Skipping the mango queue at Dupont Circle

Happy Monday, DMV! It’s June 29.

I spent the weekend meandering in search of joy.

On Saturday, my family and I wanted to go to the quirky Red Bull tandem bike race and the mango festival in Dupont Circle, but we couldn’t muster the rush of energy to do both in one day, so we opted for the free mangoes that were on offer.

The event organized by the Indian Embassy and Dupont Circle BID started at noon, but my family moved at a lazy weekend pace, arriving closer to 1 p.m. As we came out of the Dupont Circle Metro station, it was clear a whole lotta people coming off the train and up the escalators were all headed toward the mangoes.

Up at street level, we saw thousands lined up, and because Dupont Circle is a circle after all, the line looked like an infinite queue, no clear beginning or end.

We decided to pass on the mangoes, so our friend who had joined us for our adventure later stopped by a grocery and bought us a mango instead.

Meanwhile, the bike race that we missed looked like crazy fun.

Yesterday after the rain stopped, my family and I went on our usual evening stroll.

Fireflies were out in force, hovering just a foot or two above the ground and offering their warm yellow blinks of light. We spotted rabbits and bunnies, which look cute no matter what they’re doing.

The creek near home was swollen, and there on a gravel bank that jutted out into the water sat a man on a lawn chair. I smiled at him. He smiled back.

And that was just the dose of joy I needed.

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Or not to do…

Maria Elkin, 36, shared this pic and story about a sparrow in her neighborhood, Brightwood in D.C.

“I have no love for house sparrows. I know that they're invasive, they're loud, and they're bullies at the bird feeder. Around the time we moved into the neighborhood in 2022, we were at the local Fort Stevens playground with our son when I saw a female house sparrow that looked quite different from the rest. Where most female house sparrows are a drab, dusty brown, this one had bright, clean, almost golden plumage. I pointed her out to a fellow mom who said ‘Oh, that's Blondie!’ apparently having seen her at previous visits to the playground, she and her daughter had given her a very apt name,” Maria wrote in her submission.

“I suspect Blondie is leucistic, which is a condition where birds have a partial loss of pigmentation that results in white or pale feathers — different from albinism which is a total loss of melanin.

“I saw Blondie a few more times over the course of that summer, and then assumed she had passed on … but [this year] we put out bird feeders in our backyard (even installing a few of the famous ‘sparrow halos’ intended to keep HOSPs [house sparrows] away) and to my joy Blondie paid us a visit! The other surprising fact I learned at that point was that house sparrows can live up to 20 years (though 2-5 is more common in the wild).”

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