Cleveland Park Day

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If you wander today along Connecticut Avenue between Macomb and Porter Streets between 1 and 5 pm, you will encounter neighbors, local merchants, and folks from the elementary school, library, fire department, and other neighborhood organizations celebrating what’s interesting and fun about Cleveland Park. Attractions include music, food, clowns, a moon bounce, McGruff the Crime Dog, and President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland, long-ago residents presumably returning to check out old stomping grounds and new restaurants.

Among the events will be a tribute to Cleveland Park Library staff whose positions were suddenly and gracelessly slashed over the summer, especially beloved children’s librarian Hillary Fennell, a living encyclopedia of children’s literature and a lovely lady besides, who had served the library and its community for over thirty years. What is story hour without Ms. Hillary? (More on this in the October 5th post.)

MsHillary

CakeBerriesChristiane


Fancy Feet

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Pedicure

Way down at the bottom are my toes being painted in honor of my wedding anniversary. It’s hard to draw, though, when your feet are being pumiced to a fare-thee-well.

My friend Jana says the pedicure sandals look as if they are made from Necco wafers.

I realize that my feet are probably not the first thing my husband will be gazing at when we go out to dinner tonight, but an anniversary pedicure feels so celebratory.

CakeWeddingSheila & Jim

Dig for Elephants

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Elephant

Eat your heart out, Boston! We have our own Big Dig in Washington, DC, at the National Zoo, and ours has elephants in it! Well, maybe it’s not quite as Big. But it’s certainly been transforming the core of the zoo for the past fifteen years—on every visit you have to navigate construction equipment and major piles of dirt, although not always the same piles—and it ain’t over yet.

First we got big splashy Amazonia Habitat with its science gallery; then Think Tank, for research into primate (as opposed to primary) education, with the crowd-wowing outdoor overhead O-Line for the use of orangutans when they decide to move between buildings. This was followed by completely redesigned panda exhibits to welcome for their honeymoon a new young panda couple, parents of hugely popular Tai Shan. Then came Asia Trail, with its green roofs, convincingly sculpted rocks, and several new endangered species for the zoo’s species preservation program.

Now the major project under way is Elephant Trails, a research and breeding program to preserve the endangered Asian elephant, which will provide an expanded herd with a more natural and environmentally friendly environment. Phase 1 opened this summer, and on a recent walk I had a look at the elephants munching breakfast near a big new stepped pond, in well-kept rolling grassy fields, like a high-end retirement home. I don’t know what the elephants think, but I’m ready to move in. You can learn more about it at the zoo’s website, and even make a donation and get your name on a plaque.

Fish

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The pond in the Bishop’s Garden, from a series of paintings at Washington National Cathedral. And a poem.

FishPond550AA
The Name of a Fish
.
If winter is a house then summer is a window
in the bedroom of that house. Sorrow is a river
behind the house and happiness is the name

of a fish who swims downstream. The unborn child
who plays in the fragrant garden is named Mavis:
her red hair is made of future and her sleek feet

are wet with dreams. The cat who naps
in the bedroom has his paws in the sun of summer
and his tail in the moonlight of change. You and I

spend years walking up and down the dusty stairs
of the house. Sometimes we stand in the bedroom
and the cat walks towards us like a message.

Sometimes we pick dandelions from the garden
and watch the white heads blow open
in our hands. We are learning to fish in the river

of sorrow; we are undressing for a swim.

— Faith Shearin

The Man with the Plan

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L'Enfant

Here is a drawing from our homeschooling Local History and Geography book, in honor of Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825), whose birthday it is today. Because of other obligations I cannot give him the lengthy post he deserves, but I hope to do him justice in 2011.

L’Enfant, an artist and son of an artist, came from France with the Marquis de Lafayette, as most Washingtonians probably know, to fight alongside the American colonists for independence, and later, having impressed the General with his battlefield sketches, was appointed by George Washington to design the United States’ new capital, Washington, DC. He created a a plan which was unfulfilled during his lifetime and has been only incompletely followed since, but which nevertheless gives us today this lovely and unusual city.

L’Enfant examined a quiet, hilly site of woodland, meadow, and marsh, uninhabited but for a handful of farms and the tiny port of Georgetown, and visualized an orderly grid overlaid by wide diagonal avenues allowing for long vistas, designed to incorporate stately public buildings, canals, bridges, squares, parks, and monuments: not simply a new bureaucratic center, but a Grand Capital for a young, energetic New Nation.

He had also a number of sensible, intelligent ideas as to how construction of the new city might have been financed, which were unfortunately never followed. Reading about the snail-like early development of the city, its wrangling political factions, its stodgy unimaginative Commissioners, and its greedy unscrupulous speculators, would make your hair stand on end. It also sounds uncomfortably familiar.

In the midst of it L’Enfant and Washington kept before them the vision of a finished work. Along the way L’Enfant, a hot-headed and demonstrative fellow, offended any number of people by vehemently defending his plans against unattractive provincial alterations (like any artist worth his salt) to the point of knocking down a new house that intruded on one of the proposed avenues. Not the way to keep your job. Which he finally lost after an exasperated Washington could no longer defend him against his many critics. L’Enfant remained bitter about his treatment—he was never paid for his work, although others made considerable sums through its implementation—and spent his remaining years as the poverty-stricken guest of a kind friend in rural Maryland, to be buried finally in their garden.

He has since been removed to a more honorable site in Arlington Cemetery, overlooking the city that finally rose to meet his expectations. Happy Birthday, Pierre, and I hope you are enjoying the view.

Water

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From my sketchbook, the fountain in the courtyard of the Freer Gallery of Art, a quiet place to sit and meditate (and wish you were in that pool). And a verse for Sunday.

FreerFountain

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

— Philip Larkin


Mountain Woman Part 1

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JuliaHolmes

Imagine that you are a little girl born in a village in North America in the early 19th century. You, like the other village girls and their mothers, help maintain a family farm: growing vegetables, cooking, scrubbing, making clothes. You might see your destiny as a farmer’s wife, raising children to follow in your footsteps.

But perhaps your mother is also an advocate for women’s suffrage, and your father is a fierce abolitionist, which might give you a somewhat different perspective on your life. This was the parentage of Julia Archibald (1838-1887), later Julia Archibald Holmes, born in the village of Noël, Nova Scotia, in 1838. And today, August 5th, is the anniversary of the day she became the first woman to reach the top of Pikes Peak, Colorado, when she was twenty years old.

When Julia was about ten, the family moved to Worcester, Massachusetts (where her mother became friends with Susan B. Anthony). But they didn’t stay there long. Slavery had been abolished in Canada in 1834, but there was a growing anti-slavery movement in the United States, and Kansas was the place in which the Archibalds decided to support it. They had a mission.

A series of treaties had declared Kansas to be Indian Territory, and a number of Native American tribes had been removed from their eastern lands and resettled there. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of westward-bound pioneers followed trails that passed through the territory, and by 1850 settlers were squatting along the trails and elsewhere in Kansas. Pressure from these land-hungry folks led eventually to (familiar story) the creation of new treaties, the removal of tribes to areas yet further west, and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, opening the area officially to settlement.

It was not only Native American tribes who were unhappy about this. Slave-state Southerners were displeased that the decision about the existence of slavery in the new territory was to be left to its residents. So, as you might guess, both advocates and opponents of slavery rushed into Kansas, each staking out territory and hastily setting up local provisional governments and institutions that were attacked by both sides, setting off several years of violence that foreshadowed the Civil War.

The Archibalds settled in Lawrence, Kansas, a center of controversy, and their house became a way station on the Underground Railroad. In Lawrence Julia met James Holmes, a veteran of John Brown’s campaigns. Apparently he was fiery and dedicated; she was handsome and spirited; there were certainly similarities of background. They were married in 1857.

But they didn’t stick around in Kansas for the resolution of the national conflict. The following year they joined a wagon train headed for Colorado, where gold had been discovered. And a lot of other excited Kansans were doing the same thing. Not many gold-seekers actually found what they sought, but their immigration resulted in the founding in Colorado of towns, businesses, churches, and probably plenty of saloons, as well as a rapid dramatic increase in its population.

According to Julia’s journal, their own party was driven more by “a desire to cross the plains and behold the great mountain chain of Noth America” than to search for gold. She acquired what she deemed a sensible traveling outfit: hat, moccasins, short calico dress, and bloomers. Bloomers had been recently introduced to the public by women’s suffragists as more sensible than skirts.

Her choice of clothing gave Julia the freedom to walk beside the covered wagons instead of riding. She improved her stamina by deliberately increasing her daily distance, and she recorded her observations of wildflowers, landscape, and skies in her journal. The only other woman on the trip disapproved of Julia’s unconventional garb and stayed in her wagon, thus missing most of the scenery. (Like my children, with noses in their books when we travel. “Look! Look out the window!”)

To Be Continued—Please see August 6/Mountain Woman Part 2