get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see the dew bespangling herb and tree
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DC Secrets—Thai Xing

February 27th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Life - (0 Comments)

Thai Xing is the restaurant I choose when I want more than a delicious meal, when I want a haven. To me, it’s more akin to a garden than a typical restaurant. Taw Visittaboot, the creator of this experience, opened the restaurant in a row house tucked in the middle of a residential block of Florida Avenue—a busy, commercial avenue that traverses the city east to west with several blocks of old row houses that were once genteel and survived years of poverty to exist now in surprising counterpoint to the commercial sections on either side of them.

While there is a handmade wooden sign on the row house’s wall identifying Thai Xing, the sign is unlit, and nothing else marks the entrance to the restaurant, so that, even assuming you know the address, and even if you have been there before, finding the right door involves moments of hesitation, anxiety, faith. The first time I walked in I had a strong feeling that I might be walking into someone’s private house party next door to where I was supposed to be. And the most recent time I was there, once I’d located the right house, I walked down to the lower level, where I’ve always eaten before, to find it open but empty—everyone was up on the main level, where the restaurant has expanded to—but without any clear directions or markers as to where to go. The result? Once you have found the door, and opened it, and walked in among the candle-lit tables, the rich colors, the sketches and paintings, most of which I believe are Taw’s, the diners, and the spicy-sweet scent of the Thai dishes, you are hit with a sensation of relief and pleasure, as if you have stumbled upon a hidden oasis.

And then there is the food. There is no menu to order from, although you are asked whether you have any food restrictions when you make a reservation. Instead, all diners are served what Taw creates. The waitresses bring dish after dish to the table, most of them very spicy, each heart-warmingly delicious and existing in concert with the others. My favorites of my recent meal there were the cucumber soup and the squash curry. The cucumber soup, brought out early in the meal, was, unlike most of the dishes, not spicy. The thin, gentle broth had fragments of a leek-like vegetable, and in the middle, a cucumber log that, having cooked in the soup, was soft enough to easily slice with a spoon. (Have you ever had cooked cucumber before? I hadn’t.) The cooked cucumber was soft and watery, like the essence of cucumber—and stuffed within it was the surprise of minced pork. The plain broth, the refreshing, simple cucumber, and the complexly tangy pork existed in lovely contrast. And then there was the squash curry—the squash was meltingly tender but still in its skin, and the tactile scooping of the sweet flesh out of the skin, along with the sweet and spicy coconut-based curry with plenty of Thai basil lighty placed on it—it was perfection. I’ve loved Thai food for years. But every time I eat at Thai Xing I feel that all the other Thai dishes I’ve ever had have been but approximations of what Thai food is supposed to be. And that the dishes created by Taw are the real. It makes me happy to know that the restaurant exists as I go about my days, that it is only a reservation away.

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February Light

February 15th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Life | Dog Days - (4 Comments)

Sometimes it’s when you least want a dog that you most need a dog. February is typically the hardest month for me to enjoy in D.C., even in an unseasonably mild winter like this one. It’s cold, the days are still short, and while you can hope for a crazy big snowstorm with snow days and sledding and snow forts and snow men, you’re more likely to get an icy mess that might, if it stays cold, turn the sidewalks into the corrugated, pitted menaces I remember from my childhood in this city, when I swear I spent weeks walking back and forth to school over rutted, treacherous ice flows. We had one of our more typical February weeks last week. A half a centimeter or so of snow dusted our landscape one morning, and then there was cold, and wind, and spitting rain. Most people stayed in when they could. And yet the dogs had to be walked. And so every day I headed outside, and not just to get to the car or metro or bus. And, thanks to the dogs, this is what the winter weather brought me: the sight of my old dog Pundit flipping onto his back at the first sight of that half-centimeter of snow and sliding down the hill in our front yard, just as he’s responded to every snowfall since we first moved into the house in 2000. A run with Cholula in the park so emptied of people by the spitting rain that we had our own quiet woods in the middle of the city. And this, glimpsed as I hurried the dogs home—the winter light catching one of my favorite architectural elements of the city—the turrets on the old row houses.

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D.C. Secrets III

October 2nd, 2011 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Life - (1 Comments)

 When you spend a lot of time in the city, you have to find your oases.  One of my favorites lies between a courthouse and the Canadian embassy, where on any given weekday, you’ll find people from all walks of life sitting, talking, smoking, worrying, mostly ignoring the two fountains that bubble quietly before them.  Many times I’ve seen sparrows perching ankle deep on one of the lily pads flicking themselves with water, while pigeons bob their heads along the side for a drink.  In the winter, when the fountains are drained, schools of carved fish go on full display.  I love that the sculptor put creatures in the fountain that you can hardly see when the fountain is full, and that appear in their glory when the fountain is dry.  I love the whimsy of the creatures, the perfection of the depth of the lilypads to the actual living birds, and the humbleness of the bubbling fountain in the center. 

Recently, when I went to photograph the fountains for this blog post, I found them uncharacteristically empty in the middle of the summer.  There was a parks maintenance person working nearby, and so I asked him why the fountains were drained.  He said that there was a problem with the plumbing that needed to be fixed. I asked him when they would be fixed and he said he didn’t know.  I pushed for an answer, trying to get a general time frame so I knew when to come back, and he finally said, “Listen, I have no idea.  That is not in my jurisdiction.”  I burst out laughing, which made him smile.  SUCH a Washington answer. 

Thank you, David Phillips.

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Camp Slugabed, Day 5

July 21st, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Nature - (0 Comments)

Buy them water shoes,
And take them to a creek
Where they can splash,
Rock hop,
Climb,
And cross.
Let them be explorers,
The creek a path
They cannot lose.
Let them help each other,
Rather than looking to you.

We parked at the Tilden Street parking lot
In Rock Creek Park
And hiked along a feeder creek.

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Camp Slugabed, Day 4

July 19th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Nature - (0 Comments)

Take them to an urban garden,
Preferably one that is old, with surprises hidden along narrow paths.
We went to the Bishop’s Garden, tucked below the National Cathedral.
They walked along the stones I’d tripped over as a child
Were enchanted by the same secret fountains,
burbling over the same mossy basins.
They played that they were singing princesses in the old stone gazebo
I’d played in with my friends when I was young.
The sun was bright,
The roses fragrant,
The stones cool,
The gazebo shaded.
The gulf between my youth
And theirs
Vanished.

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Camp Slugabed, Day 3

July 12th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Nature - (0 Comments)

Take them on a hike,
And let them lead.
We brought a friend along
And left little brother at home.
We drove up the Clara Barton Parkway
And parked in the Angler’s Inn Parking Lot
On the Canal Towpath, named for the restaurant
across the street.

We went on a good hike for young kids—
Heading up the canal towpath until we reached Widewater,
Where the canal opens into a lake, marked by small rocky islands.
Then we turned right, into the woods on a blue marked trail, the Billy Goat trail.
It travels up and down ravines, along an inlet of the Potomac, up again
over steep-but-not-too-steep rocks, and then leads to a high rocky place that
Opens startlingly to the rapids of the full Potomac River.
We stopped there, made that our destination, and turned back,
Although the path continues, steeper and rockier, with increasingly beautiful views, up the Potomac Gorge almost to Great Falls.
(that part is for when they get a little older).

This is what they found:

An elongated yellow and black spotted wasp (according to my biologist friends, most likely a Megarhyssa. The long pointy spike on its back end is not a crazy-long-hard-to-maneuver stinger but an ovipositor, used to bore into dead wood and then deposit an egg on beetle larva that have, in turn, been placed there by their mothers in hopes of avoiding just such predatory insects like these.)
A butterfly wing, lying abandoned on the towpath.
Freshwater clams
Fish, darting shadowy along the canal and the shallow inlet
A great blue heron
Spiral shells
Two toads
A millipede
A deer
Water turtles.

They touched things I wouldn’t touch:
The millipede (which pooped on S)
A toad
They paused for longer than I would have paused,
And, trained by their school on how to hunt for insects,
Let other families with children race past.
They abandoned lunch to
Sift through the cool shallow water along the inlet of the Potomac
For small shells, empty of animals,
Perfect spirals,
Perfect treasure.
They challenged each other up rocks
And helped each other down them.
They skinned knees,
Got hot and dirty,
And then wet and cool
In water of questionable cleanliness.
We were next to the city,
But for a while, no longer of it.
It was good to get out of the city.

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Camp Slugabed, Day 2

July 6th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Nature - (0 Comments)

Take them to the river
(even if it is raining)
And rent a canoe.
We went to Fletcher’s Boat House, where the Potomac River is tidal and calm,
But still wild.
Paddle them upstream, giving them a few tips on how to hold the paddle
But not too many.
If there are three of you, as there were of us,
Let the person in the middle be the duffer,
And let the two of them trade off that position.
Start paddling upstream, and stay along the banks or the jutting rocks, where obstacles above you—rocks, land, tangles of logs and underbrush—create barriers that the river must flow around and then back up towards, creating eddies where the water, like you, is flowing against the main current.

When the kids are more excited about the occasional bloated dead fish
Floating in the river
Than the herons flying overhead
Or the swallows darting in oblong circles along the boat,
Paddle the canoe over to the dead fish and let them investigate.

Paddle upstream until you find a destination.
We found a waterfall, and crossed the river to reach it.
I hauled the canoe up on the sandy banks
And we sat on the ridge of a rock and ate lunch.
Then we climbed up the waterfall
And looked out over the river we’d paddled.

On the way back,
Look for where the bubbles flow the fastest,
And steer your canoe into them, where the power of the river
Will carry you downstream, and you just have to keep the bow pointed along the flow  (not always easy).

At home, have the kids make picture books about their day.
In my kids’ books, the dead fish, the canoe hauled up on the sand during lunch, and the rain figured prominently.

In Camp Slugabed, I can’t give them my experience of the river,
which comes from years of kayaking and canoeing in the rapids much farther upstream
Than Fletchers.
That is something they will find or not find as they grow.
But I can take them there,
In case it is meant to become
Something they need, as I did.

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Camp Slugabed, Day 1

June 29th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Life | Nature - (2 Comments)

Get your kids on whatever bikes they ride
And go on a hunt.
We had a two year old with us,
So we hunted for the baby ducks
At nearby Meridian Hill Park.

The kids flew down the sidewalk on their bikes,
Z swerving on her two-wheeler,
S’s training wheels rattling.
The older sisters waited for their little brother at the cross streets,
Flew along the smooth park paths,
Dumped their bikes and ran down the steps along the formal fountain.

S found the baby ducks first.
We watched them swim and dive with their parents,
Raced past the bathing sparrows and
up the long steps,
And biked back home.

Z was elated at being the fastest,
S at having found the ducks
And M, who struggled with being slower than his sisters, proudly said
I go to Camp Slugabed.

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D.C.’s Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens

June 11th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Life | Nature - (0 Comments)

Washington, D.C.’s Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens aren’t really a secret (hence this entry isn’t a part of my D.C. Secrets series), but they are among the less visited of the great parks in our area. They are quietly astounding. I recently went there on a field trip with my 7 year old. It was one of D.C.’s early heat-wave days, and the bus was late and unairconditioned. Between the long wait at the school and the long, hot bus ride, I was doubting the worth of the whole field trip idea as we climbed off the bus, sweaty and slightly car sick.

And then I walked into the park with the 75 or so first graders. The lily pads lay thickly across the ponds, dotted with flowers on all sides. Dragoflies hummed in the air above the floating green circles, and the ponds were teeming with minnows and tadpoles. The kids walked slowly behind the knowledgeable and capable park ranger, crowding at the shores to see the insects and flowers and fish. We learned that the nuphar, a yellow flower protruding across the ponds from the protection of its pads, is one of the oldest plants, older than North America. What a gift, for young urban kids to walk in the presence of something so old, still growing among us.

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DC Secrets II

June 2nd, 2011 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Life - (1 Comments)

It’s hard to learn to bike in the city. Our neighborhood doesn’t have quiet cul de sacs or dead ends. The short alley behind our house leads right out to the narrow, crowded sidewalk. Also, our house is at the top of a hill, so heading in most directions involves an alarmingly steep slope. We’ve taken the kids with their bikes to neighborhood parks, but a lot of them are small—big enough to learn to ride a bike, but too small to show the kids why they want to learn to ride a bike—to fly down a road in whatever direction they choose to go.

I owe this secret to www.princeofpetworth.com, who posted some beautiful pictures on his site a while back. Inspired by his photos, on a recent Sunday, we took the family to Yards Park, the new waterfront park along the Anacostia River in Southeast, right by the Nationals Stadium. We included in our car Z’s two-wheeler, S’s princess bike with training wheels, and what M calls his pink tricycle, a little four-wheeled bike without pedals. Yards Park is beautiful, and not only does it have long, varied walkways the kids can ride their bikes on, the walkways were not crowded, and they were designed with different surfaces—concrete or wood—different dimensions, and different directions–along the river, over the water on a futuristic bridge, and by terraced landscapes and grassy lawns. The kids biked longer than they’d ever biked before, and at the end of the trip Z biked back to the car and, riding in circles on the sidewalk, yelled, “I love biking!” just before the bike’s tire slipped into a dirt parking strip and she fell. It was a good day.

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