Typos

Typos

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Yesterday was busy. I had my class and plenty of work and an errand to run at lunchtime. It wasn’t until this morning that I noticed yesterday’s post, about how we’re in no hurry for the cool, sharp weather of “all.”

Ah, the typo. Bane of our existence. There are the funny ones, like the time our magazine, Bluegrass, misspelled the name of an advertiser, Mrs. Farthing. (I’ll let you figure out which letter was missing.) That one was legendary. Even the local radio announcer gave us a hard time on that one.

The thing about typos now, though, is how easily they can be corrected. If I notice a misspelling or an inelegance in the blog, I just slip in and fix it. Online publishing, then, softens the rigidity of the written word. But removing the permanence also removes the power.

Early Showers

Early Showers

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Consider the flowers of late summer. They are both delicate and strong. They bloom as if there is no end to summer. And their friends, the mushrooms, mimic their bravado. Look at us, they say. We’re pretty too.

It is another cloudy, humid morning, only this time with a rumble of thunder and a patter of rain. We are damp and clammy here. We have our windows open and our minds, too. We are in no hurry for the cool sharp weather of fall. We are in a lull, a gracious interlude, and I for one am glad of it.

Right Turn

Right Turn

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Yesterday I drove down a street I’d never driven before. I turned right instead of going straight, and I was in … the country.

In many parts of Fairfax County there are vestiges of the old mixed in with the new. My first view to the left was a green field and a barn, a scene I pass every day but from another angle and therefore completely altered. It made me think about the scale of times past, houses closer together and right on the road, as if leaning in to tell secrets.

The lane narrowed as I drove until, at the end, I could scarcely turn the car around. With each leg of the passage, I felt myself being drawn further back into Oakton’s past. It wasn’t a bad trip.

Late Light

Late Light

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There is a special quality to the day that has been cloudy and ends with a last-minute parting of the clouds. The sun, of course, is low in the sky, and so those first rays are a bit disorienting.

Is it just selective memory, or does the sun set more grandly, more expansively on those days? It makes sense that it might. Banks of just-parted clouds pile in heaps on the horizon and add drama to the sun’s steady slipping.

And on the ground, people who have been inside all day rush out to walk before darkness falls. The streets that were clammy and silent are suddenly peopled again. There is an unusual briskness at day’s end. And a hopefulness for the morrow.

Haying Time in Franklin Farm

Haying Time in Franklin Farm

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On Friday’s walk I spied two monster tractors motoring back and forth across what remained of a meadow quadrant, cutting down everything within reach. It was a brisk, efficient business, abolishing in minutes what it took months to build: the waving golden rod, the spindly stalks of Queen Anne’s lace, the nettles, the Virginia creeper and the chicory.

It is haying time in Franklin Farm, which means not the cutting, drying and bundling of grass to nourish animals through the lean months, but rather a tidying up of the suburban landscape. Franklin Farm is a subdivision, after all, and this is not the mowing of a lawn but of the common land, a place set aside for recreation and beauty, a tip of the hat to the dairy farm that was here before, and as such, a place I like to walk because (despite the paved paths and center-hall colonials), it has some sense of the genuine about it.

I’m almost afraid to walk past the meadow today. Will the entire swath of grass-carpeted land have fallen to the blade? If it has, we will all be the poorer for it. We will miss the beauties of first frost on tangled briars, a seasonal transformation made possible only by negligence, by leaving alone the delightful chaos of nature.

Still Dawn

Still Dawn

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This morning I notice the stillness. In the fog of a new day, I hear what has become mere background noise, the fluid chorus of chirping crickets, which passes for silence this time of year.

“By September, the day breaks with little help from birds,” writes the conservationist Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold’s line makes me notice the truth: The day dawns quietly now, without the raucous morning chorus of cardinals and robins and jays. “The disappointment I feel on these mornings of silence perhaps shows that things hoped for have a higher value than things assured,” Leopold writes, explaining how he feels on days he does not hear a covey of quail.

I am not disappointed by the lack of bird call, but I am made pensive by it. There is something in the dawn chorus that does my heart good. Birds are onto something; they sense hazards before we do. When they quiet down, I listen up.

The Third Shift

The Third Shift

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When I was a full-time freelance writer I wrote often for Working Mother magazine and became familiar with the theory that multiple roles are healthy for working women. The theory goes something like this: When work goes well, it inoculates us against the stress of home and family life. And when home is crazy, the office provides another avenue for achievement and satisfaction. Of course, sometimes both work and home are demanding, but that’s another story.

Last night I missed class to go to Celia’s back-to-school night. I’m glad I made the choice I did, but I missed the camaraderie of the class, missed the two hours I would have spent thinking and talking about ideas.

So after I came in, I spent a few minutes thinking about choices and the multiple roles equation (or my vastly simplified memory of it). The equation is missing a number, I think. There’s a part of me (a part of every person, I imagine) that is not about work and not about family. It is the “third shift,” that which we do for ourselves alone. And often that’s what gives, what falls behind.

For me it’s the thinking self — the reading and writing and pondering self — that has, as the children have grown older, become ever more important. This is the self that has been parched for years. Now that I’m starting to quench it, I don’t want to stop.

Proust and Fog

Proust and Fog

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There are some spectacular stretches of scenery on Interstate 64 between Beckley, West Virginia, and Lexington, Virginia, but the rain and fog made it difficult to capture them this time.

Looking at the snapshots this morning, I think of the Proust we’re reading for class, selections from Swann’s Way. I think about how Proust would be able to parse the fog for us, take us into the cloud banks and out again with memories as sleek and silvery and slippery as a fish.

What may seem obscure, remote and impenetrable is, upon reflection, packed with meaning. The difficulty lies not in the absence of material but in the abundance of it.

Proust’s meaning is never superimposed, though. It is organic; it grows out of repetition and early familiarity. It accumulates, layer upon layer, as a result of daily living — fully conscious daily living.

Terra Incognita

Terra Incognita

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An element of modern life that we tend to discount is the amount of travel we undertake. I often think of this after one of my quick trips to Kentucky, a quick trip that takes eight hours each way.

But even the distance conquered by each suburban commuter, moving daily from one realm to another, can be 50 miles or more round trip.

Once, when Mom and I were traveling together in Ireland, we asked a shop woman for directions to a manor house that we knew was less than 10 miles away. She pointed us down a stretch of highway. “It’s lovely that way, I’ve heard,” she said.

It took us a minute to realize that the woman had never been there. What was for us a short jaunt, just one tiny leg of a many-legged adventure, was for her terra incognita.

And so it goes with traveling. We learn not just from the distances we traverse but from the people we meet along the way. People who show us another way to live, the way of staying put.
Staying put is our terra incognita.

Field Stone

Field Stone

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Last night I went for an after-dinner stroll. People were entertaining at a house nearby. White twinkle lights glittered in the trees and a red carpet covered the walkway. There was a football game going on and Kentucky had not yet lost.

Earlier in the day Ellen and I had walked around the neighborhood admiring the knock-out roses and the loamy soil that produces them. This is our hometown but not our home neighborhood, so there is much to learn.

But there are also the familiar sights, the field stone, for instance. Many old walls around here are made of it, and I grew up hearing these stone fences were built by slaves. I later learned it’s more likely they were built by Irish immigrants who had come here with the railroad and stayed for the horses.

This lamppost gives a hint of the artistry required to build a stone wall. I like the rough weathered look of the thing, how it seems both solid and light at the same time. It is free of manufactured precision; it is forgiving and free.