I began to spot them in the forest a few days ago, although from the looks of it they’d been there for a while. The wreaths seem homemade, maybe fashioned from local boughs.
This one is special though, decorated as it is with an eagle feather.
Welcome back, the wreath says. Welcome back to the eagles, more common in these parts than they used to be.
Welcome back to the foxes, who prowl and hunt and make their home.
Welcome back to the walkers, including this one.
It’s been a while since I studied a topographical map. I’ve had to refamiliarize myself with those little squiggly lines. The closer they are together, I remember, the greater the elevation.
Sometimes there’s a little number there to help. In the case of my terrain it’s a little number in more ways than one, something in the 300 range, as in 367 feet above sea level.
But even 367 can be felt in the legs on the way up — and on the way down. It’s a good reminder that the land has a texture and a contour. That it has a mind of its own.
Once again, I’m on a mission, this time to find a passage through the Crabtree Park woods to a street called Foxclove. From there it’s a short walk to a Reston trail.
Having struck out on finding it from my end, yesterday I drove to Foxclove and tried it from the other direction. I reached at least one point I recognized from earlier hikes, enough so that I think I can find my way back there another time.
Once I have this figured out I’ll be able to walk from my house to the trail system I usually must drive to reach. It’s not exactly the Northwest Passage, but it’s something.
I just finished reading a novel I had previously “read” by listening. I approached this as an experiment. Would I catch more of the nuance when my eyes scanned ink on paper? Would I possess the story more fully?
The answer, so far, is inconclusive. While the spoken version brought forth the rhythm of the language, and the voice of the narrator captured its emotive power, the act of reading did what it always does for me: it created a private conversation between me and the author. It’s a conversation that seems more completely “mine” when there’s no middleman.
The words of the novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, say it better than I can: “Turn a page, walk the lines of the sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.”
When my children were young, I would often end the long days by trying to clear a path to the couch to read or relax for a few minutes before sleep. Often, though, the couch would be occupied.
It might be a stuffed bear, rabbit and dog having tea. Or a bevy of Barbies strutting their stuff. Whatever it was, I hated to dismantle it. I’d been so busy all day doing my job that I hadn’t had time to appreciate the work my girls were doing, play being the work of childhood. But the little scenes were so dear that I knew I would never forget them.
Now we’ve come full circle. It’s my girls who are coming upon these sweet reminders of their children’s play. Except when the toddlers are over here, which they were yesterday. When I went down to the basement after the flurry of departures, I found a little something the kiddos left behind.
I’m not sure what’s going on in this tableau, other than knowing it includes a block, a plastic rabbit, Playmobil girl, tiny doll wardrobe on its side covered with a piece of lavender fabric, and red plastic monkey from a game we once had called Barrel of Monkeys. Needless to say, I couldn’t dismantle this right away —and I took a picture before I did.
As we move ahead into this strangely early spring, I’m enjoying the flowers that have bloomed and noticing a feature about them that I may not have fully appreciated before … and that is clumping.
There are clumps of Lenten roses, clumps of daffodils and clumps of snowdrops. It’s just the way they grow and spread, I know. But the impression is one of abundance and joy.
It seems that flowers, like humans, enjoy the company of their kind.
Do facts matter? How integral are they to the underlying truth? These questions and more were raised in the one-act play “The Lifespan of a Fact,” which I saw last night with journalist friends.
The play and book on which it is based raise all sorts of questions about literary license, rights of authorship and fiction versus nonfiction. But for me it was also a trip down memory lane, as I recalled a fact checker I worked with at McCall’s magazine.
Carmen had a quick laugh and a determined air. She wore well-tailored skirts and blouses, and everything about her was precise, from her sturdy pumps to her tidy bob. When she appeared at my desk with a manuscript covered in red ink and pencil marks I always wanted to slink down into my chair, down, down, down until I could slide under my desk and hide out there a while.
Too late, of course. Carmen knew I was there. And even if she didn’t, she would hunt me down just as she did every fact in every article. I’m not a sloppy reporter, but everyone trembled in Carmen’s wake. In a pre-Internet era, fact-checking was no easy task, but Carmen and her minions made sure that every piece in the magazine was shipshape and gospel-true. There were no questions about the lifespan of those facts.
This is not a complaint, so I hope the weather gods don’t take it as one. But the human body is more comfortable when it stays in one temperature range for a season. When it’s 70 degrees one day and 40 the next, it does something to a body. In short, it makes it shiver, then roast, then shiver again.
Today the high is forecast to be 80 degrees. This is February 23, I’ll point out. Daffodils are blooming. Snowdrops and hellebores have been out for weeks. By Saturday we may have snow.
Perhaps this is just a cycle, a La Niña phenomenon. But unseasonable winter warmth — and these crazy yo-yo cycles, too — now carry with them a tinge of guilt and fear. In their balminess are denuded forests, smoke clouds, flooded homes, loss.
I love warm weather. But not with these strings attached.
(This photo was taken in Washington, D.C., on January 24, 2023.)
To the untrained eye this is nothing but an ordinary parking lot. But to me — and the other people who parked their cars here — it’s a suburban trailhead.
Yesterday I took two short walks, both of which began in parking lots. In each case, I had to find the paths, which took online research (which happened years ago) and on-foot exploration. Then I traipsed the paths themselves, an ongoing process of discovery.
Who would guess that less than a quarter-mile from the lot above there are fox dens and creek bends and greening briars glittering with raindrops?
The photo above was snapped quickly with no attention to angle or light. But I’m glad it looks as ordinary as it does. It’s proof that around here, the ordinary can lead to extraordinary.
While I’ve never been a clean freak, I do keep a relatively neat house. Just don’t open any closets or drawers, and avoid the basement at all costs.
But even I can experience what I’ve come to think of as TMT — Too Much Tidiness.
With four friends over for dinner last weekend, the house had come perilously close to this condition. Waking up to a blank coffee table for the second morning in a row, I knew what I had to do. I marched down to the basement and brought up two armloads of magazines.
Here are two years worth of National Geographics, a year and a half of Atlantics and various other publications, plus a couple of books for good measure.
Ah yes, that’s better.