Instead of a Card

We met when we were just out of college working at our first "grownup" jobs in Chicago. We'd joined our church choir, which was planning a concert of Handel's Messiah later that year, and Cathy and I bonded over long rehearsals in the ornate sanctuary of St. Clement's. 

It was the springtime of our lives, and the possibilities seemed limitless. Would we stay in Chicago?  Would we marry and have children? Would we stay in touch?  No, yes and absolutely. We never missed Christmas or a birthday. Until this year. 

When May 31 arrived and there was no card from Cathy, I was worried. I learned a few weeks later that she passed away in April from the breast cancer she'd been fighting for several years. 

Cathy was loving and cheerful to the end: a devoted wife, mother, daughter, colleague and friend who is missed and mourned by all who knew her. Today, August 31, is Cathy's birthday. I can't send her a card — but I can write her this post. Happy Birthday, Cathy! I will never forget you!

Remembering an Adventure

Five years ago today, I said farewell to a country I never thought I'd visit but hated to leave once I did. Bangladesh may not be on everyone's bucket list, but traveling through it in 2017 left such an impression that I think of it every year this time. 

I remember long drives beneath trees planted by the British ... and a boat trip through the Sunderbans, where we met villagers who plant mangroves to stem the rising tides. 

I smile when I think of our earnest police escort and our escape from the crazy cattle market where I thought we'd all be trampled.  

The last evening, I swam in the rooftop pool as the sky and deck turned the same, otherworldly shade of pink. I didn't realize it then but the campylobacter food poisoning bacteria was most likely already in my system, an unwelcome souvenir I would bring home from this marvelous country. But still, even with the unpleasant afterword, I'd take the trip all over again. In a heartbeat. 

Random Paddle

Since we live less than a mile from the border of Camp Reston (my name for this suburb during the summer) and kayaks are available to rent on Lake Anne, a few miles beyond that, taking a random paddle some weekend has been on my list of summer things to do since May. 

Yesterday we were finally able to make good on it, with temps not yet 90 and rain not yet falling. 

What a revelation to kayak among vistas that I usually stroll through. There were the rose mallow, from the other side of the shoreline, the watery one. And there were the backyards and porches of houses I usually only see from the front. 

It was an exercise in perspective-shifting. And it was exercise, period. Both are necessary. Both are good.

Making Do

This morning while doing what passes for a quick clean of my kitchen with paper towels and disinfectant spray I was thinking about the house maids in "Downton Abbey," which I've been rewatching recently.

When I view the excess that attends the lives of the Earl of Grantham and his family I feel disgust laced with envy. How dare they consume all those resources for just one family (a family of two parents and three daughters, exactly the size of my own)? 

But then, quick on its heels, this rueful observation: Wouldn't it be nice if I had a cook, a gardener, a chauffeur and a scullery maid?

My house is seldom spic-and-span. It's tidy, but not scrupulously clean. Long ago I realized that in order to raise children, write and bring in some income, standards would have to slip. And slip they did.

Now I have more time but I've learned to live with stains on the carpet and smudges on the walls. Truth to tell, if a crew from Downton Abbey were suddenly to offer its services, I might have to think a minute before I said yes. 

Extraordinary

In the continual quest to match music to landscape, today's choice might seem a bit odd. Who tramps through the suburbs listening to Brahms' German Requiem?

Someone who loves the piece and believes it ennobles whatever they see while listening to it, I suppose.

And so the stilt grass, that long-legged invasive, looked more like slender bamboo fronds waving. And the Joe Pye weed was more elegant, more proudly purple, than its usual shaggy self. 

The shaded trails embraced me, the meadow views broadened my vision, and the pond gleamed golden in the morning light. 

It was an ordinary walk made extraordinary by the music in my ears. 

Stoking Up

The hummingbirds are stoking up, preparing for a heroic flight to southern climes. Which means I'll make another batch of nectar and enjoy the show. 

Although the tiny birds have been scarcer around the feeder this year, preferring to take their sustenance from the nearby zinnia garden, they've been topping up with the nectar,. And now that the days are waning they've been sparring with each other to imbibe the sugary syrup.

They zoom one way and then another, bobbing and feinting to reach their goal and sip their fill.

It's one more sign that summer is winding down. But at least it's an entertaining one. 

Sacred Journey

When I read the obituaries of Frederick Buechner last week — he died August 15 at the age of 96 — I wondered how I had missed him all these years. He is the author of 39 books — novels, memoirs, sermons and other nonfiction — and is known for encouraging people to listen to their lives. 

"Listen to what happens to you everyday," he said, because it is "a kind of praying." The "hurly-burly of life" often drowns out that sound, he continues. But for that reason, we must pay even closer attention.We find our purpose, he wrote, in the place where "deep gladness meets the world's need."

Some spend most of their lives looking for this place, this intersection. Others find it early on. And some, of course, never find it at all. 

But it's good to learn about one who not only found it for himself, but who took the time to share it with others. I've already ordered one of Buechner's books, the library being short on his work. The Sacred Journey arrives next week. 

Stereophonic Summer

The cicadas are back today, or maybe it's just that I'm outside, in a better position to hear them.  Their shimmering sound is stereophonic, flowing from one side of the yard to the other. 

How evocative it is! How it distills the summer. It is chorus and verse, call and response. It is fecundity and humidity and all the other parts of the season that make us (or at least me) feel so alive. 

Today, however, it's competing with the sound of chain saws, which it often does these days. But I'm tuning out that white noise and focusing on the cicadas instead.

(Photo of cicadas from last year's Brood X.)

Late August

It's warm and slightly muggy today but the cicadas are quiet, the children are, too. It's the first day of school in Fairfax County.

It's early this year. When our children were young, they never went back until the day after Labor Day, which meant that this last week of August was the one when we'd  buy school supplies, learn about teachers and schedules, take one last trip to the pool.

It's a desultory time, summer's last gasp. The zinnias are leggy, the mint has bolted, and brown leaves are sifting down from the dying oak. 

How can summer be ending? There must be some mistake!

Black and White

When she was young, my daughter Celia once asked me if the past was lived only in black-and-white. It was a good question, I thought, since that's the way she'd seen it depicted in old photographs. 

But as those of us who've lived in the past (at least her past) can attest, it happens in color. 

I spent a few hours in the black-and-white past last night, perusing a book of photographs of Lexington, Kentucky. Many of the snapshots were taken in the 1930s, when my parents were children. There were the storefronts (including Leet's, owned by my great uncle), the interurbans (street cars that went into surrounding small towns) and the intersections (Main and Lime) of their youth.

While the photos were sepia-toned, I reminded myself that Mom and Dad saw these sights ... in color.

The City Beautiful

In one of the last chapters of Devil in the White City, the engrossing nonfiction narrative of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, author Erik Larson writes, "The fair taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that their cities did not have to be dark, soiled, and unsafe bastions of the strictly pragmatic. They could also be beautiful."

The fair gave common folks a glimpse of what cities could be and inspired artists to create beautiful fantasy cities of their own. Walt Disney's father, Elias, worked on the fair and its beauty rippled down to his son, Walt, who created his own "White City" in the Magic Kingdom. Author L. Frank Baum visited the fair and it informed his vision of Oz. 

Though some critics complained that the World's Fair, with its emphasis on the neoclassical, actually delayed a more uniquely American architectural style, the pendulum seems to have swung around on that point. "The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe," Larson notes. 

Daniel Burnham, the architect who created the fair, later devoted his expertise to helping real cities attain the sweep and majesty of the White City. He drew up plans for parts of Chicago, as well as for Cleveland and San Francisco, and he helped fully realize Pierre L'Enfant 's vision of Washington, D.C. 

It was beauty that drove this quest, the desire to replicate the grand cities of Europe. A noble occupation, I think, and one to admire.

The Old World

I want to stay with the filing topic today, because when I file, I read, and when I read, I remember. 

The folders I'm going through are full of the notes and research I collected for the articles I wrote when I was a full-time freelancer. I toss most of the research and notes, but I keep the assignment letters, list of sources, and the piece itself. The "wheat" is small and the chaff is plentiful. 

What emerges from this winnowing is not only a set of skinny file folders, but also the portrait of an age. It was a golden era for magazine writers: publications were plump, editors were many, business was brisk.

It's a different world now, a leaner, meaner one. And while I try not to let it bother me, I miss that old world. 

Filing Al Fresco

Yesterday was picture-perfect: clear skies, low humidity, a freshness in the air after Monday's rain. It was one of those days I didn't want to be inside. 

And yet I'd come back from the lake determined to make decluttering a larger priority and tackle those file boxes in the basement. What to do? Haul them up to the deck, of course.

My back isn't happy about it today, but that's what I did. They shared the glass-topped table with the parakeets, who also didn't want to be inside on such a glorious afternoon. 

Papers were tossed, order was imposed and Vitamin D was absorbed. Who could ask for more?

Long-Day Season

The headline caught my eye just in time to save the page of newsprint from becoming part of the fire-starting equipment last week at the late.  "Darkness creeping in as long-day season ends," it said. 

Apparently Saturday, August 6 was the last day we'll have 14 hours of sunlight until May 2023. It was the end of what the article called the "brightness quarter," the 90 or so days of "solar beneficence and dazzle" we receive every May, June and July. 

It's also the end of long twilights and drawn-out dawns, of slower living made possible by humid air and looser schedules. You might even say it's the end of that feeling of limitlessness and possibility that summer brings. 

But that would be a gloomy thing to write on a spectacular late-summer morning, not in keeping with the bountiful daylight we still enjoy. 

Topology

Last week's get-together meant I focused more on family than landscape, but on walks and short drives to beaches and beauty spots I laid eyes once again on a landscape I love.

What is it that inclines us to a certain place? I think it has to do with what Annie Dillard calls "topology ... the dreaming memory of land as it lies this way and that" — a quotation that serves as the frontispiece to this blog.

Dillard was describing her hometown of Pittsburgh in this passage from An American Childhood. But topology — the study of a region as defined by its topography — can apply to any place that strikes our fancy, that holds within it the balance of sky and meadow, shade and sun that makes our heart sing.

These are our places of memory, whether we've been to them hundreds of times ... or only once.

Campfire After Dinner

A requirement of any lake trip is a campfire after dinner and the promise of some sticky, sweet s'mores. The children had a chance to eat these treats, the rest of us, too — although I cheated this time and just nibbled on a few squares of chocolate, forgoing the graham crackers and marshmallows. 

But I found the greatest pleasure in staring at the fire. Watching the flames flicker and dance, marveling at the colors, savoring the warmth, too. (It's chillier here than back home.) 

We sat by the fire until it burned to embers, an owl sounded behind us, and daylight faded to black. 

The Paddle

The wind finally eased enough to make it possible to kayak around the lake, or at least our small portion of it. A brief rain squall engulfed us as we made our way to the dock, but it passed just as quickly. 

And then ... I was on the water again, moving in that way that only water provides: bobbing and slicing. There are more motor boats in this location, and their wakes kept me on my toes. They also reminded me of how much I need to work on my upper body strength. 

All in a day's work ... or at least a vacation day's work. 

(The lake in the distance, with a bucolic foreground.)

The Shortcut

When I reached the top of the hill, a rise barely perceptible when driving but all-too-noticeable on foot, I could go straight or go back. Turning left or right wasn't possible, due to the high volume of traffic and distinct lack of shoulder. 

I wasn't ready to go back, so I forged ahead, onto Toothpick Road. There were trees and homes tucked away in them. There was a steady descent. Most of all, there was the promise of the park at the end of it all. A small brown sign I hadn't noticed before pointed me in that direction. 

And sure enough, two brief turns later, I was crossing the bridge that leads to the park. Water to the left of me, water to the right of me, all shining in the late-day sun. 

I thought about the route I had been taking, which was several miles longer. I couldn't wait to get back to the house and tell everyone about the shortcut I'd found. 

But my news was greeted with confusion. Everyone else had already discovered Toothpick Road. Their GPS programs had routed them that way from the beginning, whereas I, well, I hadn't been using an app to get to the lake, thinking I knew the way from last year. 

Still, a shortcut can be a glorious discovery, even when it's old news.  

Lake's End

An early-morning walk on an unfamiliar road, each turn a revelation, each house a mystery.

The tentative goal: to find the dock where we can park kayaks. But that's just an excuse to explore. 

People wave and smile as they take out their trash or water their plants. I wonder if they're native to this place or tourists here like us. 

Fifteen minutes down the way, I come to the lake's end. Or at least the terminus of this inlet. It comes to a gentle stop, this water; it empties into a field of green.

Their Summer Vacation

Alfie and Toby were not invited to Portugal or Florida or Virginia Beach. They are also not invited to Deep Creek Lake in Maryland, where the family is now gathered for a week of intergenerational fun. 

But they did have a couple of hours al fresco over the weekend, when brownies baking in a nonstick pan required their temporary removal from the hook in the kitchen they call home. (Nonstick coatings can be lethal to birds.)

The daring duo seemed to like it outside. They surveyed the backyard, reveled in the oppressive humidity, and sought each other's company when the bluejays squawked. 

It was a brief change of scene, but sometimes that's all you need!

(Alfie in blue on the left and Toby on the right, his green plumage almost camouflaging him.)

No Shades

So far, today is looking cloudier than most in these parts, so I may be able to make it through without wearing my sunglasses. If so, it will be a rarity — and a welcome one. 

The world is greener and more luxurious when I don't view it through tinted plastic. But my eyes appreciate the barrier when faced with a searing sun. 

Best of all is glimpsing pools of light from inside the green cocoon of the rose arbor.  It's filtered light that spares the naked eye. And it's beautiful, to boot.  

A Scorcher Begins

I'm just back from a walk through the rapidly warming morning. It isn't a scorcher yet, but it has every intention of becoming one. Checking the forecast now: ah yes, a high of 96. That's why I met so many dog-walkers and early runners. 

There's a feel to the air in a morning that's moving toward high temps but has not achieved them. It's the last vestiges of cool lingering in the shadows and the dips in the road. It's the cicadas gearing up for a raucous recital. 

It's the summer, full bore, and those of us who don't mind the heat, who thrive on the long light, are reveling in it. 

The Ones That Got Away

By the time I got upstairs, all I could remember was that it was one of the best ideas I'd ever had. Down in the basement it had seemed revelatory, perfect for a blog post or even an essay. But by the time I'd climbed two flights of stairs to jot it down, it was gone, lost amidst the grocery lists and other to-dos in my mind.

Such is the fate of what seem my best ideas. 

What to do? Ought I to wear a pen and notebook around my neck? Practice better memory hygiene? Learn the mnemonic devices of the ancients? All of the above? 

Or, should I just let those brilliant ideas go, have faith that they'll return again soon, perhaps when I least expect them.  At which point I will realize that ... they weren't so brilliant after all. 

In Kentucky, Rain and Tears

When I was strolling on the beach recently a fellow walker greeted me with "Go, Hoosiers!" I almost cheered him on. There are plenty of Hoosiers in my family and I went to college in Indiana for two years. Then I realized what he was up to. I'd almost forgotten that I was wearing my Kentucky T-shirt that day. He was asserting dominance. 

There's been no forgetting my home state these last few days. As more tragic reports flow from the flooding in Whitesburg and Hazard and other Appalachian towns, it's hard not to think about the dire straits in which my fellow Kentuckians find themselves. 

These people had so little to begin with. They live on steep mountain roads with creeks in their backyards. The rains that triggered floods and mudslides are supposed to happen once or twice in a thousand years. People weren't expecting creeks to become raging torrents that lifted up refrigerators and cars and, worst of all, swept away children and parents and brothers and sisters. 

More rain fell last night in Kentucky ... and more tears, too. 

(On dryer ground: a photo taken last year in central Kentucky.)

Of Egrets and Storage

It's a new month and I'm starting it off by cleaning up my i-Phone. This is seldom a task I enter into willingly. Usually a storage crisis sends me into a tailspin and forces me to delete large attachments (often photos I already have but had sent others) or uninstall apps. 

A painful process, indeed. But I remind myself that it's no more than editing: what I've done throughout my career — removing the extraneous. 

But deciding what's extraneous ... ah, that's the rub! 

(What does an egret have to do with i-Phone storage? Not much. It just reminds me of elegant simplicity, something I strive for in my data storage!)