The Washington metro is jammed with people visiting the cherry trees down the block from UD’s Foggy Bottom office. After class last Tuesday, she asked a cabbie to drive her around them. He said it would take forever – sightseeing traffic was at a standstill.
There are cherry trees everywhere around here, including at the front and back of UD’s house.
Months ago a rainstorm took down a massive cherry at the back of UD’s half-acre wood. Its three branches look very beautiful, very rested, on their sides. Their mottled charcoal barks are spun with old vines.
Some of the tree’s root system must have stayed in the earth, because it’s not dead. Smaller branches have suddenly produced bouquets of yellow-studded white flowers.
So there’s this froth of cherry blossoms at eye level. UD will collect some of it and put it in the biggest vase she can find.
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Done.
Early spring, and UD‘s been
creating a system of paths through her
wooded half acre. Mr UD has
given names to the paths, and he has
called the entire complex
Ferdinand House and Park.
(Munro Leaf, author of Ferdinand the Bull,
was the last owner of UD‘s house.)
Here are some highlights.
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The first path, The Meadow Path,
starts here, at the
Balinese Wind Chimes.
Now you begin walking
The Meadow Path.
Many old vine-covered
trees have fallen.
Weather Vane at the beginning
of the Road to Nowhere.
The Middle Way,
with Poet’s Table in the
background.
Ferdinand the Bull.
And Isabella.
As usual, a large limb has broken off onto our front yard during this late March snowfall. UD‘s practiced eye sees this one as quite loppable. She’s more worried about traumatized early spring shoots.
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She’s just back from her first lopping.
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The Tao of Lopping.
With each clean cut yielding a core of yellow wood, there’s a good feeling: the offshoots from the main trunk give easily, and it’s pleasant to think you’re putting things right branch by branch.
With cold fingers despite your gloves (first you try rubbery garden gloves, then a rather nice pair of leather ones), you gather a few lopped branches and toss them over the wooden fence so the town maintenance men will pick them up.
But then you wonder: Would they prefer one large unlopped limb? Too late to ask the question; you’ve lopped the thing… But you think of the wood chipper and wonder if you’re doing things right.
The tao of lopping: There is no right. There is no wrong. There is snow falling on ‘thesda, your cold hands, your pleasure at each clean cut.
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Or, if you like:
The tao of Sheryl Sandberg: Lean in.
… Mr UD turned up
a portrait of her.
Woman at the Window, Portrait of Zofia Borucinska, 1908. It’s in the National Museum of Warsaw.
It’s also featured in this book, whose author describes Kazimierz Stabrowski’s “model in a peacock crown and radiant, shimmering blue dress with peacock eyes.”
Click on the image for a larger view.
On UD‘s front lawn this morning is a Razor Scooter.
Why?
Les UDs are having a contest. What’s the back story? How does a silver scooter end up on your front lawn very early on a Saturday morning?
So far Mr UD hasn’t come up with much. Mainly he’s embellished UD’s scenarios. UD has three scenarios.
#1: Rokeby Avenue in front of our house is an ideal scooter/skateboard street. It attracts many people – often very young people – who UD watches fly down Rokeby’s incline all day. Especially all-Saturday, which today is.
So a kid was on the thing this morning (again, has to have been very early – I saw it at 7:30 AM) – or, wildly, late at night? Late on the night of the meteor streak?? Late at night strengthens my theory, which involves a bad spill.
Kid takes a bad spill; his buddies (parent?) help him (carry him?) and need to ditch the scooter. It’s light – they’re in a hurry – they toss it.
The toss theory involves the fact that the scooter (a 2009 Razor made in Shenzhen Guangdong) does seem to have been thrown onto our lawn — when I lifted it, pretty sharp indentations appeared in the soil at each point of the scooter.
Mr UD’s embellishment is that it was a family on their way to Garrett Park’s Saturday farmer’s market with their kid; again, they ditched the thing, figuring they’d fix up the kid, check out the market, and then retrieve the scooter.
#2 A neighbor of UD, noting that UD has had trouble walking lately (probably arthritis in one of my feet), has, in an act of charity, put the scooter on UD‘s lawn for her use.
#3 It’s ‘thesda. People throw out nice things all the time. The scooter – which probably cost around hundred dollars – works fine, but is certainly scuffed. Its rider suddenly decided it was old or creaky and then and there discarded it. It’s a five-minute drive to the sporting goods store.
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Update: Various additional theories have come in.
UD‘s sister the Morrissey fanatic: Petty theft, joyride, ditching after joyride.
UD‘s neighbor Koneti: Big item pickup is in a few days, and people are putting things out in front of their houses. A kid noted the discarded scooter, and the rest is the same as UD‘s sister’s theory.
… John Wilson, artist.
Wilson knew UD’s father-in-law in Paris,
where they both studied with Leger.
… raising her prayer shawl.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
UD and Tammy were carrying too many things – purses, prayer shawls, coats – so when it came time to hold the program for the event, we leaned some of this stuff up against the Chinese Embassy’s fence.
A few minutes later, a nice man approached and explained that the fence was China, and China would prefer we not use its territory that way.
The rally’s location was politically sensitive – embassies everywhere. Sensitive embassies. Our group wasn’t very large (a hundred plus people), but we attracted scads of anxious men whispering into phones.
The Israeli embassy people were extremely friendly. “We wanted to invite you all into the embassy,” explained one of several embassy people who came to talk to us. “But we would have needed a list of names in advance for security.”
A deputy assistant whatever addressed our group. “We respect you. We respect what you are doing. We get your message loud and clear, and it is a message we will send back to Jerusalem.”
The message – in case you haven’t been following these posts – is that women should have equal rights to pray at the Western Wall.
UD ain’t much of a Jew, but when this kind and friendly group of Jews began to sing a psalm together, she was crying somewhat.
Would she have teared up if they’d been kind and friendly Anglicans singing As Pants the Hart?
Er, yes.
Anyway. It was a chilly overcast early Washington evening, and UD and Tammy put on their prayer shawls, and raised their prayer shawls, and listened to the speakers, and thought about that strange place, Israel. When, toward the end of the event, the speaker announced it was time for davening, they figured that was their signal to leave. They crossed Connecticut Avenue and had sushi and talked about God.
… goes, this afternoon, with her official photographer, Tammy Trocki, to a Women of the Wall protest at the Israeli Embassy.
UD‘s reminded of her milkfed suburban weeniness by a consideration of Anat Hoffman, the allballs leader of this group.
UD, world’s worst Jew, will feel mighty strange in a prayer shawl this afternoon, rocking Passover songs with people who actually have religious convictions. She will atone for this spectacular hypocrisy by blogging about the event.
While there, she visited a capybara.
Pretty big snowstorm predicted for tomorrow – and here I thought, early-March, that we’d dodged all that.
Worst on Wednesday, and I don’t have to be on campus, so I can enjoy the views from my living room in Garrett Park.
Have been making many fires, enjoying hearth and home. Herds of young deer race about at the top of our hill. I watch them while the fire crackles. Aroma of sweet smoke. Silence all around.
Or the sound of many birds – some cardinals have built a nest in the house gutters, and the babies pip when the food comes in. There are hawks, high up, and, at night, owls. These also are things to see and hear.
John, next door neighbor, waylays me as I gather wood – wants to talk about the nature park we share. His big camera is around his neck; his big cat is tied up a few feet away. John misses his mother, who died two months ago. This what he does instead of visiting her.
He tells me everything he’s seen – a large fox, two hawks…
It’s true that you can become engrossed in the wildlife. The carnage alone – rabbit skulls, fallen cooper’s hawks – is fascinating. I’ve found antlers, of course; and bright feathers.
With the large herd of deer there’s deershit along all the paths I’ve created. They turn out to be deer paths. Doing all I can to make their lives more pleasant. If I leave a molecule of taste on a discarded plastic container, racoons take it out of the recycling and then drop it deep in the forest. I go through, every couple of weeks, cleaning out their trash.
I’m right now sitting surrounded by my students at a very sunny seminar table – windows the length of the walls on two sides. They are taking their midterm. Crayola blue sky, not a cloud. Sharp edges of colorless federal buildings against the blue.
The city is quiet. Faint engine sounds and nothing else. It’s only 9:30. Rush hour has quieted down, and people are settling into their offices. Far-off contrails up there. But really, little to see.
Only the beautiful faces of my students. They are hunching, writing. They are sniffing, coughing, blowing their noses. Yes, to me, as they scratch their ways across blue books, they are very beautiful.
Single-space, double-space, use both sides of the page? They have asked me these questions, and I have answered them.
There’s a monastic stillness even here, a twenty-first century urban university. A quiet blue sky and only the white noise of heat and lighting. I’ve left the door to the room open because it’s quiet in the hallway too. An occasional chat among adjuncts in a nearby office is all.
I keep the time on the blackboard. 10:04, I write.
Normalcy is the great thing. John Wilpers’ New York Times obit ends by quoting him:
“All of this was very sad,” he said of the war. “I didn’t want to do anything to describe it as wonderful. What happened happened. Like any war, it should be regretted.”
Absence of war. Absence of conflict. Now the Presidential helicopter flies by the seminar room (even the helicopter is quiet). Twelve years ago Connie, the English department office manager, watched from her office as the Pentagon burned. I never forget where I am, what my city is. Its bland buildings and bright sky never fool me.
Still, it’s not Karachi. Metro authorities instruct us in the dimensions of dangerous packages, but we’re not really looking. We’re trusting the normalcy of the setting, our lucky country, our city the heart of our lucky country.
In 2000, Garrett Park’s median family income was $126,662. Widowers like John Wilpers, father of my oldest friend, live well, in houses whose value has quintupled since they bought them.
In my house, Munro Leaf – author of Ferdinand, a peaceful book, lived and died.
In the first image accompanying this BBC obituary for John Wilpers, his daughter, UD‘s oldest friend, holds a photograph of her father having captured and kept from suicide Tojo.
The article says Wilpers died in a Garrett Park nursing home, but there are no nursing homes here. He died, I assume, in the Garrett Park house he’d lived in for… what? Sixty years, I guess. When UD’s family came back from England (a year-long immunology fellowship for UD‘s father), they moved across the street from the Wilpers family, and UD and Terry became close friends.
UD regarded Terry’s father as a bland well-meaning parental thing – hardly the sort to hold a gun to Tojo and to his doctor, and order the doctor to fix Tojo’s attempted-suicide wound.
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The New York Times obituary.
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UD thanks Jon.
Er, the Ravens are winning… Which is TOO exciting for UD, given that she greeted existence itself in Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland… In fact, UD‘s Baltimore roots are impeccable: Her mother’s family – the Kirsons and the Wassermans – were all Baltimoreans. Her grandfather, Charlie Wasserman, was an engineer for Baltimore Gas and Electric (“He had a lot of patents for smokestack thingies,” says UD‘s sister as UD types.). Her father graduated from Johns Hopkins, as did her uncle. Her aunt was a teacher in Baltimore public schools. Her mother was an x-ray technician at Hopkins. UD lived in Baltimore until she was eight years old, at which point the family moved to England, where her father had a post-doc in immunology. Then they moved back to Baltimore for a year, and then her father got a job at the National Institutes of Health, so the family moved up (class and moneywise) to ‘thesda.
UD and her sister are laughing madly at the commercials. Mr UD sits stonily.
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Interception Baltimore!
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Touchdown Baltimore!!
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An ad with a guy driving a truck out of the nose cone of a passenger aircraft.
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Lots of fights on the field. The announcers seem to be preparing us for an on-field riot.
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Baltimore intercepts again. They’re dominating the game for sure.
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A song my mother used to love to sing.
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Wow. Another Baltimore touchdown. 21 to 3.
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Oh. My. God. Baltimore just took the ball all the way.
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Wow. Half the power in the Superdome has gone out. Used up all the electricity on Beyonce.
Weird. Survivalists all over the country must be preparing their weaponry.
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No one here understands any of the Bud Light commercials.
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Baltimore’s in the lead, but SF is close to a TD. The tension would be so thick you could cut it with a knife if I really cared.
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Four seconds to go. I think we won.
La Kid lived on Georgetown Cupcake during her Foggy Bottom years; it was always UD‘s go-to place for care packages for her and her apartment mates.
Now the immensely cool and popular place is in trouble with the DC government. Hasn’t paid its sales taxes!
A pun on lines (of customers outside) and liens (against it) goes here.
