New Look

New Look

Comments 2 comments

Today I met Blogger’s “new look.” This is disconcerting for a creature of timid technological habits. I have my tiny little comfort zone. Ask me to move beyond it and I flail about like a new swimmer in the deep end.

Still, I recognize that we either move ahead or fall behind. Treading water only works for a while.

So I plunge in, click on the tutorial and somehow, in the course of figuring out how to write this morning’s post, turn on my iTunes account and a song called “To the Morning” by Dan Fogelberg.  I don’t know how I did this. It reveals my technological ignorance in all its glory. But it was a strangely satisfying choice.

“There’s really no way to say no to the morning,” is the song’s key lyric.

There’s no way to say no to the future, either.

Sally’s Garden

Sally’s Garden

Comments 0 Comment


A few days ago our friend Sally invited us to her house to dig up ferns. Her crop was crowded and needed to be thinned, she said. So we ventured over, shovels in tow, on an unseasonably warm April afternoon.

We’d been to Sally’s house before but had never spent time in her backyard. It was nice, I knew, from looking out the back window. But I was unprepared for the beauty and calm spirit of the place.

In the native plants garden there are ostrich ferns and wood poppies and bluebells. A path winds along the perimeter with a pond in the middle and a little arched bridge. The yard is shady and cool, a habitat for birds and butterflies. It backs into a woods that stretches for miles along the stream valley of Little Difficult Run. Sally’s garden is one of those surprising suburban oases.

It wasn’t until we returned home, our car stuffed full of ferns and wood poppies for transplant, that I realized why “Sally’s garden” sounded familiar. It was the Yeats’ poem “Salley Gardens” it brought to mind, a verse put to song, a tale of regret and time passing and all sorts of emotions that are often hidden in the suburbs. But they are what give a place depth.

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her did not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she placed her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

W. B. Yeats

Missing Out

Missing Out

Comments 0 Comment


I usually write here of things I’ve seen. Today I write of something I didn’t see. As the shuttle Discovery made its graceful curtain call on D.C. the day before yesterday, I was sitting in my office, preoccupied with matters I thought were more important. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get away. It was that I didn’t. I hadn’t known how visible the shuttle would be. Some folks even spied it from the roof of the tallest building on campus.

A few minutes before 11 a.m., Suzanne called: “Mom, I see it. It’s flying right over me on 66. Cars are pulling off on the shoulder. It looks like a dolphin on top of a whale.” We didn’t talk long. I kept imagining how she was gazing at the shuttle, driving the car and talking on the phone at the same time.

Yesterday’s paper was full of photographs and quotations. People waited hours to see the spacecraft. It’s the end of an era, they said. They imagined all the miles the Discovery had logged, the places it had been. They felt privileged to witness its last flight.

After I took myself to task for missing this spectacle, I tried to think positively. There’s no way to go back. So how to move forward? Here’s what I came up with: The world is rich and full of possibilities. But it will shrink to a pinhole if I let worries and obligations overwhelm me. The next time I have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I’ll take it.

photo courtesy NASA vis Georgetown Law Facebook page

A Photo of Phlox

A Photo of Phlox

Comments 0 Comment


Waking from brief sleep, I make some tea and slowly come alive. We’ve moved from summer back to spring. The first birds are stirring. It’s the hour before dawn, when the day is just a hint on the horizon.

Soon I will drive in the gloaming past the shimmering azaleas, the fading dogwood. I will, in my haste, not have time to look, to really see, what I am passing.

But on an earlier day I have let the camera look for me. Here, on our normally sedate corner, a vivid crop of creeping phlox.

Cross Walk

Cross Walk

Comments 0 Comment


Yesterday I tried something new, something I hadn’t seen in the 23 years we’ve lived in this neighborhood — a crosswalk. It’s our corner’s first. A touch of the city in the suburbs. A time-out for the traffic. A vote of confidence in walkers everywhere.

I pushed the button, and I waited. And waited. And waited.

I started to run across the street against the light. After all, there were no cars coming. It’s what I usually do, wait for a pause in the stream of cars and then thread my way across.

But yesterday, since the cosmos (and the Virginia Department of Transportation) was giving me a break, I gave them one, too. I was a good citizen, a patient pedestrian. I waited my turn. But when the sign said “Walk” — I ran.

Diamonds!

Diamonds!

Comments 0 Comment


Saturday night I watched the new movie “My Week with Marilyn,” and, after it was over, had a hankering to watch a real Marilyn Monroe movie. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” was the one I could find in my Netflix instant queue.

It was a good choice. Not the kind of film I usually watch, foreign or independent, deep and ponderous. This was silly and frothy and fun. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell strut their stuff, shake their ample bottoms and seem so strikingly different from today’s stick-thin beauties as to be another gender entirely.

It made me think about how seriously we take ourselves these days — and how that wasn’t always the case. Once you could sing “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” and not be taken to task for your retrograde lack of feminism or support of corrupt African warlords. There I go again, romanticizing the past. It’s a nasty habit, I know.


Photo: Wikipedia from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” screenshot

Blue and Gold

Blue and Gold

Comments 0 Comment


A string of cool days and cold nights has put spring into slow-mo. I love it when this happens. It prolongs “nature’s first green,” which is gold, as Robert Frost said. Precious. Fleeting.

So, in advance of the weekend’s warming trend, I celebrate this first green, best as viewed against a blue, blue sky. And again, nature has cooperated, has given us low-humidity azures. So rather than looking down at the parched and powdery soil, I’ve looked up at the heavens. And the gold.

Unendangered

Unendangered

Comments 0 Comment


Of the three houses I lived in growing up, all had woods and fields nearby where I could ramble. These weren’t parks but undeveloped land, and about them hung an air of impermanence. The neighborhood I left to go to college was once known as Banana Hollow and had been known locally for its fine sledding hill. But the slope had long since fallen to the bulldozer.

I roamed the edges and bottomlands of this territory — just as I had the Ware farm which backed up to our previous house. That land, a plentiful pasture studded with the occasional giant oak, was home to a herd of grazing cattle. Some mornings I woke to the sound of their tramping and munching on the other side of our fence. But the Ware Farm was gone soon after we left that house, when I was a sophomore in high school.

All this is to say that when I hike through Folkstone Forest and the adjacent stream valley park, I am mindful of the gift, the certainty of this semi-natural land. Sure, in winter you might glimpse houses along its periphery, but plunge deep enough and all that’s visible is tree and fern and vine. It is stream valley land, prone to flooding and therefore protected.

I walk in an unendangered suburban wilderness. And I am grateful for that.

Serendipity

Serendipity

Comments 0 Comment


Before there was Amazon one-click ordering, there was the serendipitous joy of finding a book that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time on a dark dusty shelf in the nether regions of the library.

Though it could be any book, this time it’s Wallace Stegner’s When the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. I can already tell that it will be a keeper, that I’ll probably end up buying a copy of my own through — yes — Amazon one-click ordering.

But back to serendipity, to the way it feels to look up a book in the library catalog (and in the old days those wooden boxes ), scribble the number on a card and then go in search of it. This might take a while, especially if it’s a Dewey Decimal system; those numbers always give me headaches. But soon I have zeroed in on the row, then the shelf and then (miracle of miracles) the book is actually there, where it is supposed to be.

What’s captivating about the library find is the book’s tangibility, its placedness, it’s being there. But what fuels the joy of discovering it? It’s the plain simple (but intangible) fact that good books, in some way, become a part of us. More us than our bones and breath.

The Birth of a Fern

The Birth of a Fern

Comments 1 comment




It emerges not as a shoot but as a tendril. Furry and curved, something prehistoric, of the grave. One does not ooh and aah over the baby fern. One is curious, to be sure. And circumspect. A bit in awe. But not giddy or giggle-prone. Adorable the young fern is not.

But as it grows, it comes into its own. It unfurls, straightens out, becomes the plant it was meant to be. Lacey and delicate. At once contemporary and old-fashioned. Ferns give me faith.