Taking a Leap

It's Leap Day, a bonus, a gift, an intermittent reminder that we live in a universe with rules of its own. Yes, we can parcel our annual passage around the sun into 365 tidy intervals, but there will be hours left over, almost six of them. Adding an extra day every four years keeps our calendars in sync with the seasons. 

This year I'll experience fewer of these extra hours. Jet travel will erase them. 

Still, it's not a bad way to celebrate Leap Year: by leaping into the future, embarking on a journey, landing in a place I can scarcely imagine but will soon (I hope) see. 

(Lisbon is our first port of call, but only to catch a connecting flight.)

Madeira!

Tomorrow we take off for the Portuguese island of Madeira, which is situated in the Atlantic Ocean about 320 miles west of Morocco. 

It's a rugged, mountainous place, with drop-dead-gorgeous views (see above) — and paths to take us to them. Some of these trails are not for the faint-of-heart, but others are tame enough that I hope to hike them. 

It's a grand adventure, and like every travel adventure, it comes with to-do's that must be checked off ahead of time.  Most of my to-do's are to-done — or they will be soon. They have no choice; they have to be!

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Spring Cleaning

I never put the garden to bed last fall, so last weekend I opened the chickenwire enclosure used to keep the deer at bay and waded into the tangle of old growth. There were the tall stalks of zinnias and dried coneflower heads. There were the long stems of Siberian iris and the hollow-core canes of day lilies. 

This can be a melancholy task to perform in autumn, less a harvest than a confiscation. But done in late winter, when green shoots are already pushing up from the soil, it's a hopeful and much-needed clearing, a spring cleaning. 

As I pulled and tugged and gathered, a familiar scent tickled my nostrils. It was mint: the plant is already growing. I picked a few tiny sprigs to have in my iced tea.

Can summer be far behind?

(The garden in early July.)

Effort and Ease

I often get ideas in yoga class. Breaking my concentration to write them down seems most un-yogi-like, though, so I try to file them away to retrieve later. 

Last week the inspiration arrived during shavasana, the final, resting pose, when you spend a few minutes lying down and (at least for me) trying not to fall asleep. The teacher read us a passage about kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing ceramics with gold lacquer, celebrating the cracks rather than hiding them. Obvious post potential in that, but I'm saving it for another day.

Today I want to explore a suggestion I heard in class several weeks earlier: the need to balance effort and ease in each yoga pose. While some contortions seem more effortful than easy, I can see the wisdom in maintaining these two poles. If you're slacking, pick it up. If you're hurting, tone it down.

Some of us find it easier to slack, others to overdo. But neither attitude gets us where we want to be. To find freedom in movement requires attentiveness and relaxation, strength and flexibility, effort and ease.

Surely this isn't just advice for yoga, but for life. 

Moon Landing

To continue with the theme of wonder, there is now a U.S. spacecraft on the moon for the first time since 1972. It landed Thursday on the lunar surface, near the south pole. 

The space craft was built and flown by a Texas-based company, Intuitive Machines, with NASA equipment on board. There were some tense moments at first due to issues with the craft's navigation and communications systems. But those appear to be resolved and the robot lander, Odysseus, is now transmitting signals.

Surely it's worth a song. I'm imagining this one set to the tune of Yusuf/Cat Steven's Moon Shadow. 

We're being treated to a moon landing, moon landing, moon landing. 

Leapin' and hoppin' with a moon landing, moon landing, moon landing.

And if we ever lose our way, tip our craft, botch our stay. 

And if we ever lose our way — let's hope we can launch once more. 

Witness to Wonder

It happened at 6:50 p.m. the night before last. A burst of light in the sky, a fireball or meteor, a visitor from space, vanished before those who glimpsed it even knew what they were seeing. 

What was I doing at the time? Swapping out the old red plastic egg crate toy bins for new cloth ones? Or had I already come upstairs to fix dinner? One thing is certain: I was not outside looking up. 

I'm thinking of Bruegel's famous painting The Fall of Icarus, and Auden's poem about it, how human suffering can be obscured by the ordinariness of life. The same can be said of wonder.  How often we miss it. Our heads are down, focused on the page or the skillet, the task at hand. 

Most of the videos sent to the American Meteor Society are from home security cameras. There's no one around to see the meteorological marvel. But one of them shows a man taking out his garbage. You see the falling star with its long tail. You see him see it. He stops in his tracks, trash bag in hand. A witness to wonder. 

(Photo: Wikipedia)

A Model Life

In The Book of Charlie, journalist and author David Von Drehle tells the story of his Kansas City neighbor, who he first sees across the street in his swimming trunks, washing a car. The man was Charlie White. The car was his girlfriend's. Charlie was 102 at the time. 

Von Drehle would have seven years to get to know the man — and what a man he was. He was born before radio, commercial air travel and a worldwide pandemic (not Covid 19, the Spanish flu). Despite early adversity (he was eight when his father died in a freak accident), he put himself through college and became a doctor. Though his two first marriages ended (one in death, another in divorce), Charlie married again and became a father in middle age.

Throughout his long and amazing life, Charlie White changed with the times. When World War II came, he served in the medical corps and came out with an anesthesia specialty.  He lived with simple precepts: he took life as it came and always tried to "do the right thing." 

Charlie White: They don't make them like him anymore. They almost never have.

(Book jacket photo courtesy Simon & Schuster)

This Old Door

It's installation time: the long-awaited day when the new back door becomes a reality — and the old wooden one becomes history. That one is in such bad shape that I won't even include a photo of it in its entirety. But it's served us well and is worth a backward glance.

The old door wasn't professionally installed, but for decades it has shielded us from snow, cold, wind, rain and heat. It has kept pets and small children inside, or swung open to let them run across the desk and down the stairs. 

The door has been slammed by teenagers — and snuck through by teenagers too, although they preferred the basement window for their late-night escapes. 

It has been gouged and scuffed by pets, starting with our old cat, Basil, whose claws were much sharper than his sweet temper, followed by our dear departed doggie, Copper, who might scratch the door a dozen times a day to keep us apprised of his needs. 

In other words, the years have not been kind to the back door. The glass is mottled and wind whistles through a gap at the bottom. But it's our door, and in some strange way, I'll miss it when it's gone. 

The Work of Childhood

For many years I wrote articles about children and families. That these were the same years our own children were growing up wasn't entirely an accident. I had, believe it or not, planned it the way. But the result was an intense combination of lived experience and professional pursuit. I wasn't always in agreement with the experts I interviewed, but on one point I concurred. Over and over again I heard that play is the work of childhood. And is it ever!

I thought of this yesterday when the kiddos were over for a visit. First they biked and ran down the street, the youngest chuckling in delight as she raced to keep up with the three-year-olds. Next they swarmed inside where they pulled out the toy bins and dug in. 

There were doll houses to decorate and jack-in-the-boxes to crank. There were toy trains to zoom across the floor. There were adults nearby, but we tried to fade into the background. Because the kids were losing themselves in the "work" of play — and our job was to leave them alone. 

Bookmark Revolt

I noticed the telltale threads last night. There was one on the nightstand and another among the bedcovers. No doubt about it, my bookmark was shedding, losing its jaunty tassel. The store-bought item made of laminated pressed violets and violas — such a lovely way to mark my place in the latest journal I'm keeping — is going rogue. 

I'm not surprised at these shenanigans. The bookmark is plainly not pleased with an essay I just wrote, the essay in which I disparage store-bought bookmarks and mention how seldom I use them. In fact, I'm only using this one because my current journal does not have its own built-in bookmark. 

I could repair this marker. I could collect the slender threads and attempt to reattach them. But since I spent much of yesterday tied in knots (see below), I'm unlikely to do that today.

Does a bookmark know when it's been thrown under the bus? Apparently, it does.

Tied in Knots

I've just spend a considerable chunk of time watching crochet tutorials on Youtube. These are usually hosted by cheery British ladies with plump fingers and colorful yarns. They pronounce crochet with the accent on the first syllable. I bet they would make a good cup of tea.

But they did not ease the frustration that was building as I once again had trouble starting my project. I'm a quick crocheter once I get past the first few rows. But those first few rows give me fits every time. This go-around I decided to understand what I was doing rather than just bumble along. 

I stopped and started half a dozen times. I worked on my slip knot. But I was determined to keep doing it until I mastered this. I have no idea whether this back-to-basics approach will benefit the finished product. All I know is that I was tied in knots for a while... but I'm untangled now. 

Friends on the Trail

Yesterday a long walk took me through Reston's Vernon Walker Nature Center, over a small bridge and up a trail to South Lakes Drive, then along to the cut-through where I caught the Lake Audubon Trail. 

The wind picked up a bit as I strolled around the lake, not enough to stir whitecaps but enough to make me stuff my hands up my sleeves. 

The last leg of yesterday's amble was on the Glade Trail. I was picking up speed, thinking of things yet to do at home, when I ran into a new acquaintance, someone from yoga class. She introduced me to her friends and we all chatted for a few minutes. 

It was small talk, really, but fun to find friends on the trail. It warmed the walk and changed my day.

(Reston's first naturalist, Vernon Walker. More on him and the Nature Center in future posts. Photo: Reston Museum)

Paean to Portability

Let us pause for a moment to praise portability. Here I sit in my kitchen rocking chair, laptop on lap (actually, laptop on lap desk on lap), able to sway back and forth to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, now blaring from the radio, monitor soup simmering on the stove ... and also write this post.

This is nothing new. I've drug this trusty machine all over the world. But given that I came of age first on typewriters and later on desktop computers, the fact that I'm able to hop around the globe or the house, creating a workspace wherever I sit, is nothing short of amazing. 

What does portability provide? Ease and freedom. Today I'm appreciating them both.

(Sometimes the laptop is almost lost amidst the clutter that surrounds it.)

Happy VaLENTine's Day

When Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day collide, you have an interesting day indeed. Ashes or chocolates? Fasting or feasting? Eternal rest or eternal love?

As a three-year-old I know would say, "What the heck?" 

But there are answers to these questions, a solution to this dilemma. 

Lent is part of Valentine's. Not the other way around. 

Happy Birthday, Rhapsody

Yesterday, after the errands were run and the groceries put away, I sat down at the piano, pulled out the ancient sheet music and played the opening run. For the next 30 minutes, I bungled my way through one of the most important and beautiful pieces of American music ever written, George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

A hundred years ago to the day, on a snowy February 12, 1924, Gershwin played the piece at Aeolian Hall in New York City in a concert billed as "An Experiment in Modern Music." Paul Whiteman had commissioned Gershwin to write the piece, and Gershwin had done it in just a few weeks, roughing out the original idea on a train trip from New York to Boston. "I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness," Gershwin said.

He had created a masterpiece. Though no one knows exactly how the piece sounded that day (it wasn't recorded and Gershwin improvised parts of it), a recording made a few months later is thought to be a close replica. The piece was an immediate success, with multiple recordings, and Paul Whiteman made the Rhapsody the theme song for his radio show. Gershwin had created an anthem for the Jazz Age. 

Later versions of the Rhapsody give it a more lush orchestral sound, but the original performance brought out the jazzy brightness of the piece in all its syncopated glory. Even hopscotching through the music as I was last night, cherry-picking the easier sections, I felt its magic in my bones. 

(Thanks to Wikipedia and The Syncopated Times for info and art, and to Hot Jazz Saturday Night for the inspiration.) 

Welcome Clouds

I never thought I'd say this but around here the occasional cloudy day comes as a gift: dark, sodden and lacking in expectations. 

I've never faulted the climate of northern Virginia. It's hot in the summer and mild in the winter. Almost too mild these days, turning what was once distinctly four seasons into three-and-a-half. Springs and falls are long and lovely. 

But the steady drumbeat of sunshine can be too much. And this from a sun worshipper. A sunny day comes with its own set of expectations: errands to run, writing to complete before afternoon rays stream through the office windows right into my eyes. 

When do we stay inside and clean the closet? When do we wander lonely as a cloud? Those are questions I ask myself often ... but not today. 

Desk Envy

I really can't complain. I may not have the desk of my dreams, but it's not bad. An apple-green table of a desk, only slightly dented and worn (a lopsided heart carved into the middle, a few splotches of salmon-pink paint in one corner, souvenirs of the girls who once used it).

True, it does not overlook the Atlantic Ocean, or the Front Range of the Rockies, or the harbor in Oban, Scotland. But it does have a lovely view of the backyard, the main street of the neighborhood and a corner of the woods beyond. 

My perfectly-fine desk doesn't keep me from having desk envy, though. And last night I experienced a full dose of it while watching the movie "Something's Gotta Give." It wasn't my first viewing of this film, but it was the first time I had desk envy watching it. 

Instead of focusing on the budding romance of Erica the playwright, I zeroed in on her writing space. The broad expanse of the (mahogany?) desk, the perfectly placed lamp. The windows! Oh, my gosh, the windows! And the door, open to sea breezes.

I keep telling myself it's just a movie set. But still...

Catching up on Taylor Swift

I've just spent more time than I meant to reading about Taylor Swift. I'm not exactly at the vanguard of popular culture, but the juggernaut that is Taylor + Travis, especially as we race toward Super Bowl Sunday, seemed like something I should know just a little bit about. 

This led me to watch a few music videos, do a little googling (there's a Taylor Swift class at Harvard and, of course, she was Time's Person of the Year for 2023) and feel just a little more a part of the cultural zeitgeist. 

I'm still mostly in the dark about the superstar and her super-athlete boyfriend, but I'm curious enough that I may tune in on Sunday, if not for the football then for the celebrity dish.

(Photo: Patrick Smith/Getty)

Up and Out

Like many people these days I don't need to leave my house to ply my trade. I can do it quite comfortably from my in-home office. The temptation, then, is to stay inside far too much, especially in the mornings, when I do most of my writing, and especially in winter, when it's cold. 

But lately, I've been trundling out to a 9 a.m. Wednesday yoga class, climbing into a frigid car, battling rush-hour traffic (that again?!) and reaching class barely in time for sun salutations.

I love my small class — and the people in it. And I've come to realize that I also love getting up and out "early" one day of the week. Early is relative, of course. I used to leave the house before 7 every day. 

(A photo from the old days of "up and out.")

Fourteen!

A Walker in the Suburbs turns 14 today! If it was growing up in England in the last century, it would be free to leave school forever and get a job. 

I learned this fact while reading a Washington Post article "Centenarians Tell Us What Matters Most."  It strikes me this morning that the article's subheads do a good job of explaining why I started A Walker in the Suburbs in 2010 and continue it still. 

Don't neglect your education. Think positive. Keep reading. Keep moving. Do what you love. 

What started as an experiment during a snowstorm almost a decade and a half ago has become an essential part of my writing life. It keeps me learning and reading. It encourages positivity and perspective. And it certainly keeps me moving. 

Most of all, though, it gives me the chance to do what I love. But that's just half the equation. The other half is what happens in the minds and hearts of the people reading it. I hope A Walker in the Suburbs brings you a bit of pleasure, too. 

(An old snapshot of the girls. I bet one of them was 14 in this photo.)

At Our Fingertips

This morning I've found myself reading about the wedding of a woman I do not know, will never meet but who provided a link to a story about her nuptials on her travel blog, which I've been sampling. 

I have good friends, people I've known for years, whose wedding pictures I've never glimpsed and probably never will.  But I could describe in detail the gold lace gown that Caroline wore on her special day in 2016.  Such is life in the digital age. 

In fact, there's a chance that you are, even as we speak, reading a post by someone you don't know, writing about someone she doesn't know. 

For some of us, the world at our fingertips is much more real than the one outside our door. 

Laundry Day

"Perhaps the job most loathed by Victorian womanhood was doing the laundry," Ruth Goodman writes in How to be a Victorian, which I mentioned a few days ago. 

As I sort through my own darks and lights, I can't help but think about how differently my laundry day will proceed from that of the Victorian woman's. Hers would have started on Saturday, when the soaking began. 

More than 36 hours later she'd begin hauling and heating the water to eke out suds from the harsh soaps of the day, then stirring and agitating the clothes in a tub with a dolly stick (a plunger-like item) to remove the dirt. If she was lucky and had a wringer, she'd remove water from the clothes that way; otherwise, she'd wring them by hand. This would repeat through a couple of rinses, of course. In between she would have to carry large tubs of water in and out of what was most likely a cramped, dark kitchen. Only then could she hang the clothes up to dry. 

Laundry took up so much space and water-heating capabilities that the family would have a cold supper on laundry day, relying on leftovers from what was usually a larger meal on Sunday. 

Goodman says that her own historical laundry experiences lead her to see the automatic washing machine as "one of the great bulwarks of women's liberation, an invention that can sit alongside contraception and the vote in the direct impact it has had on changing women's lives."

Land of the Living

Yesterday I spent a few minutes in Lala Land, courtesy of a dental procedure. This is not the Lala Land of tropical breezes and white-sand beaches. This is oblivion followed by someone saying, "It's over. You can wake up now." 

Nevertheless, I'm not one to turn my back on oblivion when I have the chance. In fact, I think oblivion is the perfect way to visit an oral surgeon's office. 

Today I'm back in the Land of the Living. A cup of tea, a bowl of yogurt (still soft foods at this point) and no oblivion at all. I'll take it. 

A Prediction

So we have finally come to the end of January, the longest month. I'm convinced it has at least 40 days. No wait, that's Lent, and it will be arriving soon enough. 

But today we're in the clear. It's February 2, and the groundhog has predicted an early spring. Based on the blooming snowdrops and hellebores, on the inch-long daffodil shoots in the front yard and the faint fuzz of bloom on the witch hazel tree in back, I'd say the groundhog's prediction may be true. 

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, though, the rodent has been right only 40 percent of the time. So I won't pack away the hats, gloves and wool sweaters just yet. I won't wish him wrong, either.

Mom's Scott Hotel

It is February 1, 2024, what would have been Mom's 98th birthday. Today, I cede this space to the person who inspired me first, and inspires me still. In today's post, Mom writes about one of the homes she lived in when she was growing up. The Scott Hotel is still standing, and is a source of continuing fascination. 

Most towns have a street called Broadway, wider than the rest, wider than Main or any of the tree- or number-named streets. The name itself makes one expect it to be wider and more important than most — and in the early life of most cities, it was. In Lexington, Transylvania, the first college west of the Alleghenies, and the Opera House, where the Barrymores and others performed, were built on Broadway. 

So when my uncle wanted to build a hotel by the railroad, he built it across Broadway from the Southern Depot. More than 20 trains a day passed that way and all but the fastest stopped to deposit or pick up passengers. Some wanted meals, some lodging for a night or even longer. 

None of my friends at St. Peter's School lived in a hotel. But I did. It was my Daddy's hotel, started by his uncle John Scott, and the street beside it was called Scott Street. It was a small hotel, three floors and about 20 or 25 rooms. The Southern Railroad ran right beside it, and the impressive yellow brick Southern Station was right across the street. 

One of the rooms on the second floor had been turned into our playroom. We kept our toys there and played all sorts of games. Several times we put on plays there, hanging a sheet and pretending it was a velvet curtain. We practiced hard and then we had to find an audience. We would go down to the lobby and ask some of the regulars to attend: Cigarette Charley and Pink-Eyed Whitey.

Mom's writings don't always have a natural conclusion. This one, like so many, leaves me wanting more.