Blog : Beautiful-Things
The Silver Horse
| September 26, 2022 I found a silver coin in my mother's fancy things drawer when I was six: a large coin, inscribed with inscrutable writing, nestled among thigh-high nylons and diaphanous shortie nighties. On one side was the harp of royal Ireland; on the other, a horse.
Still Life
| September 19, 2022 “Isn’t this magnificent?” my mother says, sweeping her arm across the sky’s reflection in a pond of water lilies in Giverny. To think, we were in the very garden that Monet had painted.
Magnolia
| September 12, 2022 On the day we move to Mount Airy, we stand in the front lawn of our new home next to a large magnolia tree in full bloom. Already, we are less than three years away from my father’s stroke, just feet from where he will fall.
Patches
| September 5, 2022 In April of 1979, my mother, father, and I lounge on a jon boat on Lake Keowee in South Carolina. In the stern, my dad props his fishing rod against the motor handle, then pulls off his hat, wipes sweat from his bare head. In the bow, my mother guards the cooler.
Larceny
| August 29, 2022 The combination to my gym locker is 6-22-32. Locker number 433. To unlock the gate at the club, use 5024. It’s usually already opened by the groundskeeper.
A Cup Cracks
| August 22, 2022 I can't remember if the teacup was under the cutting board or above it but obscured by the mountain of plates, glasses, and steel pots with black handles. All I remember is the crack of porcelain on the wooden floor and two pieces instead of one.
Acceptance, Both Ways
| August 15, 2022 I was an untested psychiatry resident learning the intricacies of therapy. She was my first patient, a young woman who needed to unpack her suffering. She spread out her traumas like snow globes, delicate stories encased in fractured glass.
Lima Bean
| August 8, 2022 When my friend texts me her first ultrasound photo, it's still early, 8 or 9 weeks. We hold our joy tenderly, hoping it sticks.
The Bike Lesson
| August 1, 2022 Jax perched on his brand-new bike. I stood beside him, a human kickstand. “I can’t do this, Nana!” he yelled, his nervousness masquerading as anger. “It won’t stay up!”
To the Men Who I’ve Talked Out of Leaving Their Wives
| July 25, 2022 When you called, I was careful not to interrupt your soliloquy. Sometimes the best truth comes in fragments, unguarded bits of prose, an ugly tone or misshapen phrase that reveals much.
Cast-Iron Generations
| July 18, 2022 The cast-iron skillet has been in our family five generations, since the early 1900s. Twice as thick as when it was forged, it has layers of black scales on the outside. An imperceptible skin inside.
Seven Weeks or About the Size of a Coffee Bean
| July 11, 2022 The morning is here again. My fiancée and I have taken to acknowledging the miracle of recurrence. The water is hot again. The towel is dry again. The mirror is us again. And the coffee, about once a week, is the ever-coffee again.
Goodnight Moon
| July 4, 2022 Surely, in his two and a half years of living he's seen the moon. But he looks at it now like it's the first time. He knows it, yes, but only from his books on the shelf, the ones I read on nights I'm home for bedtime, when the sun is on the horizon and the blinds are closed.
On the 20th Anniversary of 9/11
| June 27, 2022 I think of John Ogonowski, leaving his farm at dawn in his green Chevy pickup . John flew cargo planes in Vietnam, knew the Boeing 767 like creases in his palm. He held the yoke, ran checklists, calmly captained the takeoff of the first plane that would crash into the World Trade Center.
Here I Am
| June 20, 2022 Two-year-old Ella takes a stick and draws zigzags in the sand. She asks me to write her name; I say each letter aloud and she knows that these are the marks that make words that make the stories we read to her, which she inhabits and commits to memory.
Gotcha Day
| June 13, 2022 We adopted Nala the day my mother fell down the stairs. That wasn't her name, but she didn't look like a Mindy.
Thingness
| June 6, 2022 My husband raps on the kitchen window from the deck outside where the cat sews in and around his legs. "Can you hand me that thing?" he says, pointing unsteadily. The scar from his brain surgery curves over his left ear. An upside-down horseshoe.
Pedestrian Acts
| May 30, 2022 We were late for an appointment. I wove through the afternoon crowd at a quick clip with my son and daughter, nine and six, following behind me like ducklings. Head down and shoulders bent, I had the posture of someone punched in the gut.
Into the Answer
| May 23, 2022 Your high school teacher mother taught you a trick for taking comprehension tests: always skip ahead to read the questions before the passage.
Things to do in the Belly of Despair
| May 16, 2022 Blow out the candle that burned for his last days. Dump the OxyContin and morphine in the cat litter like the hospice nurse told you to do. Touch his cheekbones that emerged like knives these last few weeks.
Everything You Hold Onto in Your Body Lets Go
| May 9, 2022 In autumn, my massage therapist comes to the barn, plugs in her electric pot to warm the large black stones she regularly returns to the river, whose current removes things bodies hold onto: the ache of arthritic knees, tight pelvises, a woman’s chorus of sharp edges, shrill songs of sore muscles and little heartaches.
On Turning Forty-Four
| May 2, 2022 This was a particularly hard number for me, and in the back of my mind, I knew it was because the late Nora Ephron, in her book about aging as a woman, wrote about how much she regretted not wearing a bikini the entire year she was twenty-six and suggested to anyone reading that they “go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're forty-four.”??
Tea
| April 25, 2022 At every lesson, she serves me tea. She steeps it with cardamom and swirls of evaporated milk then pours it steaming into “my” cup—a white ceramic blue-flowered mug—and adds a heaping spoonful of sugar.
Walk
| April 18, 2022 I’m at my desk, playing with the idea of taking the day off, when the phone rings, and shit, it’s the landline, the number I dread, the one on too many contact lists and credit card applications to ditch, and unfortunately it’s in the bedroom, across my office and one hallway away, and even worse, I have to answer it...
The Fawn
| April 11, 2022 Hunting was a source of food, the main recreation, and a rite of passage. Everyone hunted. Still, I had a choice. It was dusk, and my father and I sat beside a crop field, plowed over in the fall. We watched from woods that earlier were full of birdsong, canopied by oak, cottonwood, and pecan, when two deer appeared—a doe and its fawn.
Delicate as a Hummingbird's Heart
| April 4, 2022 This past Saturday, the fire burning on the north side of the river jumped a ridge and lit another hillside of drought-stricken timber, sending a plume so high that the air turned red with the seared skin of Douglas fir and larch.
The Last Pie
| March 28, 2022 I take my grandma to the grocery store. While perusing the produce, I mention that it is my father-in-law's birthday. She takes that to mean we are making a pie, and who am I to remind her that she doesn't make pies anymore?
Uprooted
| March 21, 2022 The day Papaw Laster kicked out Mamaw, just before their divorce, our pickup pulled up to their porch. Daddy worked in the bed, stacking and arranging furniture handed to him by Papaw. Mamaw stood silent, looking through boxes as they passed her, thirty-five years of accumulated belongings.
Dandelion Fritters
| March 14, 2022 Fingers flower-yellow. I want to make a poem from those words, but as always, line breaks trip me up like wires at ankle-height. Still, yes, my fingertips are tinged yellow, blessed by the blossoms of dandelion suns.
Istalif, Afghanistan, 2004
| March 7, 2022 We picnic by firelight in the bombed-out carapace of a hotel, where a guard in tattered shawls sips tea, cradling his gun. Beyond the balcony, mud homes jut out from the snowy hills.
