On beautiful things
and they are everywhere still
I’m trying to be hyper aware of everything around me lately— every beautiful shaft of light, every soft and waving blade of grass— just to ward off my disappointment that we’re back to this uncertainty again.
“What are you reading this summer?” I say to my cousin sitting beside me on the grass.
“Nothing!” she says.
“But I look to you for my new book ideas!” I say.
“That’s what I mean about this year. I’m reading nothing. I’m just reading The New Yorker.”
“We’re reading that, too,” says my spouse Janyce, who has just now made it back from the long food truck line. She hands me my paper carton with a grilled cheese sandwich in one hand and a small carton of tater tots with the other. I adjust the box so that it balances on the top of the picnic basket.
“Why are there so many? That’s what I want to know. I can’t catch up,” says my cousin.
“Once a week. It’s too much,” I say.
The three of us are chatting in the middle of a field under a large tree canopy on a Friday night. The sky is that particular watery blue, newly uncovered by rain clouds that threatened but never broke open. The sun’s angle paints swaths of grass in a fluorescent green glow. Up front, the band is playing jaunty Afro pop music and two little kids are joyously dancing in the grass. Summer is going by so fast. And now I feel like we’re in a race with the delta variant that is looming, and picking up speed across the country. We’ll be wearing our masks inside when we return to the office.
“It’s like we’re no longer free,” says my cousin.
“I know,” I say.
Sometimes when I can’t take the news any more, I scroll through my gmail to find my digital subscription to River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things”. I read one the other day by Michelle Webster-Hein that was even shorter than the customary 150 words. A brief meditation on a carrot.
Tonight I peeled and chopped carrots for dinner, tossed them with oil and thyme, oven-roasted them. The simpler the ingredient, the more miraculous it seems to me.
A carrot. What must that have been like, on first discovery? One insistent tug, one long orange tooth slipping upwards. Bright and grubby, sweet. Had I been that cave woman rooting in the dirt, I would have thought anything possible.
I’m trying to be hyper aware of everything around me lately— every beautiful shaft of light, every soft and waving blade of grass— just to ward off my disappointment that we’re back to this uncertainty again.
The other day, while I was sitting with my coffee cup in my flower garden, the hummingbird stopped in mid flight a few inches from my face and hovered awhile. She knows it’s me. She has claimed the feeder I fill with sugar water once a week as her own territory. She has been known to buzz me at the kitchen window, too, when she sees me sitting at the table inside. This time she flew over to the dried-up foxglove and went through the motions of getting nectar from its curled and brown husks and then flew back to my face to hover again.
“Okay baby,” I said. “I’m getting it.” I made my way over to the feeder and brought it inside for a cleaning and a new batch of food.
Truth is, I’m surrounded by beautiful things. Flowers in my garden. Goldfinches that land on the middle of my white coneflowers, swaying along with the bending stem for a few swings before flying away. “Woodman” the woodchuck, who has emerged this year from various holes in the backyard we didn’t know were there, sauntering his chubby little body out onto our weedy lawn to nibble on the most tender shoots.
And then there’s Janyce, sitting on a lawn chair beside me in a field, smiling.
“Do you want to go on a picnic and hear a band in Milton? I said.
“Of course,” said Janyce. “Sounds great. Let’s go.”