Week in Seven Words #547

This covers the week of 7/12/20 - 7/18/20.

barbering

The barber works outdoors on a path by the lake. At his station: a chair, a radio, a case of supplies, and scraps of hair softening the ground.

dragonflies

The air above the water is glittering with dragonflies. They swoop around in taut ellipses. They also bring to mind a faint memory, one that remains unrealized: that the word "dragonfly" once stood as a code for something, when I was a kid.

humidity

Humidity settles in like a rude, sweaty man arriving late to a concert, filling the seat next to you with body heat and sticky elbows and the moistness of the breath he expels through his mouth. 

pose

People pose before the words Black Lives Matter, which have been painted in large yellow letters on the street. When they're done taking selfies and group photos, they walk past a bus stop where two black homeless men are curled up on the ground (#noeyecontact #nocomment #quicksteps).

preserved

A shuttered museum, the garden behind the gates still beautifully tended.

thinly

Small businesses are evaporating, though some restaurants stay afloat with outdoor seating. For pedestrians, there remains a narrow path between tables arranged on sidewalks. Near one cafe, a homeless man sleeps on a discarded sofa, about a dozen feet from diners who can finally say they're eating out.

zooming

The funniest joke I hear this week is the one about the cost of different streaming services. The most expensive one is Harvard, at roughly $50,000 a year.

Week in Seven Words #546

This covers the week of 7/5/20 - 7/11/20.

highbrow

A 12-year-old Samoyed dog is getting groomed in the park by his owner, who has brought along music that keeps the dog happy. ("Opera is his favorite!") As bits of his puffy white coat drift to the grass, the dog grins, even when an aria is anguished.

innocent

The water is dimpled by a toy sailboat. It's an optimistic sight. A bit of normal fun in the park, during a summer when so much is out of the ordinary and out of joint.

jabbing

An egret stalks across the shallow end of a pond. Sometimes, it seems to trip forward, its beak plunging into the water. Maybe it's gobbling up tiny fish.

lacking

At the bookstore, a cashier bounces between the front register and the cafe counter. The cafe has no chairs and tables, and only one customer peeks into it. The front register sees little traffic too. As I explore the shelves, two other employees approach to ask if I need assistance. They need sales, desperately. 

nicely

Our infrequent meetings are a diversion. An hour of strolling, an hour of conversation on a bench with hopeful birds at our feet. The time we share is pleasant. It always is.

rotting

Dead fish bob on the river. Clumps of them befoul the marina. The wind sweeps away most of the sickening fish odor, but some of the stench clings.

venturing

A caterpillar that looks like creamy fluff crawls out from the grass and risks its life on the sunny path. 

Week in Seven Words #497

amusement
A young brother and sister play with a water bottle for about an hour. First they take turns tossing the bottle to make it land upright on the ground. Then they roll it and kick it back and forth. After that, they relocate to a flight of stairs and toss it up and down.

limiting
She channels her thoughts through narrow conduits of social justice jargon.

ominously
I don't know why a cloud of bees has formed above the bed of a pickup truck, and I don't get close enough to find out.

outmaneuvered
On seeing his grandma approach with the stroller, the toddler wails that he isn't ready to leave. He stomps off shouting, "Bye!" She blows him a kiss. He softens enough to send her one back. Her relaxed posture misleads him into thinking he's safe from capture. He toddles closer, grinning. He's still grinning when she snatches him up and straps him, wailing again, into the stroller.

overcoming
Her coughing fit ends, and her soulful voice crawls out, cradling each note of a slow melody.

sonogram
During the sonogram, the technician asks me to be patient as she tries to locate one of my ovaries. "It's like deep sea diving," I murmur, and she laughs. (The outer office has an ocean resort atmosphere. Soft pop music and a decor of seashell pink, cloudy white, and calm blue.)

soothes
Some shimmering classical piece is playing in the background, and I'm sinking into the sofa, my thoughts calm.

Week in Seven Words #457

differentiation
The advice you give someone may have worked for you, but won't work for them. They don't have to live your choices.

expressive
Some trees look like they have eyes, mouths, and, at times, whole faces imprinted on the bark. On one tree, what looks like multiple faces are emerging, their expressions stunned.

guarding
One motif that stands out in our walk: aggressive yellow jackets who are territorial about public garbage cans.

gullet
He eats out of a tub of ice cream while watching his favorite basketball team lose.

ocular
Walking along with two heavy grocery bags and one eye scrunched shut, after something has lodged against my eyeball on a windy day.

precarious
Holding the wine glass over my head as the kids kick a soccer ball around the room.

sensory
She prepares a strange tangerine tea. It smells good but tastes like a bitter oil.

Week in Seven Words #452

aerial
I dream of popping out of an airplane to film it in the clouds, which are soaked in a deep orange sunset.

delicate
Her apartment is filled with light and has a fragile quality. She moves as if she's afraid to touch anything. A picture frame on the gleaming piano or the small blue vase on the coffee table can shatter easily.

dementia
She's convinced her 3-year-old grandson is at the synagogue. She keeps asking people if they've seen him. He must have run off somewhere. It doesn't matter that her nurse and some of the congregants gently explain that he isn't there – that the boy she's thinking of is an adult and not in town. She's certain he's run away and gotten lost. She insists that people look for him.

kavanah (כַּוָּנָה)
I feel pierced by the urgency of the prayers, and the melodies, and the moving, sobbing, joyful, singing voices.

numeracy
The middle-aged man who shares the elevator with me sees that I'm going to the seventh floor. "Seven's a lucky number," he says. "Hopefully," I say. To which he replies, "It's a prime number." So I point to his destination. "That's a multiple of seven," I say, because he's heading to floor 28. "So it is!" he replies.

swooping
That evening, there's a large moth in the synagogue. Mostly it hops and skips among the lights. Sometimes it dive-bombs people.

well-meaning
"They try to be so helpful," she says, sorting through the holiday care package, "but as a pre-diabetic, I can't eat a lot of the food here."

Week in Seven Words #399

bearing
We're eating salads outside in the dark by a bike lane and jogging path in the park. From around the bend, we hear a blues song, and it's getting louder, the hoarse, broken, beautiful voice coming our way. A young girl appears, swinging a portable radio.

coexistence
On the rooftop garden, they've planted marigolds with tomatoes, collard greens, lavender, thyme, cucumbers, dill, Jamaican peppers, and other herbs and vegetables. Bees swoop around (I achieve an uneasy coexistence with them), and white butterflies look like petals sprung to life. A monarch butterfly appears too and lingers.

hoofer
One of the men in the subway car is moved to tell us about his dog. "Her name is Ginger Rogers," he says. He pauses, as if waiting for the dog to spring up from where she's curled up at his feet and start dancing.

pierced
His voice, lofty and sonorous, opens me to my anger and frustration. There are multiple entangled reasons for these emotions at this time.

prepping
In the span of a 12-story elevator ride, he shares his business aspirations and lists some of the books he's been reading to push himself into a mindset of success.

shared
It's cozy and delightful to have a movie theater almost entirely to yourself and the person you're with.

tomatoes
Some of the tomatoes are green and heavy. Others are crinkly and emptied out like candy wrappers.

Week in Seven Words #343

bower
Fat green leaves ripple against the railings of the balcony.

clack
Cicadas sound like crackling wind-up toys.

edged
The broad reservoir is rimmed with trees and buildings. To the north, stumpy apartment houses mostly, and to the south, silvery high-rises.

indulge
She reads a lot, and mostly on her own, but she sometimes wants to be read to. She can close her eyes whenever she wants, or jump in to share her ideas with someone who won't have a problem pausing to listen.

knucklebones
The rubber ball from a game of jacks shoots away and pings the table legs.

mise en scène
They could stage one of Shakespeare's plays here, in the garden where the paths whirl up a hill among flowers and low-hanging trees, and the rats scurry around at dusk.

reassure
They don't make hide-and-seek too scary for him. His mom hides, but he can still see her elbows and purse poking out from behind the tree, so he's laughing and stumbling to her immediately, without a fear that she left for good.

Week in Seven Words #338

ballerina
All of the dancers are talented, but one in particular has presence. She creates a mesmerizing character, and even when she isn't moving, she commands attention.

carrying
When possible, I don't use a purse. I like a small colorful backpack, secured on both shoulders and well-stocked.

distracted
The theater is dark, and she's bored. Her phone casts a square of white light that irritates other people, but gives her a pleasant scroll through all the headlines and texts that have cropped up in the last hour.

feat
With some of the dancers, the effort is obvious. They can't hide a straining muscle or how a limb struggles to extend. Beside them dance the ones who seem to need no effort.

jester
I want to make her laugh, so I do a chicken dance and jazz hands.

menace
They reach over the railing to pet the horse in the enclosure. A park ranger warns them off. "It bites," he says. They immediately back off. The horse remains still, revealing nothing.

skimming
Insects glide over the sand like silvery sci-fi drones.

Week in Seven Words #336

bistro
Cold dishes, AC pouring down on us in syrupy chillness.

disquiet
When I arrive, the first things I hear are "Hey! There's a large horsefly around, and it bites. See, this is where it bit me. I was bleeding. No one knows where it went. So, how are you? Why are you just standing there? Sit, relax."

possible
On the heels of a first draft, plenty of doubt. But a healthy sort of doubt, one that invites new considerations instead of feelings of futility.

pursuit
In the pool, he pretends to be a seal, and his dad is the killer whale hunting him. The other kids play a more straightforward game of tag, ducking among pool floats and getting caught and tossed around.

queued
A response to my recent breakup: "You aren't dating someone else yet?"

sanguine
He's lost a finger to DIY fireworks, but says that one of these days he'll get the hang of them.

unconsidered
He shares stories from camp, mostly involving counselors and camp administrators exercising poor judgment. One of these golden moments involved a man roaring in on a motorcycle to terrify the kids as a joke. (The cops didn't find it funny.)

Week in Seven Words #329

apiary
I don't know about the beekeeping on the premises until suddenly there are clouds of them around box hives on each side of the path. The part of my brain that isn't screaming reminds me that conserving bees is important, so isn't this wonderful? So wonderful.

cames
Petals lit up like stained glass in the low-slanting afternoon light.

ossicones
A man and child dressed as giraffes are reading by a pond. They could be characters from the picture book spread out between them.

parried
The ambulance circles through the cemetery's front drive, to where an old woman sits with her head in her hands on a bench. The EMTs kneel beside her for awhile. Eventually, she waves them off and leaves under her own power.

picking
On a search for a subway platform that isn't blocked by construction, I walk through a part of the city new to me. The buildings are indistinct in afternoon haze. A man on a stoop toys with a guitar.

rooted
Leaves and blossoms draped over weathered stone. Small American flags on a bright yellow lawn.

vexation
He's at my elbow, telling me I'm taking photos of the wrong things. "What's so interesting about that? Take a picture of this! See?"

Week in Seven Words #328

chainsaws
I hear the anger behind their words more than the words themselves. It's a smug, desperate, vindictive anger that rips through their speech.

clustering
Men in black coats gather at a bus shelter by an abandoned lot. Rain dribbles off their hats.

ferociously
Rounds of Monopoly Deal, with groans, squeals, and eyes narrowed over fanned cards.

furtively
Tables pushed together in a U-formation soon bear a load of beer, soda, and nachos with melted cheese. Between the chairs, a cockroach creeps, tasting possibilities.

innocently
When he finds out I'm Jewish, he asks why people hate Jews. The Jews are in danger, he says. He's a third grader who has never, to his knowledge, met a Jew before.

tide
Returning from a weekend away to an ocean of laundry.

transcendently
As an adult, she finds coloring books relaxing. Some of the pages she's working on show mythic creatures. Using colored pencils, she makes a phoenix shimmer with fire.

Week in Seven Words #281

airborne
A dragonfly, a branch and a monarch butterfly, suspended against the blue-white sky in a mosaic.

buzzed
The dip has been sitting out for hours. The chips and crackers have been pawed into crumbs. The guests have had too much wine to notice.

etiolate
She painted the sunflower drooping against a faded wall. The sunflower looks like it's losing color the way people lose blood.

glint
She twirls in a dress made of soda cans and playing cards. Silver streamers run through her hair.

grubby
At the coffee shop, the outdoor seating is a bench encrusted in cigarette butts.

materialize
Walls of sloppy, spiraling graffiti become, just one block down, a series of murals: blue faces, owls, the moon's surface.

unfolding
Depending on the light, the leaves on the tree look like paper sometimes, and other times like moths about to break into flight.

Week in Seven Words #280

blender
Rain spatters the window. The backyard looks like green liquid, a parsley shake.

cloy
The candies are a brightly colored glue of sugar and preservatives.

principle
He doesn't like the cake, but he eats it, because it's cake.

silencing
A spider threads its web across the mouth of a stone lion.

sloshing
His aquarium is a blue tub. The fish are plastic toys, and bob as if they're dead. He pokes at them to make them look lively. They lurch and sway in the water.

underestimate
Throughout the game of Clue he glances at his phone, gets up to eat, and forgets what he asked the other players. He still wins. He's like a fictional private eye who looks unprofessional and gets dismissed as an idiot, only to solve the murder way ahead of the police.

unfruitful
A plot of dirt bakes in the sun. Nothing, not even a weed, grows in it.

Week in Seven Words #259

audacious
A cockroach scales the chrome and neon walls of the ice cream parlor like a sci-fi hero.

bluster
A storm whips the houses, cloaks the streetlights.

chagrin
She doesn't want to admit to buying the junk food for herself, so she claims it's for friends or family. It gets me annoyed with how much guilt and shame is associated with food (with some brands even labeling their products 'guilt-free'), as if shame or guilt will reliably motivate people to make healthier choices long-term. And as if it's shameful to have some dessert.

choo-choo
He asks me what I'm sentimental about. The first thing that comes to mind: trains. I still have sentimental ideas about taking a train trip across the US. I know I'm romanticizing Amtrak. Amtrak, of all things. I know about the possible difficulties of long distance train travel, especially in this country, where it's not a popular way to get around. But I really like traveling by train (even in subways sometimes, when the cars aren't crowded). For more than several hours? I don't know. I haven't done it yet.

fostering
What makes for a good friend? Someone who can respect you and accept your essential self. Who can challenge you without belittling you. You can grow, and they will not insist that you need to stay the same or make yourself smaller to suit them. They will not demand that you stick to an outdated version of yourself or a version of you they've built up rigidly in their minds.

sensuously
She presses a lemon to her ear, pauses, puts it down. Picks another one to listen to and decides to keep it. Then she moves on to the peaches. She rolls them against her cheek, one by one, until she finds the peach with the most pleasing caress.

variation
Imperfections enhance beauty.

Week in Seven Words #235

carousel
Paintings, mirrors, glassy music, kids bobbing on waves of color and noise.

fetching
A winsome, curly-haired lawyer picking her away through old warehouses and artist lofts.

genuine
People talking about what they love or what they're interested in, without competitiveness or preening.

patrol
Wasps swooping over a green plot where Lincoln sits and listens.

platinoid
Skyscrapers that look like they were made entirely of platinum group metals: ruthenium windows, iridium roofs.

sunny
Yellow brick, bright as fruit, a backdrop for trees.

traces
In a neighborhood saturated with history, I wonder who once stood beside the lampposts or looked out the windows with the white shutters.

Week in Seven Words #228 & 229

228

gazers
Three teenagers are sitting on a bench, arms around each other, looking for the moon in a daytime sky.

heightened
The silence on the path isn't true silence. The trees are bristling, and animals are scraping unseen against dirt. My feet are crunching on loose rock. The silence is the absence of human voice.

platitudinous
People who tell me to "be myself" often mean "be a self that I approve of and am comfortable with."

punctuating
When I read beneath the green branches, bugs fall onto my book like extra punctuation.

subterrestrial
In part because it's dwarfed by a flag pole, one gets the sense that the old stone building, crouched on the ground, has a small room in it with a door, and that this door opens to a flight of stairs that takes you miles below the city.

sweeping
Wedding photos in the park - the bride's train sweeping over fallen green leaves.

witchery
The shop, dark as a cavern, smells of soap and herbs.

Week in Seven Words #182

hurried
A cold wind whisks me off the bench.

merry-go-round
Toddlers play tag, round and round the fountain in a flurry of giggles and screams. It falls on the youngest, a boy with curly brown hair and a shy smile, to be "it" most of the time; occasionally, his mother scoops him up and runs with him to give him an advantage over the others.

pestilential
At a small park by the subway station, a rat pokes around an elevated bed of shrubs, as people sit and read and chat just a foot or two from its twitching nose.

pyretic
The clock face looks feverish in the dark.

rags
A curtain of gnats hang over the lakeside path.

stomp
The show is a celebration of percussion; anything from stomping feet to brooms to trashcans can be turned into a musical instrument. Even newspapers can rustle together in a compelling rhythm.

unhurried
I'm not sure where I am, only that it won't be hard to find my way out. In the meantime, I'm surprised by the appearance of a swampy pond, a stream pouring over leaf matter and rock, a clearing covered in yellow grass where an empty bench awaits a reader.

Week in Seven Words #178

cornered
The more she runs, the more the dog chases her, until she's finally curled up in a ball on the couch giggling as the dog licks her ears.

corpuscle
I open the door and startle a cardinal into flight. It glides across the pavement like a drop of blood.

evasive
Fireflies dip in and out of the hydrangea bushes.

phonological
The voice recognition software built into my computer twists my words out of shape sometimes, but for the most part it's very helpful. What I need to get used to is speaking aloud as I work; how will it affect my writing on the occasions when I use it?

pseudo
The tomato sauce on the pizza bagel is a watery paste, something tomato-ish, and I can still taste the cold bite of the freezer at the heart of the bagel.

scaled
Plastic animals camp on the windowsill. They've crossed the cool plain of the air conditioning vent and now have an unbroken view of metal and concrete canyons.

subjective
After finally turning off the TV, they start up a drawing contest and ask me to be the judge. It feels weird though to assign scores to their artwork, and they get exasperated with my reluctance.

Week in Seven Words #177

curiosities
What do we learn in museums? Sometimes it's only 'oohs' and 'ahhs' and a fact or two. How many times do we really connect with what we're seeing - immerse ourselves in it?

discomposure
He flies around the souvenir shop like an agitated moth, landing on treasures and launching off them again. Finally, he clutches a prize to his chest, but keeps circling as he's told to put it down again.

flirtation
A butterfly lands on her shirt front, right on her breasts. She stares at it, eyebrows raised, until it flutters off. "Must be a boy," she says.

hives
Palatial buildings are home to the offices of petty bureaucrats.

jigsaw
The White House is beautiful, but in a strange way looks like a hollow 3D puzzle of itself.

morphemes
Fun word games give structure to the hours we spend on the road.

natation
Swimming through images captured by Hubble. Strolling in a warm, gray drizzle. Looking out from between low-hanging branches at the Tidal Basin and Jefferson's pale monument.

Live Butterfly Pavilion at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in DC

Where I was, a little over a week ago: