The Appointment

The Appointment

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I made the appointment, and I’m keeping it. Not the dental appointment, though I made that one, too. This one is with the Reston Used Book Shop, where I’ll take a box of books tomorrow. If I can lift it, that is. 

I’ve written before of purging and rearranging, of my meager attempts to bring order from chaos. This current book removal project began as part of an ongoing basement decluttering effort, and has spread upstairs to a slew of double-booked shelves. 

The question now: Do I start filling another box to give away? Not so fast. I don’t want to overdo it. So I  haul the carton to the car for tomorrow’s date with destiny. That’s enough for now. I think I’ll celebrate …  by ordering a new book. 

(The future home of many of my books, I hope.) 

The Victorians

The Victorians

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They drugged their babies, wore four layers of underwear and often went hungry. They are the Victorians, and they may as well have been ancient Greeks so different are the lives they lived from our own. 

I learned these facts from the book How to Be a Victorian and the experiences of author Ruth Goodman, who lived for a year on a Victorian farm where she dug turnips, squeezed into corsets, and brushed her teeth with soot (which she recommends as an alternative to modern toothpaste). 

More than halfway through the book now, I can say with some certainty that life was difficult for most Victorians, who worked hard and ate little. It makes me wonder about the lives of ease that so many of us live. How has comfort shaped us? How did adversity shape them? 

(Halfpenny meals for poor children, 1870, from Wikipedia)

Standing Ovation!

Standing Ovation!

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My rule for a standing ovation is this: if the performance deserves one it should lift you up, almost a levitation, and you should find yourself standing as if by magic. 

I don’t always follow this rule. You stick your neck out when you leap to your feet before others. And you seem the curmudgeon when you stay seated while everyone else is standing. 

Every so often, though, conditions are right. The music moves you, you’ve cleared your lap of program and purse, and when the last notes sound you’re ready to jump up and start clapping. 

That’s what happened last night when the National Symphony Orchestra played the final bars of Shostakovich’s Symphony Number 5.  It’s a prodigious work, one I’ve loved since I first heard the Leonard Bernstein recording of it at my friend Barbie’s house in high school. 

I listened last night with significantly altered ears, heard the suffering and the pathos of it, the triumph, too. I felt the shiver down the spine, the frisson that cannot be faked. I knew that when it ended I would be on my feet.  It was the least I could do.

(The Kennedy Center Concert Hall stage, January 25, 2024)

Auld Lang Syne

Auld Lang Syne

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It’s Robert Burns’ Day in Scotland and elsewhere as fans of the poet raise their glasses to toast the man and his verse, preferably at a Burns Supper, where haggis is eaten, strong drink is quaffed, and songs are sung (some of them not suitable for mixed company). 

I saw little of Burns at the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh. His room was being renovated. Instead, I looked at the exhibits of his compatriots, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott. 

But today’s festivities are a perfect excuse to write about Scotland, look through photos of the place, and honor one of the most famous of Burns’s poems, Auld Lang Syne.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak’ a right guid-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.

Gift of Sight

Gift of Sight

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During these wide-open days of winter, I’ve been keeping a pair of binoculars on my desk. They’re fast becoming an essential element of this writer’s toolkit. 

I’m watching a fox sun himself in a sunny corner of our backyard. He paws at the snow, ambles around the hollies. Every so often he glances up with his perky ears and catlike face (a winning combination since the rest of him is doglike). Does he see me watching him? 

I marvel at the alertness of his posture, the thickness of his reddish-brown fur, his winter coat. I imagine the feel of the sun on his back, the generations of wildness in his bones. 

He is a gift, as are the woodpeckers and cardinals at the feeder. A reminder of the creatures who live among us, the natural world we inhabit. The binoculars help me see the fox and, by extension, all of creation.

Woods in White

Woods in White

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The main roads were plowed by Saturday, but wind chill kept me inside. By yesterday, though, temps edged up to the high 30s, and I was itching to leave the house. Would the Reston trails be clear? 

Some were, and those that weren’t I avoided, snapping a photo instead. 

I trod paths I haven’t walked in a while, passed the “laughing tree,” which now sports a white mustache. 

There was a thin layer of frosting on bowed limbs, like a squiggle of toothpaste on a toothbrush. 

I hiked for more than an hour. I was not alone. 

Another Bronte

Another Bronte

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It’s prime reading weather — long nights, cold days — and I recently bought an e-book to keep me company: 50 Masterpieces You Have to Read Before You Die (Volume 1). How could I resist 50 classics for two dollars?

True, I’ve already read many of them. I was an English major, after all. But I doubt I would have started The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte had it not landed on (in?) my electronic nightstand. It’s an epistolary novel, a tale told entirely in letters and journals, and a reminder of how life was lived in an earlier, calmer and difficult-to-be-anything-but-landed-white-male-gentry time.

Though I can’t say Anne has become my favorite Bronte — it would be hard to dethrone Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights) — her novel grew on me, and by the end I couldn’t put it down, so thoroughly was I rooting for Helen and Gilbert to marry and find happiness. No spoiler alerts here; you’ll have to read it yourself to find out. 

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Soon to be Gone

Soon to be Gone

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The snow is falling as I write. It’s piling up on the deck, weighing down the potted ivy, filling in the footsteps, smothering the covered chaise. After having no snow for 24 months, two storms in a week have dumped more than a half a foot here. 

As mentioned earlier, I’m not a skier or a snow-shoer, and I tiptoe around ice. But I love to watch the white stuff coming down, to marvel at the way it clings to every branch and twig. I like the way it banishes the wanness of winter, the contrast it provides. 

As it grows lighter here, ghost trees emerge from the backyard: spindly white arms, tall dark trunks. Small birds clog the feeder, land lightly on a snow bank, fluff the flakes with their little tails.

Soon I’ll celebrate the 14th anniversary of this blog, which was conceived in snow, made possible by the week off work that snow provided. Snow was my first topic. Strange since we have so little of it anymore. Another way in which these pages celebrate not only the here-and-now but also the soon-to-be-gone.

Still a Baby

Still a Baby

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The new year is no longer the shiny new penny that shows up from time to time in my change purse. It has dulled around the edges. But when I look at the days proportionately — 18 out of 366 — 2024 is still in its infancy. A resolution stands a chance with odds like that.

Which is why I trundled out to a yoga class at 8:30 on the coldest morning of the year yesterday. Not just for the stretching and the strengthening, but also for the meditative aspect of it. 

The trip was worth it. The class was small, and the instructor was experienced. She took us through a variety of poses and encouraged us to use our breath to get into and out of them. Studio lights were low, music was soft. When I left, the new year seemed young again. 

(Ah, to be as limber as a baby! Photo: CCC)

No Nonsense

No Nonsense

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When I woke a little after 7, the sun had not yet begun to strike the sides of the big oaks I can see across the road. But it was light enough to assure me not all the snow had blown off trunks, limbs and branches. 

Traces of high contrast are still there, the symphony, synchrony, of black and white. The only color I see in my window-scape is the barest touch of dark green from the hollies at the fence line. But I’ll soon find more in the Great Outdoors, having somewhere to be in less than an hour. 

“Take winter as you find him,” wrote James Russell Lowell, “and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow with no nonsense in him. And tolerating none in you, which is a great comfort in the long run.”

We’ll see about that.