Midstokke: Finding relaxation in the nation’s capital
I would never have expected I’d have to go to the city to relax. But cities have the amenities that foster the kind of laziness one needs to recover from months of nail gun and orbital sander operations. Like metros and Uber Eats.
After hanging the last piece of siding at 8 p.m. on a Sunday, I hopped on a flight to our nation’s fine capital. It is far more lovely than it looks on the news, which primarily shows suited folks climbing steps. Just a few hundred feet away, the cherry blossoms are at peak bloom and some of America’s finest art collections are on full and free display.
People often talk about cherry blossom season in the same tone they mention the pending solar eclipse. Equally, folks go out of their way to view these things. As for me, I happened upon the legendary display by accident because I was trying to run a wide berth around the war memorials on a warm Friday of sightseeing-by-jog.
Freya the Brown Dog and I had set out for an urban tour that afternoon, somewhere on Pennsylvania Avenue. From far away I could see the stoic and regal point of the Washington Monument, like D.C.’s personal sundial, and it was in this direction we trotted. It doesn’t take long to realize one is moving through not just monuments, but monumental history.
We turned from a side street and found ourselves at the steps of the Supreme Court. What historic conversations were happening at that moment behind those walls? What pivotal decisions were being made this week? Had been made in months and years past in this same spot?
These were humbling contemplations, silenced only as we crossed the street and ran past the Capitol building to ponder about the echoes in its chambers. More than 200 years of our nation’s evolution have taken place there! The end of slavery happened there! The right for women to vote! The inauguration of great presidents and mediocre ones. A couple of good speeches. And at least one widely televised incident of trespassing.
On this day, however, the building just perched quietly on its hill, watching over the strollers making their way up and down the National Mall, to and fro from Smithsonian to Smithsonian.
Beneath the Capitol’s grassy knoll were the first clouds of cherry trees, fluffed in full bloom and providing the perfect backdrop to girls taking graduation pictures, one woman in a full geisha costume, and several quinceañeras. The latter convinced me that my hoop skirt wardrobe is far too limited. Those girls looked as though they were in their natural habitat right there in the city with their green and gold, frills and sequins, and the rustle of fabric with each new pose.
We ran past the museums, along the pool of reflection, and through one highly effective awareness campaign for colorectal cancer – an acre of blue flags fluttering across the heart of the Mall. I imagined a national surge in colonoscopies baffling gastroenterologists for weeks after the spring break rush of tourism.
When I ran toward the war memorials, I veered wide and aimed for the cherry trees instead. Their magical shade was a kind of soft white haze that absorbs the noise, shyly invites in spring with the nods of a breeze.
I am a practiced cry-runner and hike-sobber, but the kind of tears evoked by war memorials are laden with a visceral sorrow one cannot breathe through. To read those names – each once a blessed babe, a child with so much hope, a son or sister, parent, friend – to think of the empty space they’ve left at a table, concentrated now to fading memories and a name etched in stone; it is more than my soul can bear.
We paused at the Lincoln Memorial, a great man made into a great statue, and sat upon the steps to look back at where we’d been. In this single swath of land resides such remarkable achievement and such unthinkable tragedy. Can we not have one without the other?
The walls of names go on and on and on and on.
These are just the names of our own.
How many other walls are there?
The next day, in need of a balm, we went to the museums, for art is the panacea of ailments of the soul. I spend a lot of time connecting to nature, but art seems to be a thing that connects us to each other, a common language for humanity. There, I see proof that anguish is universal, hope is infinite, and artists know both. Somehow they manage to accept, or at least bring closer to understanding, the reality of all the loss we must endure.
On the way home, we walked past the Capitol buildings again and I found myself hoping its residents read the names on the walls and spend their Sunday afternoons in the museums, too.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com