The Unvoiced

I read an essay over the weekend about the writer Tillie Olsen, whose impact was large though her output was small. It was that last point that comforted and inspired me. And not for the best of reasons. As I contemplate a life soon freed of the day job, I'm already looking for excuses. 

Before, I could always say ... gee, I wish I could write more of my own stuff, but I have to work for my living. What will I use for an excuse now? This essay, by A. O. Scott in the New York Times Book Review, provides a blueprint. I'm going to quote liberally from it, because it articulates an exhaustion I've long felt but seldom read about. The italics are mine.  

Olsen was a writer her whole life — she died in 2007 — but she didn’t write much. Not because she was blocked or lacked material. The blockage — the obligation of earning a living and tending children, the “immersion” in caring that was a source of fulfillment as well as frustration — was the subject matter. The silence that surrounds those stories is its own kind of statement.

Is there a place in literature — in our canons and course listings, in our criticism and theory — for unwritten work? ... Literary ethics prompts us to attend to the unheard and the marginal; curiosity or impatience with the same old stuff sends us in search of the forgotten and the neglected. But what kind of attention do we owe — what kind of attention is it even possible to pay — to the unvoiced?

I'd have to go back to an essay by Ursula Le Guin, "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Writes the Books,"  to find words that so perfectly describe the unique challenges facing the woman who raises children, makes a home, holds a job and dares call herself a writer. 

It's a topic I soon hope to explore with renewed relish — or at least, that's the plan.

Dune Walk

Two years ago, I visited the Great Sand Dunes in southern Colorado. My brother Drew and I drove until nightfall to reach the place,  but it was so dark that evening that we could only see the snow on the peaks. The dunes were invisible, being dusk-colored. 

But that only made the morning's vista grander, a landscape that picked me up and put me in my place, that begged to be explored, which is what I did, starting at the lodge ...

Passing a small picnic grounds

And a primitive gas station

I walked for more than an hour in the cold mountain air, all the while being pulled toward the dunes as if by a magnet.

Once on the sand, I trudged and marveled, watching the experienced dune-goers, who brought saucers and boards for sliding. But I had what I needed to capture the experience — and that was what I was after.

20,001

Over the weekend I learned that the daughter of a former neighbor, a man I watched grow up, was gunned down in broad daylight just steps away from her middle school outside Richmond, Virginia. 

This was not one of the mass murders we've experienced recently; there was "only" one victim: a young girl who brought happiness and light to all who knew her, who was stepping up to take more responsibility on her family's farm, who had all of life ahead of her. 

Police have the alleged assailant, also a juvenile, in custody, but have released no further information. We can be sure, though, that his life will also never be the same, nor will his family's. 

I think of the unimaginable pain this murder has caused, and of all who are grieving for this young girl — hundreds if not thousands of people — and multiply it by 20,000, the number of people who lost their lives to gun violence in 2020. 

I know it's not only about guns. But it's a lot about guns. How many random shootings and mass murders will it take? How many more lost lives?

P.S. After posting this early yesterday morning, I read about another young life tragically ended. And the next day, there was this. 

An Excellent Trade

Every year in early spring I try to organize the two climbing rose bushes that clamber over the pergola on the deck. So yesterday, I ventured forth with clippers and gardening gloves and a ladder to snip off the deadwood and re-attach boughs with twisty green gardening wire.  

A new task this year was freeing the detritus that collects under the tangle of limbs. This meant holding up the thorny wood with one hand while sweeping the gunk out with another, all while balanced on a ladder.

By the time I was done, I had leaf bits in my hair, black smudges on my face and pricked fingers and thumbs (the gardening gloves can only do so much). I was, in short, a mess. But the rose ... it was looking pretty good. Maybe it's just where I am now, but I consider this an excellent trade. 

(The rose at the beginning of its blooming period last year.) 

The Heat

For the first time in a long time, I'm warm. The windows are open, the sweater and long-sleeved shirt are peeled off and I'm sitting comfortably in short sleeves. 

The heat has roared in on a wild west wind, sending temperatures into the 70s before 10 a.m. It reminds me of a mythical beast, this heat, like something I'd heard about but wasn't sure was real. Now that I've had a taste of it, I'm remembering how it limbers up the muscles and frees up the mind. How it opens doors, both literally and metaphorically. 

I'd like to think the heat is here to stay, but I know better. It's a fickle time of year. We could have cold rain tomorrow. But at least the heat is here now. And I'm basking in it. 

Curtain Briefly Drawn

It was a gully washer, a cloudburst, the kind of rain that lifts worms from their snug in-ground quarters and deposits them onto the driveway. I even spotted a banana slug this morning, clinging to the siding on the front of the house.

Yesterday's downpour was torrential at times — rain with a mission. It filled the creeks and muddied the soil. It made the forsythia pop and the skunk cabbage unfurl.

Birds loved it; the feeder was mobbed with goldfinches, sparrows, cardinals and woodpeckers. 

It felt healing, this rain, a curtain briefly drawn between winter and spring — brown boughs and cracked dirt on one side, greenness and growth on the other. 

Open-Door Policy

It's a drizzly morning filled with bird song. Water beads on the just-sprouting branches of the climbing rose and small puddles collect on the aging deck floor. 

I sit on the couch just inside the back door, which is open to the moisture and the song, which matches the morning in its timbre and intensity.

It's often like this in the warm or even warmish months: back door open to breeze and heat and whatever else is out there. That we've had mice and snakes and an occasional bird is part of the package. I'll accept them if it brings us closer to the landscape. It's my own open-door policy.

(The only open-door shot I could find is of the front door. It's often open too, but it has a storm door.)

New Normal

Over the weekend, a taste of normalcy: dinner out — in a restaurant — with friends who are also vaccinated.  The restaurant was empty save for one table of three seated 20 feet away. The server was properly masked. In that sense, it was not business as usual. 

But what a thrill to see actual human faces, not squares on a screen; to enjoy full human expressions, not the crinkle of eyes above an oblong of cloth. There were appetizers and stir-fries and shrimp with vermicelli. There was much catching up. And afterward, there was a stroll through the narrow streets of a small, quaint downtown.

It was not the kind of dining experience I might have sought 14 months ago, folks crammed together talking and laughing, the clink of glasses, the buzz of alcohol and laughter. It was the new normal. And it was absolutely wonderful. 

Celebrating Crocus

This morning, a celebration of crocus, of the all the new ones that have sprung up in the yard this year, apparently dormant for several years but making their appearance now thanks to time and warmed earth.

There are clumps of crocus by the street, around the tree and amidst the laurel in the front garden. They are pale lavender, rich purple and creamy white.

Though I think of crocus as shy flowers, in company they project a bright and jaunty beauty, a kind of brazen, "let's do it" approach that makes me admire them for their bravery.

Spring Awakening

Spring woke me up this morning. It tugged at my elbow and jostled me to consciousness earlier than I was planning. I didn't know it was spring at the time. Only after I learned of the 5:37 a.m. vernal equinox did my early awakening make sense.

But it had to be spring, had to be something hopeful and fresh that was already about its business before sun-up. Because it didn't rouse me with light pouring in the window. It's still dark in these parts. And it didn't entice me with the aroma of lilac — that shrub is far from blooming here. 

It simply filled me with the sense of wanting to be up and about — even before daybreak. Why? Because it's spring, 2021, and it will soon be bright and warm and full of promise.

Writing and Music

Having a piano I can actually play means that I've been digging into all sorts of old music. There's Debussy's Arabesque with its rolling arpeggios, Handel's Passacaglia with its variations on a theme, a Chopin polonaise with its jaunty beat and Scott Joplin's piano rags, just because.

But the most poignant find was the book of Brahms' Intermezzos. How I loved those pieces when I last played piano seriously, and how playing them again brought back the self that played them then: young, dreamy, all of life ahead of her. 

I wasn't sure what kind of life I wanted to have then, but I knew I wanted it to include writing and music. And now, all these years later, it does.

The "R Word"

This week, I've begun to share the news with colleagues that, come May, I will start a new phase of life, one without the grind of daily work-for-pay. You might say I'm "retiring," though that's a loaded word in my vocabulary.

Writers seldom retire, but editorial directors for international development organizations do, so I'll use their nomenclature when necessary. 

The fact of the matter, though, is that I don't much care for the "R word." It sounds like Bermuda shorts and golf courses and happy gray-haired couples staring off into the sunset. 

Which won't look much like what I'll be doing, which is writing and peddling my work, not so much a new thing as an old one with a twist — a return to the freelance world I inhabited happily for decades but with less of the financial pressure. 

Still, it's an adjustment, one I've been mulling over privately for months — and one I can finally mull over publicly here. 

An Irish Walk

There were cobblestones and spongy soil, rocky fields and urban trails. The walks of Ireland took us from Giant's Causeway to Trinity College — and many places in between.

One of my favorites, which I'm reliving today, took us from central Kinsale to Charles Fort. It was a sun-dappled paved path with jaw-dropping views of the harbor that winked at us every now and then. 

Seeing the landscape up close, at walking pace, has kept it close to my heart. The memories of that walk are embedded there, to be pulled out at special times — like St. Patrick's Day — to remember and to cherish.

The Details

Sometimes all it takes is a short stroll to open the mind and senses to the day ahead. Today I took the long way around to the newspaper — out the back door, down the deck stairs, around the garden and through the gate and side yard to the driveway where it lay, double-bagged in orange.

The ground is hard and cracked, given two weeks without moisture, which made it easy for me to amble out there in my (sturdily-soled) slippers. Weather folks say we need the rain, but I say we need the dryness. The yard is finally not a lake anymore.

On my short expedition, I found several sticks that I broke over my knee and stuck in the bin for tomorrow's yard waste pickup. I noted the fine pruning of the hollies, which no longer graze the garage. I heard the tiny peeps of birds fluttering awake in the azaleas. And I spotted swollen buds on the forsythia.

It's a new day, these details said. Embrace it!

Grateful Balance

On Saturday, I met my brother and sister for a walk, all three of us fully and gratefully vaccinated. We gathered in a park near the river on a day that seemed ordinary but was a long time coming. 

It was just a walk, a simple walk, but we hadn't been together without masks on in over a year, have hardly been together at all, so it felt both new and old at the same time. 

It's a challenge to balance the emotions — being mindful of those who still suffer while celebrating my own return to semi-normalcy — but one I'm happy to undertake. 

(A photo from an earlier walk: I was too much in the moment to take one on Saturday.) 

 

Farewell to the Spinet

When the moment finally came, it was nothing at all like what I thought it would be — as moments  seldom are. I worried that my dear, sweet Wurlitzer spinet, the piano Mom and Dad had bought on the rent-to-purchase plan when I was a kid, would have to leave here in the instrument equivalent of a body bag, bound for what I've heard described as "that great concert hall in the sky."

I'd been dithering over this for years — knowing that if I was to continue to play, the spinet would have to go, but being unable and unwilling to get rid of the instrument on which I plunked my first scales, practiced for hours a day in high school, and accompanied the girls when they were young musicians. 

It finally dawned on me that I was going about this the wrong way. To get rid of the spinet, I would need to fall in love with its replacement. So last Saturday I ventured out to a piano showroom in a mall not far from here, intending only to look and see what was there. 

What was there was a used Schimmel studio with a top you can prop up like a baby grand and a tone and touch that sent shivers down my spine. It was more than I was planning to spend but they were willing to take the spinet on trade! That clinched the deal, and the day before yesterday, the spinet left the house in a piano truck safely belted and blanketed, perhaps on its way to another young pianist.

Meanwhile, I can't stop playing the new piano, which fills the house with its sonorous sound. I would say I don't know what took me so long — but, of course, I do. 

Shorn

The men who climb trees were here last week, and they left our oaks and gum and hollies tidy and pruned and shorn. 

It was a long-overdue task, given the branches that were hanging over the house and scraping the garage. But it leaves me feeling bare and exposed and doubtful of the shade we'll have this spring and summer.

It's all part of growth and renewal, removing the deadwood, but it reminds me too much of the way life is now: cutting back to the quick, to the most essential, learning how much we can do without. 

Which is why I'm hoping that the haircuts the trees received leave them with thicker and more elegant tresses come summer. 

Last 'Normal' Day

On this same equivalent Thursday last year, I rose early, dressed quickly and left the house. It was the last day of a three-day conference that I had first dreaded but had warmed to because it brought together people I work with but seldom see. We met at a downtown location, and on the last day I went in early so I could take a walk beforehand. 

Though the coronavirus was much on our minds — the bathrooms were mobbed at every break with people obsessively washing their hands — there was much yet we didn't know. We didn't wear masks, we didn't practice social distancing, and we took our lunch in a common room, all 80 or so of us scooping our salads and fruit from common bowls and eating together at small, cocktail-sized tables. 

Since Thursday was the finale, at the end of the day many of us went across the street to a watering hole where we huddled even closer to each other. In retrospect I would kick myself for that, especially when I learned that at least one of the attendees came down with Covid right after the event. 

We knew something was coming, and in fact we learned that day that we would be working remotely the next week, but we could never have known that a year later we would still be hunkered down in our houses and apartments, waiting to resume a normal life we're not sure will come again. 

Early Walk

There was time for an early walk this morning, a chilly start to a day that has already warmed considerably. But a few hours ago, I bundled up and crunched along the gravel berm, thinking about the hours soon to be unfolding.

It had been a while since I walked early, preferring the lunch-time stroll when temperatures are below freezing. But with warmer air and earlier dawns, that is shifting.

The day is different when you walk in the morning. It stretches out endlessly and without complications.  At noontime, the work of the day is very much in my mind. But the morning belongs to the half-awake brain and the thoughts that weave in and out of it.

Robins in Winter

Yesterday I watched two plump robins hop around the backyard by the witch hazel tree. It was the first in a string of warming days, and it would have been tempting to see them as harbingers of spring. But I've been seeing robins off and on all winter, stepping out of the house into air brisk enough to tickle my nose only to hear their distinctive spring-like sound. 

So I did what any self-respecting modern person would do. I googled "robins in winter?" in hopes of learning that their presence in January meant warmer days would soon be here. 

Ah no, it meant nothing of the sort. The "first robin of spring" saying, at least in these parts, is just a saying.  Robins winter in these climes, so seeing them doesn't mean much of anything. 

But what I learned warmed the heart if not the fingers and toes. In cold months, robins are much more likely to be found in large flocks. They have learned to stick together when the pickings are slim. Would that we humans could follow their example. 

(Photo: Wikipedia)

The Point of 'PossibiliDay'

Today is International Woman's Day, one of the 31 days that comprise Women's History Month, and one of many observation days we celebrate at Winrock International.

It is also a day I dubbed "PossibiliDay" back in 2017, when I'd been at my then-new job almost a year and was celebrating the freedom of my new work and an awakening to the power of possibility. 

This year, March 8 feels far more International Woman's Day than "PossibiliDay," a fact I attribute to almost five years in this position, the last one spent working entirely at home. 

But this is okay, I tell myself. Because the point of "PossibiliDay" is not to mark it every year. It's to remember that possibilities lurk where we least expect them — and to take heart from that fact. 

Cake for No Reason

It was near the end of a fascinating Zoom book group conversation — which moved from the book itself to a discussion of memoir — that one of us mentioned having just sampled the best white cake ever. 

Baking the perfect white cake is something of a holy grail for me, the attempt to duplicate the most delectable wedding cake-like texture, dense and fine of crumb. I don't have much time to devote to this quest, but I have experimented with several recipes over the years and was delighted to have another one to try. 

When I saw the King Arthur Flour "Tender White Cake" recipe I was immediately encouraged. I had all the ingredients in my pantry and fridge — or so I thought; it turned out I was missing almond extract. But a quick stop at the grocery store remedied that, which is how I found myself up to my elbows in flour and sugar at the end of a long work week. 

Thanks to my power mixer, though, I was able to cream the unsalted butter with the (sad to say not King Arthur brand) flour, add one egg white at a time, and finally whip in the cup of yogurt laced with vanilla and almond extracts. 

The cake was as exquisite as advertised, with a rich, old-fashioned flavor that my mother would have said reminded her of a cake my Aunt Mary made. Beyond the taste, though, was the experience.  It was fun to bake a cake for no reason — that is, for no reason other than the cake itself. 

In Praise of Clippings

This morning's newspaper included an article about books on D.C. I did what I do with all helpful articles I think I might want to read again — pulled it out and saved it. 

We live in a digital era, but you wouldn't know that by looking at my files. They are stuffed full of newspaper and magazine clippings, everything from recipes to book reviews to especially fetching columns I want to read again. They are messy and unwieldy — but essential, too.

I could find the same articles and bookmark them on my computer. But there's something to be said for the physical presence of the article itself. For the touch of the paper,  complete with ripped edges and, sometimes, with notes I scribbled in the margin. 

Clippings are outdated, I suppose. But I keep them around. They are tangible reminders of the ideas they hold. 

Up in a Tree

Oh, how I love to climb up in a tree

Up in the air so blue

I do think it the pleasantest thing

Ever a guy could do

Scaling the trunk and sawing the branch

Till I can see all 'round

Hoping I'm belted and harnessed all right

So they'll catch me if I fall down!

Till I get back to the Earth again

Back where the chipper chips

The homeowners cheer when I'm in the clear

Don't they know, I never slip?!

(With apologies to Robert Louis Stevenson.) 

Moonlight Sonata

I learned from today's Writer's Almanac that Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata was published on this day in 1802. This means that for 219 years young pianists — and those who live with them — have been tortured by this piece.

Even now, I can thrum the fingerings on the desk. The first few bars of the first movement of Moonlight Sonata along with the opening of Beethoven's Fur Elise may well be the last knowledge to leave my brain. Yes, it's that bad. 

I wore an aqua-colored dress with a white collar at the recital where I performed Moonlight Sonata. And I think I performed it relatively mistake-free. 

My teacher was unorthodox, so recitals were mercifully few and far between. But of the handful I had, on at least one or two occasions I had to start over when mistakes derailed me. 

Moonlight Sonata was not one of those times, though ... because it was then and forever will be, embedded in my brain. 

(Title page of the first edition, courtesy Wikipedia)

Steady and Clear

When I woke at 5:40, morning had begun. It was seeping in around the window shades and filling the room not with light but with something that wasn't darkness, either.  A vague shift of shadow, a sharper awareness of shapes.

I lay there a while, thinking it was still dark enough to sleep and that would also be a good way to start a Tuesday, also, perhaps better than jumping out of bed. But the morning won out. There was an insistence to it: Come on, get up. What are you waiting for?

Once downstairs, the morning fulfilled its promise, putting out a steady clear light from the east, which I stationed myself to watch by sitting in the big blue chair. It's been a light fest ever since, a treat we can continue to enjoy as days lengthen and expand. 

A long winter, an even longer year. The light is welcome. 

March Mizzles

March begins with low skies and sodden soil, with raindrops pinging puddles. The ground is full of water; it can hold no more. But still the rain falls. It follows the snow and the sleet and the freezing rain, all of which left their mark. 

Last night's drops drummed the roof. This morning's precipitation ventures forth more vaguely. Will it shower? Will it drizzle? Perhaps it will remain indecisive — and mizzle.

In the meantime, moisture pools on sidewalks, beads on branches, saturates the air with mist and haze. If today were to dress for the weather, it would need a poncho and galoshes. 

Welcome, March. I hope you brought an umbrella.