyers, left on Steeplechase, left on Fox Mill.
When I pulled into our driveway, the porch lights were glowing a warm welcome. My heart leaped at the sight. I parked the car and walked inside.
Amid yesterday’s electoral busyness and drama came word came of a high school classmate’s death. He was a wild man and a lover of life who lost his own life far too soon. Hearing this sad news from my hometown put everything else in perspective.
Not just the brevity of it all or even the wonder of it all but the preciousness of each individual person. Each one a world apart, each with aspirations and aggravations that we, on the outside, can never know. As we emerge from the collective that is an election season, when people are numbers, weights on a swing state scale, we return to what really matters — the individual.
This is the morning after, the day we cheer or sigh. But tomorrow is a new day, and like every new day, composed of the individual actions of individual people.
I drove to work today, and as I crossed the Potomac the familiar landmarks loomed solid and significant in the wan winter light. Driving past the White House and the Capitol, I thought about the people who aspire to live and work in those places, people I’ll vote for today.
It does feel momentous, this election. Perhaps because we live in a battleground state and our phone rings half a dozen times or more a day. Perhaps because positions seem to be ossified — the fact that we had our first hard freeze last night, is that a metaphor?
Or perhaps because these polarized times make clear a truth we sometimes forget: that every vote really does make a difference.
(Photo: DClikealocal.com)
The first day of winter is still weeks away, but this feels like the real thing: Cold and light earlier than usual, the low temps not part of the night but part of the day. Just so there can be no mistaking.
I notice the silence. The robins and jays have left us; the juncos have not yet arrived.
The shutters are closed, but I spy through cracks the flicker of branch stir outside, as a brisk breeze sets treed leaves a trembling.
Here in this quiet hour, clocks ticking again on standard time, I think, resignation is much like this — to crave long days and fireflies, yet know even in my longing that this is what must be.
“Do you want to hold it?” asked Jim Lewis, our tour guide. “You might need both hands.”
And with that he passed me a 12-pound cannonball that, yes, was easier to hold with two hands than with one.
Lewis is a member of the Hunter Mill Defense League, which sounds like some sort of retro radical 60s organization but is actually a group of citizens formed to protect and defend the lovely, historic and oft-threatened (by development and widening) Hunter Mill Road.
Lewis and colleagues have bushwacked their way through the rolling hills of western Fairfax County, discovering old road beds, abandoned millraces and confederate earthworks, cannonballs and former camp sites. Now they’re sharing their knowledge through lectures, booklets and the occasional tour.
Yesterday’s four-hour jaunt delivered more information and ideas than I could possibly capture in a single post. Like the cannonball, it was a lot to handle. It gave me a plethora of ways to see this land I live in. A place of history and of depth.
(Jim Lewis and cannonball near the Confederate earthworks he found in the woods behind his backyard.)
It’s still dark at 7 a.m., a cold inky blackness that does not invite exploration. Leafless trees, downed branches littering the yard, a sky just light enough to promise hope.
It is a season that calls for poetry (as if all seasons didn’t). So I return from the library my arms full of Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Maxine Kumin.
This morning, Kumin makes me smile:
Bucophilia, I call it —
nostalgia over a pastoral vista —
where for all I know the farmer
who owns it or rents it just told his
wife he’d kill her if she left him, and
she did and he did and now here come
the auctioneers, the serious bidders
and an ant-train of gawking onlookers.
Bucophilia — it’s a word I’ll take into the day.
When constructing my fantasy life I often get hung up on location. The suburbs are out, and a pied-a-terre is a given (after all, I still have to earn a living); the confusion comes with the country retreat. A cabin in the mountains? A cottage on the shore?
After Sandy, the answer is clearer. After Sandy, the mountains are starting to look pretty good. After Sandy, I wonder: What happens when the places I love are under water?
There’s Venice. But of course with Venice it has always been part of that city’s doomed charm.
And there’s Chincoteague. As the wind and rain pounded us Monday I thought of my time there this summer, the stillness of the refuge, the beach that goes on forever. Does it still?
And now there’s New York City, too. Sea water coursing through subway tunnels, lapping at the steps of the Stock Exchange. Apocalyptic visions.
People perish; place endures. Or at least it used to. I’m not so sure anymore.
(Lower Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge.)