Space Relations

Never my strong suit on standardized tests, what we used to call space relations is not one of those fusty academic subjects that never comes in handy later in life.  It's an aptitude you can use! 

Right now, for instance, it would be nice to know if the two large (and growing) piles of stuff I've been collecting for the lake will fit in our two smallish sedans. One of these cars will have a kayak strapped on the top, or at least that's the plan, so that must be taken into consideration, weight-wise. 

My record in these areas is dismal. I can't even figure out how big a Tupperware I need for leftovers, often trying one too small before I finally hit it right. The difference in cubic feet between a dollop of green beans and the mountain of food, fans, towels and other essentials growing upstairs and down is, well, stunning. 

The hour of judgment is coming. I have a feeling it will also be the hour of jettisoning. 

'Let Every Fiber Thrill'

With our family lakeside getaway only two days away, I couldn't have picked a better time to read Madeleine Blais' book To the New Owners. A valentine to her family's ramshackle bungalow on Martha's Vineyard it sums up the chaos of multi-generational gatherings.  

One of my favorite chapters features excerpts from the guest register. There are explanations, exhortations and ruminations — entries that touch on every aspect of that family's island getaways.

"I've never played so many games of gin rummy in my life." 

"I can think of no other place I'd rather go  out and not catch any fish!"

And, because this is a literary family, numerous riffs on the famous line from Moby Dick, including, "Call me, Ishmael" and "You never call me, Ishmael." 

One of my favorite entries is this quotation from Flaubert, which captures the spirit with which one should embark upon a trip that (in my case) consists of eight adults, two babies and two large German Shepherds:

"Spend! Be profligate! All great souls, that is to say, all good ones, expend all their energies regardless of the cost. You must suffer and enjoy, laugh, cry, love and work, in other words you must let every fiber of your being thrill with life. That's the meaning of being human, I think ..."

(Above: Guest books from Thule, our beloved lakeside cottage in Indiana, which left the family about five years ago.)

Welcome, Toby!

Turns out there's not only a wood shortage and a computer chip shortage but also ... a parakeet shortage.

The local animal shelter had only a bonded threesome. And pet store clerks said that shipments of birds sell out the same day they arrive.  

Our new bird, Toby, was part of a "shipment" of three, first seen huddled in the bottom of a cage at the local Pets Mart first thing on a Monday morning. 

"I just put them in the cage an hour ago," said the manager, who seemed to know and love the critters she was caring for. "They're really scared."

Toby, the green-and-yellow bird above, was sitting slightly apart from the other two parakeets at the pet shop and seemed the one most likely to be a boy, though all bets are off on gender at this point. 

More to the point, he spoke to me, not literally, though if he wasn't living with another bird he might learn to. No, it was more of a psychic connection. There seemed to be a valiant little spirit in him, something plucky and endearing. He and Alfie first sat cage-by-cage and now perch side-by-side. It's still early, but they seem to like each other! If only it was always this easy.

The Lark Ascending

I was lucky to find early in my life the twin passions that drive it still. One is words, the other is music. I've made my living from the first and kept the second for pleasure. For that reason, music has been the great unexplored ocean — restless, deep and ever-changing. 

This morning for some reason I hankered to hear the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Thanks to the streaming service I had free for six months and decided I must keep, his pieces were at my fingertips. 

My walk began with Overture to the Wasps, which after a buzzing start, settles into a brisk march and then a shimmering serenade. 

I listened to The English Folk Song Suite, Fantasia on Greensleeves, and then... The Lark Ascending. It's this last one that I can't get out of my mind, so much so that I came home and started playing it on my computer. The comments on the YouTube page — more than four thousand of them — speak to the power of this special piece and of music in general.

People write about emerging from depression after listening to The Lark, of saying goodbye to dying loved ones with this soaring melody. The piece harkens back to a simpler time, said many. One man wrote that it reminds him of his parents peddling through the English countryside during World War II, his father on leave from the RAF, the couple picnicking one golden afternoon. Life amidst the madness, ending somehow on a high note, despite it all.

One-Car Weekend

I remember when the driveway used to resemble a parking lot — five drivers and as many as four cars. Lately, there have just been two parked there, both gray sedans. And starting Friday, with one car in the shop, there's just been one. 

This might have seemed difficult in the past, a juggling act, but lately not so much. We  often run errands separately, but those can be planned around each other. Appointments seldom overlap. Neither of us parks our car all day at a Metro lot.

Life is simpler in this respect, and it makes me wonder ... could we do this permanently? I'd like to say yes, doing our bit for the carbon footprint and all, but I'll have to say no. 

In the suburbs, the car is autonomy, mastery and sometimes salvation. I'm thinking about the other day, when a walk I thought would be one hour was more than two, how glad I was to see my car parked beneath the trees, waiting to carry me home.

So as much as I'd like to be noble and economical, I'm hoping that the one-car weekend doesn't become a one-car week. 

Lower East Side

The New York City expedition was two weeks ago, but I'm still thinking of the city and its pleasures: the cacophony of drill hammers, car horns, trucks backing up, people talking, gesturing, all while walking, of course — life happening everywhere you go.

The destination of our trip was the Lower East Side, a neighborhood I seldom ventured into after dark back in the day. But there we were, wandering down Delancey and Essex and Orchard, dodging only rain, not bullets. 

I 'm stretching that a bit; it was mostly muggings we were trying to avoid in the mid 1980s, carrying a folded $10 or $20 in a back pocket, "mugger's money" we could offer if accosted. 

But still, it was hard to visit the area and not notice the sheen of danger.  Maybe that's part of its charm.

Newborn

Happy is the day that dawns unexpectedly cool. The door that swings open into rare air. 

It is the surprise that matters, expecting heat and humidity in mid-July, unaware of weather reports, of fronts arriving or departing.

When you get something else, something altogether delicious and cleansing, it takes your breath away for a minute. 

The world is newborn. 

Briefly Lost

I started off slowly yesterday, as if I knew the walk would be longer than usual. It was one of those sultry afternoons that envelops you in summer, humid without being oppressive, full-bodied and yet (to me at least) still comfortable. 

The Glade Trail beckoned, cool and single-minded, one long tunnel of green. I took it to the Cross-County Trail and then to Lake Audubon.

I had strolled around Lake Audubon before and knew you could not circumnavigate it, but I tried again anyway, knowing it would spit me out somewhere. And it did — only at first I had no idea where that somewhere was. Was it a neighborhood near the pool? A development near the shopping center? 

For a moment, I had to get my bearings. For a moment, I was lost. 

But I turned the way I thought I should, and there, on my right, was the Montessori School, a marker. Nowhere near where I thought I would be. But somewhere I knew, just the same. 

Brown-Edged

You'd think writing several posts about the Brood X cicadas would have been enough. 

I described how I felt sorry for them and their short lives. Then I wrote about how they inspired me to want to "seize the day." Finally, I noted their departure..

What I haven't yet described is what they left behind: the brown branches hanging from cherry, gum and oak. The crinkly brown tips that fall off and litter the yard.

Known as flagging — since the limp branches wave in the wind like so many sad little flags — the condition is not serious, I hear. Trees affected with this look sicker than they are, gardening experts say. 

But for folks in my neighborhood, who are quite used to 100-foot oaks toppling over in a storm or breeze, any sign of sylvan distress is taken seriously. 

Walking the other day, noticing the damage and thinking about a name for it, I came up with "brown-edged," which reminds me of a cookie, the brown-edged wafer, popular in my youth. 

Though a brown-edged tree looks nothing like a cookie, somehow that makes it easier to take.

Mixing it Up

Walking yesterday I found myself going the "wrong" way on familiar routes. I was, without intending to when I began, mixing it up. 

Down West Ox and into Franklin Farm, striding down the shady path into the neighborhood instead of out of it, as I usually do. From there to Dower House Drive, and only picking up the open trail when I got to Flat Meadow.

One of the last times I was in this area the walking paths were being repaved, and I was chased away by a small tar-roller machine. This time it was quiet, a Sunday morning, fresh and cool after days of oppressive humidity. 

The trail was open, the way was clear. I need to mix it up more often. 

All Aboard?

Boarding the train  back to Washington last Saturday, I found myself in the new Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall. It's an imposing place, artfully done with glass ceilings that frame original stone walls. 

The space created for this new building was at one point suggested by the former senator from New York, and as a New Yorker article about it points out, the new terminal seeks to atone for the travesty that was the teardown of the original Penn Station in 1963. 

The train hall is glossy and spit-polished and features huge screens with rotating displays, including photographs of 1940s travelers, women in frocks with sleeves down to their elbows, a generous if  not always flattering cut, I thought, as I waited for the train in my cap-sleeved dress. 

That I spent as much time as I did musing on those passengers and those dresses is proof that there was little else to look at. 

So, with apologies for acting the curmudgeon, let me grieve for a moment the loss of the Amtrak boarding area in the previous Penn Station, the one that replaced the"Beaux Arts beauty" of the original, the Penn Station of more recent yore, where the chaos of waiting for a train was the city's final gift to the departing traveler. A reminder of the chaos you were leaving behind, the chaos that you would miss when you returned home.

For Bart

The quick and surprising death of our parakeet Bart on Wednesday brings to mind this quotation from Jeremy Bentham: "The question is not, can they reason? nor, can they talk? but, can they suffer?"

The poor bird never seemed as chipper as his cage mate, Alfie, and back in March, I feared Bart was on his last legs. But he perked up and lived several more months to nibble and climb and spar with Alfie.

There was little clue to what ailed him, but I hope his suffering was brief. It certainly seemed that way. 

Now Alfie is left alone in the cage. He's outlived two other budgies, and we'll look soon for a new bird to join him. 

Birds are creatures of air and movement and song. And that's the way I'd like to remember Bart. 

(Bart in a recent photo shoot.)

Good Fences

"Good fences make good neighbors," Robert Frost's neighbor says to him, though the poet believes the opposite is true: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall/That sends the frozen ground-swell under it/And spills the upper boulders in the sun." 

But when it comes to deer, good fences do make good neighbors — or at least they have this summer. Some of these day lilies haven't bloomed in years. They've been nibbled off at the stem by a hungry mob of does and fawns.

This year, we put up chicken wire and caution tape (the latter is for Copper, who kept trying to run through the fence without it), and, voila, here are creamy yellow day lilies, lovely rose red ones, too. Here are the cone flowers in pink and white and russet. Here are black-eyed Susans, too. It's a bounty, a visual feast. 

For years I've relied on something called Liquid Fence to protect the flowers. But a heavy rain can wash it off during the night and a marauding herd of deer can eat every bud in sight in one unprotected evening. 

"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out," Frost says.

I don't need to ask. I know. 

Garden Bench

I'm writing this post from the far reaches of the backyard, a place I seldom sit but am sitting now because of a lovely new garden bench. 

The garden bench is a wondrous invention. Made of wood and surrounded by trees, it invites contemplation, pause, taking stock. It's a place for reverie. 

From here the house is just part of the equation, silent and still. Its worn flooring and stained carpet are safely out of sight. 

The bench sits where I was thinking of putting my writer's cabin, back when I was thinking I needed a writer's cabin. 

Now I think I may have what I need: a series of places — my new upstairs office, this wooden bench, the hammock, the trampoline, the deck under the rose-covered pergola — and, most of all finally, some time. 

Function and Form

Most of the time I float along in my English major bubble, writing posts and essays, paying little to no heed to how things work.  I turn the tap and water flows. I flip a switch and lights come on.

But lately I've been forced to take measurements, consider function over form, to — in my own small and limited way — think like an engineer. 

This shouldn't be difficult; two of my siblings are engineers. However, they ended up with all of the math genes, while I muddle along in a touchy-feely alternative universe. 

Until recently, when I've been forced to pay attention. Take the bathroom shower, for instance. I jump in one every day; most of us do. But it took me weeks to realize that a fixed glass panel by the shower controls in the new bathroom would prevent me from setting the water temperature before I get in. 

Turns out, there's a remedy for this — the shower controls can be moved closer to the entryway and away from the shower head — but had I not thought differently for a moment...  I would never have known about it.

Shank's Mare

Today, my feet are in the suburbs but my soul is in the city. I'm missing New York City in many ways, especially in this one: walking there is purposeful. It's about getting where you need to be, not taking 10,000 steps.

You don't bother with the subway if you're just hopping 20 blocks. Taxis are harder to come by than they used to be, and on Thursday night, Uber was asking $120 to take you from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side. Yes, they are on opposite sides of the island, but come on!

Which brings us to shank's mare, that most dependable mode of transportation. It might be hot and it might take a minute, but walking will get you where you need to be.

Yes, I rhapsodize about the practice of walking. It calms and inspires me on a daily basis. So much so that it's easy to forget its original purpose, which is to get us from one place to another. In New York City, you don't forget.

A Symphony

If walking in the suburbs is a sonata, walking in the city is a symphony. It is the cued entrance of  countless well-tuned players, the trilling of a piccolo, the thrum of a timpani. It is pedestrians striding through the square and construction workers in hard hats taking a break. 

It's a stroll on the High Line and a view of lower Manhattan from Little Island, the city's newest park. 

It's meandering through the West Village, down Bedford and Barrow, past the Cherry Lane Theater and on to Bleecker, where I'll grab a Napoleon and watch ten white-habited monks who've come from Our Lady of Pompeii to buy some cannolis. 

It's the plume of a fountain in Washington Square Park and the chess players and weed hawkers and pickup jazz bands that gather nearby.

It's a trip to the Strand Bookstore (still there!) on the way uptown, then dinner at a hundred-plus-year-old bar and grill.

Four movements, none of them replicable. A city walk. A symphony. 

Exhaling...

During the depths of the shutdown, as I wondered if life would ever be back to normal, I thought often of New York City. I had seen photos of empty streets, unpeopled sidewalks. I wondered if the city would ever be bustling again. I could take emptiness elsewhere — but not here.

Yesterday, as we drove through the Lincoln Tunnel, I held my breath. Would the city be ... the city? Or would it look like parts of Portland and Seattle — other metropolises I've visited recently that were still shadows of their former selves?

The answer, at least so far, is no. Pedestrians strode down 34th Street, idled at corners staring at their phones, scampered under the omnipresent scaffolding. Delivery women pulled huge handcarts piled high with boxes, the NYC version of the Amazon Prime van that careens down our street at all hours. 

And on the Lower East Side, our destination for the evening, the pierced and tattooed ones sallied forth into the night wearing every crazy outfit you could imagine. 

I could finally exhale. 

The City Itself

Today my brother, sister and I head north to the city, not Baltimore or Philadelphia, which are north of here too, but the city, which to me will always be New York City, where three of the four of us once lived.

The occasion is a birthday celebration, but do you need a reason to visit New York? 

Or, is the reason ... simply the city itself? 

Tales to Tell

For the last few months I've been slowly moving books into the spare bedroom I now call my office. It was my office once, long ago, when I was a full-time freelance writer and two of our daughters still bunked together in the room across the hall.  

But since then it has been Claire's room, from the time she was a grade-schooler with hermit crabs and hamsters (including one who miraculously gave birth two days after we brought "him" home from the pet store) to a teenager with walls covered by photos of the band Green Day.  

The door to this room has been slammed shut so many times that it barely closes. But it does close, and that is important. 

For now, I sit here in hard-earned quiet, thinking about the journey it took to reclaim this room — not just the painting and decluttering but the long journey from moving out to finally moving back in. 

This room has tales to tell. 

Tuesday Already?

I'm only two months into this new phase of life, taking a measure of its contours, trying to figure out if time will pass more quickly now that I have a slightly less crammed-full schedule or if it will slow down instead. 

I'm hoping for the latter. Which is a good sign, I guess. One wouldn't want to slow time down if time were hanging too heavily on one's hands.

But what if the opposite is true? What if the days and weeks are still winging by? What if the chunks of free time are still not roomy enough? Am I being greedy? Am I asking for the impossible? After all, I'm not 11 years old and on summer vacation. 

Patience, I tell myself. The long afternoons are on their way. Just not yet. 

Eat Your Greens

The parakeets consume mostly seed (and a prodigious amount of it, too, I might), but every so often I dig up some dandelion greens for them.  The plants are pesticide-free and full of nutrition. 

Interestingly, though, when I'm actually looking for weeds, I have trouble finding them. Or I should say, when I'm looking for dandelion greens I have trouble finding them. They're increasingly pushed out by the Japanese stiltgrass. 

Ah yes, it's a battle of the weeds in our yard, with the much-preferred dandelions on the losing end of the scale. Which means that when I do score a clump of them, Alfie and Bart tuck in with all the ardor those little beaks can muster. 

In my more earnest moments, I think the birds have the right idea: eating seeds and greens — and singing their hearts out the rest of the time. 

Pause, Reflect, Enjoy

For a day that will end with the splashing of light across a night sky, that would if I were close enough to it, also include loud pops and bangs (but which will not since I'll be viewing the fireworks from a ridge across the Potomac) ... it is starting out calmly and quietly.

Bluebirds have been flitting between the neighbor's yard and ours, their cerulean wings flashing out against the green grass of the yard, which backgrounds the birds when they perch on the chicken wire that now encloses the garden.

The deck, cleaned of the dried bamboo fronds that usually litter it this time of year, is blown clean and fresh. The air is cool, not yet humid.

It is a lovely, calm Sunday morning, a time to pause, reflect and enjoy.

Welcome, July!

July has started off with a bang, which suits this month of blistering heat, fireworks and frequent performances of the 1812 Overture. 

Last night stormy weather moved in. While it drenched us, it downed trees and may have even spawned a small tornado closer into town. (And it happened almost nine years to the day from when a powerful derecho storm blew in, leaving almost three million without power.)

Today's morning-after is much less significant, though one daughter still has no power at her house, and a downed tree crushed one neighbor's porch and crashed through the windshield of another neighbor's car. 

But here in the outer 'burbs (touch wood), the lights are on, the air conditioner is humming and I just sent off my first (in a long time) freelance assignment. 

Time for a nap? It's tempting!

The Bunny

I'd heard a bunny had been spotted, a creature new to these parts, but until last Saturday I had yet to lay my eyes on him. I was mulching the knockout rose and digging up day lilies when I caught his slight movements from the corner of my eye. 

The rabbit was about eight inches long, with perfectly upright ears that perked up at the slightest noise and strong little jaws that would, if they could, eat all the flowers we've fenced off from the deer. At the time, though, he was only nibbling harmlessly at the weedy grass on the garden's border.  

I watched him for several long minutes, pondering the nature of cuteness, how much of it has to do with the size, shape, fluffiness and configuration of the tail — long and thin (rats) creepy; puffy and white (bunnies) adorable. 

Though we have squirrels, chipmunks, deer and even the occasional raccoon and skunk in these parts, rabbits are rare. Which gives them a luster — and a free pass — that other creatures lack.

Were the bunny to procreate, though (which bunnies are wont to do), he might lose a lot of his charm.