… Dublin, Ireland on Saturday. UD, who likes her quiet life, now launches a noisy spring break. She will of course blog throughout her travels. Ne quittez pas.

… at the Arena Stage. Along with anything written by Frank Zappa, this play’s script has provided UD with sayings that have enriched her life over decades.

Albee’s stuff comes in handy mainly in domestic situations…

YOU CAN TAKE IT. YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!

THAT IS A DESPERATELY SICK LIE.

These are for sure my favorites, but there are others.

After this season’s big snows, after the big winds, the Scottish lanes of Garrett Park, Maryland (all of its streets have names taken from locations in Sir Walter Scott novels) were strewn with leaves and limbs. Up and down my street, Rokeby Avenue, thick branches from the town’s lowering oaks and maples lay in piles fashioned by walkers who kicked things aside as they walked.

The whole town of Garrett Park is an arboretum. We’re known for enormously high old trees that mass so closely it’s sometimes hard to see the sky at all. If you want to catch a meteor shower or a lunar eclipse or a rare northern lights show, you’ve got to sidle out of the town’s embrace.

During the evening of the thundersnow, I stood at my front door and heard the woody chorus of the town trees creaking, cracking, and then letting fall their old arms. I heard the stalwart firs and beeches begin to fail, piece by piece, under the weight of snow. Some of the branches fell into my front yard, breaking off from their trunks with a shower of loosened snow, then drifting to the ground in a cloud.

************************************

By the time the weather cleared, my small house, surrounded by about an acre of land, looked like a lumberyard. Some logs from the last tree we had removed (trees are always encroaching on our house, or on the above-ground wires in front of it) still lay scattered in the woods, waiting to burn in our fireplace. They’ve been there long enough to spawn giant puffballs.

There was the routine limbfall as well, the almost-daily drop of twigs and branches onto our back deck and down the stretch of backyard and woods. And now another layer of – call it ground canopy – established itself: bits of hollies, sharp and palm-like; long, just-budding dogwood offshoots; beautiful soft viburnum outgrowth with glossy green-gray leaves; dull thin hollow honeysuckle sticks.

There were immovably heavy black limbs mottled with olive starbusts. They showed, where they’d broken off, the wood’s pale yellow heart. Some had hollows for owls and squirrels, and sub branches that looked like deer antlers. On foggy days and nights, this elaborate fallenness everywhere lent an air of lassitude, a sort of cosmic letting go, to the small world of my town.

**************************************

But now there was the business of breaking up the wood and dragging it into the little forest next to our property. This wasn’t my daily routine of walking the dog about the place and bending every now and then to pick up a twig. For this I’d need the hatchet I’d inherited from my mother, a serious gardener and thirty-year resident of the town (I grew up in Garrett Park). I’d need the green tight-fitting garden gloves I’d bought to protect my hands from the prickly bushes edging our house. I’d need a bit of upper body strength.

The deer who live at the top of our hill watched as I hurled hatcheted pieces of timber into the woods. When I stopped to stretch, I marveled at the sky: wild traceries of limbs, all of them still shivering in the wind.

I made note of the most fragile among them, the dead ones ready to topple in the next storm. When I tired of hauling trees into the woods, I simply made piles of the branches. They got higher and higher, until they looked like platforms for a saint’s immolation.

The piles are still out there; very slowly, I’m digging out from the woodstorm.

“Don’t toss them all away!” said my friend Karyna to me the other night. She said she’s always wanted to try wood sculpting. “I’m coming over to see your beautiful wood.”

… rank UD‘s town, Garrett Park, third on their list of ten favorite historic districts:

Garrett Park Historic District
Garrett Park, Maryland

As a railroad community, Garrett Park developed over time. Many of its houses—sprawling Victorians—date to the 1890s, while the neighborhood also boasts an array of modest 1920s-era “Chevy Houses,” which came complete with a car in the garage at purchase. We love the eclectic mix of this community, which is also reflected in its neighborhood spirit, evidenced by a sign on prominent display along the main road since the 1980s, boasting “Nuclear Free Zone.” (The train still runs, too—you can hear the whistle echo through the streets.)

UD‘s latest column in the Garrett Park Bugle.

… last winter.

Click on the image
for a bigger picture.

… Ireland…

… February 2011.

Talking about the Ralph Ellison novel with my American Lit students yesterday, I suddenly remembered a story Mr UD’s father used to tell.

The version I told the students was the one I happened to remember; later that evening, Mr UD gave me a more accurate account.

********************************

An officer in the Polish army in the Second World War, Jerzy Soltan was captured by the Germans in 1939 and put in Murnau, a prisoner of war camp for these officers.

Let’s set the scene.

In the early afternoon [of April 29, 1945], on the orders of a German officer, Captain Pohl, the 40 or so camp guards relinquished control of the watchtowers and handed in their weapons. [The camp commanders knew the Americans were on their way.] Then, at around 3 p.m., as the American Army approached the town of Murnau from the north, a small group of cars with SS men approached the camp from the opposite direction. When the Germans and the Americans met just outside the front gate of the camp, gunfire erupted. Most of the SS cars turned around and fled back to town, but the lead car opened fire, which brought even heavier fire from the medium-tank platoon and their 76mm guns. Two SS men, Colonel Teichmann and Captain Widmann, were killed in the exchange of fire, as prisoners in the camp climbed on the front fence and watched the proceedings, cheering the Americans on. Also killed by a stray bullet during the exchange of fire was 2nd Lt. Alfons Mazurek, one of the prisoners.

Jerzy Soltan stood among the prisoners at the front gates, watching. To his left, he saw pull up a huge, shiny, Horch, inside of which sat an elegant SS man. To his right, Soltan saw trucks approach Murnau’s entry.

As he looked at the SS man, “I saw that suddenly he had been transformed into a general!” Come again? “His uniform suddenly went from green to red!”

Soltan wasn’t being funny. The moment was so surreal – liberation? death? – that this was simply the thought that came into his head.

A moment later he realized the SS man had been shot to pieces by the Americans in the trucks.

But where were the Americans? No one was driving the oncoming trucks. “They were black. I couldn’t really see them. I had never seen a black person.”

After dinner this evening with friends at Indian Ocean, we walked down Connecticut Avenue to Van Ness, and then up Chancery Center, to the Egyptian embassy. It was a clear, not too cold night, with a bright moon.

I hadn’t yet seen this street, full of new, massive embassies — with the Chinese particularly immense. It’s an all-over-the-place, neither-here-nor-there building, with the vague geometries of a synagogue.

As we walked up the hill to the embassy, a woman wearing the Egyptian flag as a dress passed us; she was surrounded by excited friends, some of whom carried a banner that read WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN.

You remember Walk Like an Egyptian.

(This, I know you remember.)

Men with Egyptian flag face paint thanked us for being there and said that tomorrow at one o’clock there will be another gathering.

This one was winding down. There were happy groups of young people, a guy in a Cat in the Hat hat, a child flying the flag, a woman calling up the hill toward the embassy: “Hassan! Yasmeen!”

The floodlit United Arab Emirates embassy, with its big gold dome, was magical. The Egyptian embassy next to it looked like a small version of the woeful Kennedy Center. (Here’s a blog whose first photo shows the UAE embassy; plenty of photos of a recent protest at the Egyptian embassy follow, complete with people holding WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN signs. I guess it’s a thing now.)

We wandered around; a bunch of people dressed in the national colors asked our friend Joe to take their picture. Much laughter.

Happiness everywhere.

I never take for granted living in this city, where you can walk three blocks from your restaurant and, under a white moon, join up for a moment with something unearthly.

UD‘s stomping grounds are described in this way in today’s Washington Post, and it seems about right (though Mr UD claims “We are not a village.”). It’s an article about all the generators people are buying, given the constant power outages.

Because I’m feeling a little better (I’ve got bronchitis), and because today was warm and sunny, I went out to our back acre and began removing the many limbs that fell during what people are calling the thundersnow. I broke smaller branches off of big fallen trees and tossed them into the woods next to our property. Then I dragged the stripped trees into the same woods.

Squirrels are amazing. Yesterday, I threw a large number of nuts out on my deck for them. I don’t like squirrels, and I would not do this in temperate weather, but I’ve taken pity on them with all this snow.

In minutes, they’d organized an entire social, economic, and spiritual system around the manna. A production line of squirrels captured, gnawed, whittled, and then sped off with each pecan. At the bottom of the deck, squirrels with ribbons in their hair danced around a branch on which they’d drawn a crude image of a pecan. Directly against my sliding glass doors, a neat line of squirrels bowed and scraped in gestures of propitiation.

Today it’s flat-out war. Among themselves, as to which forms of propitiation are truly genuine and effective, and with other groups of squirrels, attracted to the bounty.

… though coughing up a storm. Her cold has moved from head to chest, so she’s hacking like mad.

And speaking of storms, there’s an ice storm headed this way, so Les UDs are preparing for loss of power, and for life in the Legacy Hotel, once again.

UD’s problems are meager, however, compared to those of her sister’s husband’s daughter (this is her other sister, not the Morrissey freak), who, with her young twin daughters, was due to be flown out of Cairo this morning. This woman’s husband – a graduate of George Washington University medical school, and a military doctor – has been stationed in Egypt; but he has also lately been flying to Djibouti, and he was in Djibouti when the protests broke out.

GW, the Washington Post reports, has a number of current students in Cairo, one of whom talked to the campus paper:

Cory Ellis, who is in his first year of GWU’s Middle East studies graduate program, told the GWU student newspaper, the Hatchet, that he went to some of the protests, camera in hand. Although Ellis watched the riots from a safe distance, he was temporarily incapacitated by tear gas, according to the Hatchet.

“I didn’t come to Egypt to take classes. I can take classes at GW. I went 5,000 miles away from home to experience another part of the world and immerse myself in the culture,” Ellis told the Hatchet. “I major in international affairs, so I want to experience international affairs. I didn’t want to let the chance to witness history slip by me.”

Here’s an account of another GW student there.

This is UD’s sister writing. UD is home, without internet connection. She does have power, so she’s back from the hotel, but there is no connection. She’s also got a cold, so she’s in no mood to go slutting after a hotspot.

A thousand pardons. She will return soon.

So, UD pulls her curtains aside to let in the thin light of another snowy day… She snuggles deeper into her bed coverings…

She hunkers down, in other words, at her ‘thesdan hotel, for another three days — until the Potomac Electric Power Company restores power to her Garrett Park house.

Two pieces of good news, however: The weekend rate on our trendy room is way low; and Butch, the Garrett Park maintenance person, tells Mr UD: “Don’t worry about the [vast] tree in your yard. The town will take care of it.”

Let’s start here, with a post I began yesterday afternoon. A post interrupted by a power outage:

A massive branch just fell —- but so neatly! so completely! onto our front yard. A nice clean horizontal fall onto rapidly building snow. It took no wires down with it, and after its loud crash lies calm and black atop the white. Kind of like this, only no longer attached to the tree.

************************************

Okay, back to the present.

Watching, out of our front windows, as the power disappeared, was exciting, beautiful, a light show.

A sound and light show, because as street and house lights flickered and flashed silver and blue against the bright white night, you could hear, all over town, massive trees creaking and cracking under the weight of snow. Huge, high, many-branched branches came crashing down in pillowy clouds.

After each crash, in the quiet of no traffic and no people, the old trees of Garrett Park again spoke, as in a children’s tale.

Now – almost noon – there’s still no power in Garrett Park, and I’ve settled into a local hotel to do my work.