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.
Last week I went through files in the basement, an ongoing task. I ripped and shredded and came up with two bags worth of trash. It barely made a dent.
A weirder (to me) but also necessary form of clean-up is digital detoxing. In the course of updating my computer’s operating system (one of those pesky to-dos I haven’t tackled in a while), I realized that I may not have enough memory to install the new system.
So I’ve been prodding and poking in the digital bowels of my machine, finding all sorts of hiding places where large files lurk. Many of them are videos sent with text messages. Clicking on those videos yields blasts from the past, old work snippets, footage of dogs (not mine) romping in fields. Those are easy ones to delete. But the other day I found a video with a much-younger Copper dashing around the backyard, giving his much-larger dog cousins a merry chase.
To see him again in his younger skin brought a tear to my eye. There was our own dear, frisky pup, bobbing and feinting and generally being his own irascible self. I used to think only hard-copy cleanup was an emotional minefield. Now I know otherwise.
I’m writing this post as a break from designing an economic system. It’s a class assignment, of course. I don’t design economic systems just for fun.
But once I’ve gotten going on this project, it’s more enjoyable than I thought it would be, somewhat like the hours I’d spend drawing pictures of houses when I was a kid. They had towers and secret passageways and all sorts of bells and whistles. I didn’t worry about the cost or the plumbing. I gave my imagination full reign.
This assignment is not quite so free-form. We must explain what this system would produce and cite evidence to prove our case. But one thing I’ve learned in my brief time as a graduate student is that there’s always evidence … somewhere. I’ll go and look for some now.
(A market in Myanmar, 2017, part of a more sustainable agricultural system.)
The trail was unfolding as it had the last few times I hiked it. I thought I knew where I was going … until I didn’t.
Yesterday I took off for a stroll in the woods without a phone or a map. This was not a well-marked Reston trail, where I usually know where I am. This was one of the district parks with sporadic signage and paths that meander all over the place.
When I saw the outlines of a rooftop in the distance, I took the turns I thought would bring me out on a street where I could get my bearings. But even doing that took more twists and turns than I would have liked. I was, in short, beginning to feel a bit anxious about being in the woods alone at 4 p.m., the sun lowering in the sky, not knowing exactly where I was and without the tools to find out.
This is not a cliff-hanger. I kept walking and eventually made my way home. And in the end … I relished that my heart skipped a few beats along the way.
(Signage for a walk near Asheville, the kind I wished I’d had yesterday.)
The trail beckoned, a trail beside the trail, a connector. It meandered from the Washington and Old Dominion (the W&OD), a rails-to-trails strip of asphalt that runs from the D.C. border to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, to a garden park.
Connector trails are surprises. Often makeshift and cobbled together with stray pieces. Frankintrails, you might call them.
This one had a bridge, a warning to avoid trespassing on the surrounding land (on which was built one of the more impressive mansions I’ve seen in this region) and a bucolic stretch where the scenery had the scale and immediacy of a New England lane.
Beyond that, there was a street winding through a neighborhood, then a shaded trail threading its way among fir trees to the park itself. That part was hilly enough that I can feel it today in the backs of my legs.
Still, the connector walk was a beauty of a discovery. I’d take it again today, if I could.
A long walk yesterday along a Reston path, the Cross-County Trail, then around Lake Audubon and back to the car.
It was one of those hybrid walks that I enjoy for its variety.
Along the way, this Valentine’s surprise attached to a fence post. A tribute to the power of love … and of whimsy.