Blog : Beautiful-Things
Recovery
| January 4, 2015Construction resumes in my Las Vegas neighborhood. The trauma of recession recedes. Now pick-up trucks, cranes and other wheeled monstrosities I cannot name block the streets as custom homes begin to take shape. “That’s great” people say. “Just think of your property values.” “No more of those ugly empty lots.” Except that I love those lots...
Skipping
| December 29, 2014 It’s nearly dinner time in Mweso, a small village in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, but the nuns I’m staying with insist they don’t need my help preparing it. So I relax on the porch and watch the road across the clearing, where villagers walk by on bent knees, flanked by tall trees with leaves like unfurled swan wings. The war is near, but not here, not now.
The Best Time
| December 22, 2014 Nighttime is the best time. I peek in and watch him sleep in his dim room. Sometimes he talks in his dreams. "Mansion Hills, yeah, yeah. Mansion Hills. Good old 2807," and I know he’s wandering through his house and his neighborhood, a nice enough neighborhood, but with a name far above its station.
Lost Tribe
| December 15, 2014 We called it "seek and go hide" because we thought it sounded cooler. In summer we’d play all day long. After quick cereal breakfasts, we’d gather on our rural street—aged six to ten or so, Lee jeans and tattered tees, mosquito bites like satellite maps on our elbows.
Playboy
| December 8, 2014 When my mother caught Chris and me looking at Playboy, we knew we were in trouble, but to my surprise she did not get angry. She took me into the house and pulled out the large glossy art books with paintings by the Impressionists. “A woman’s body is beautiful,” she told me.
Turkey Soup
| December 1, 2014 On Thanksgiving, after the turkey is carved and gutted – after we slice through half of the twenty-pound bird my mother insists on ordering, though there are only ever seven of us for dinner – my father and grandfather return to the half-spent carcass and harvest the rest.
Raindrops
| November 24, 2014 A thunderstorm breaks this morning. Afterwards, my nine-year-old daughter calls me to come outside and look. I go, resisting the temptation to finish washing the dishes first. My youngest child won’t be young much longer. The soft, still air feels like forgiveness after the sky’s wild outburst. My daughter is admiring hundreds of raindrops clinging to spider webs in the corner of our front stairs. I usually remove these webs with a flick of the broom. But not today – they are transformed, bejeweled, and their splendor leaves me powerless to disturb them.
Rocket Scientist
| November 17, 2014 As a child, when adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had plenty of answers, but they all sounded like Halloween costumes. Race-car driver. Astronaut. Olympic track star. My father was a rocket scientist for NASA, so the idea that a person could be anything, in this world or beyond, was real to me.
The Giant Dipper
| November 10, 2014 When I ask her “What was the greatest adventure of your life?”, my grandmother grows quiet. Like all questions I have ever asked, she takes this one seriously. I watch her lips part along their narrow seam, the glint of gold visible between her two front teeth.
Missing
| November 3, 2014 You have been ours for ten months, and tomorrow, the state will return you to your mother. Not ours, of course. We know. Foster parents have no rights, not really. Friends and family of foster parents certainly don’t, no matter how many braids we tie, or school assemblies we attend, or baths we draw. I know the words on your spelling list for next week--you’ve been struggling with affect and effect--but it doesn’t matter, because tomorrow you will go home, and though we don’t know it--though we give you our phone numbers and beg you to call, we will never hear from you again.
Last Lure
| October 27, 2014 Waiting to take the ferry across Alaska’s Russian River to the more fruitful south bank, I poke around the breast pockets of a fishing vest I haven’t worn in years and come up with a fly, one tied by my father at my kitchen table in the late 1990’s. I know this, because Dad always pried the business end of the hook a little more open when he finished. The hook is dressed in hunter orange hair, wrapped tight on the shaft with black thread, secured with strokes of my clear nail polish.
Trike
| October 20, 2014 Depending on whom you talked to, it was either a recumbent bicycle or an adult tricycle. There was a big difference between the two terms. “Recumbent bicycle” sounded like a serious piece of machinery, and called to Louise’s mind old men who wore spandex shorts and sucked packets of energy gel. “Adult tricycle,” though, sounded too special, something for people who could not ride a two-wheeled bicycle, and well, who couldn't do that? It was like saying “Adult crib” or “Adult diaper”—something for the very old, the almost gone from this world.
Edge of the Chesapeake
| October 13, 2014 My legs dangle off the dock. Clear water flows under my feet. Rows of low waves move toward me in slow parallel lines, disappearing below the boards. A white streak of light runs the crest of each wave, and the slightly shadowed troughs glisten powder-steel blue. I can see to the marsh bottom. Evenly spaced ridges in the mud look like imprints of the wavelets on the water’s surface. In my throat rises a feeling of being filled, but at the same time, longing.
Rain
| October 6, 2014 Our children are up to their knees in the waves before we notice the dark cloud above the lake, a blur of rain below it, moving toward us. As I wade out to them, the cloud comes closer, and we return to the beach. Within minutes the sky darkens overhead and the first chilly raindrops strike bare shoulders and backs. Under towels wrapped around us, token protection against the rain, we huddle together while other bathers retreat, leaving us alone at the water’s edge in the rain. Then I see my granddaughter, the ten-year-old, still standing in breaking waves and falling rain, smiling at us, shrugging nonchalantly, never flinching.
Holding
| September 29, 2014 My sister and I live on either side of sixty. We've been mothers half our lives. Visiting her in Oregon, Ashland, running a steady hundred degrees for days into weeks, we head to Lake of the Woods for the coolness of lake water and wind in the pines. Winding up the mountainside and back through our lives, our four children are never far from our conversation, like our own childhood—childhood, singular, as we shared it, for better or worse, till death do we part. One minute I'm driving my sister's Honda Fit through the forest; the next instant something bounces from the trees onto the road in front of me like a basketball, and that color, and stops.
Chalk on Pavement
| September 22, 2014 At the far end of the empty park-and-ride lot, a silver Toyota jerks its way across the yellow painted parking lines in starts and stops. Someone, presumably, is learning to drive. Sprawled sideways on the ground, I pull an oversized piece of pink sidewalk chalk across the uneven cement, my hand echoing the jerks of the car in an attempt to carefully form letters on a square of pavement next to the bus shelter, the rough concrete cold under my hands.
Sign Language
| September 15, 2014 The motion of the body. Exchange of truths. Listening without the ears. Telling without the mouth. My daughter points to her chin and signs, my favorite then points to a moth that bumbles through the air on the other side of the sliding glass door. When the moth lands on the door, she moves toward it. She presses her hand on its glass. Wing against wing. The words she will fling through the twitch of her knuckles, the clasp of her palms, the flap of her wrists. Years and years of words, of stories that reach past hearing, past telling. Stories that reach into the skin.
Wildflowers
| September 8, 2014 To the right of my childhood home, where the grass melted into a thick wood, our tree’s steady wooden arms embraced two sisters and their imaginary games. I remember low branches covered with lichen and soft moss, just a foot or two above dark soil. The dip between branch and trunk served as a sort of woodland lap, a seat to welcome even the most unlikely tree climber. From early morning, we slid our hands across peeling birch bark while our feet peeked from beneath a cap of bright, green leaves. By day’s end, sticky, brown sap stained sleeves, palms and pant legs.
The End of the Movie
| September 1, 2014 Today: summer afternoon on the front porch as thunderheads grow over the top of a giant oak. In the yard you perform perfect cartwheels, your legs long and straight in the air. Watch this, Daddy, you say, and execute another textbook cartwheel before you bounce up the steps to sit in my lap and rest your head against mine. You stare at the darkening sky. A breeze lifts your hair as distant thunder rumbles. This is like the end of the movie, you say.
Half-Lady, Half-Baby
| August 25, 2014 We’re in our bunk beds. Summer in western Pennsylvania, windows open. Someone nearby mowed his lawn not too long ago. The carnival is in town behind the fire hall, and earlier tonight, we stuffed ourselves with cotton candy and elephant ears. In the darkness, we hear the barker for the freak show. Come see her! Half-lady, half-baby!
Ceremony
| August 18, 2014 Spring struggles through enough days to offer tulips. They've popped up in every garden lining the street, and a few reach from the corner where Indie, my twelve-year-old daughter, and I turn toward home. This is our end-of-the-day walk with our dog. A few nights ago, she picked two of the tulips—red-pink petals, black anthers—and put them in a mason jar on my nightstand. Tonight, she asks if she can pick one for herself.
Lilac
| August 11, 2014 The scent in the air is familiar this last day of spring as I push my granddaughter's baby carriage, strolling the new neighborhood where my son and his family have moved. I spot the purple lilacs just above my head, blooming in splendor on tall bushes surrounding a stately home. I pull a branch down and push my face into the luxuriant bouquet, breathing their fragrance full measure. No lilacs grow in the subtropical clime where I've lived for decades.
Storied Walls
| August 4, 2014 The wall outside my window is a bending patchwork -- out of plane, out of level, sloping in opposing directions; each one of its red bricks is imperfect like pottery and bread -- shaped by hand and baked in fire. It is a fragment of the thick red halo that once wrapped this whole city, was once a part of its strategic embrace. Though these ancient walls have been torn by gravity and time, the city still breathes inside them.
Digging for Gold
| July 28, 2014 My four-year-old niece, Cheyenne, runs toward me, jumps into my arms when I arrive at her house in the woods. I pull her up, our faces are close. She smiles, raises her hand. "Can I see your pretty teeth?"
Late Spring
| July 21, 2014 Another chilly, overcast afternoon. From my nest on the sofa, I stare out the window at the yard, where dead grass outlines piles of dirty snow. The gray sky mutes any hints of greening in the pines and spruce. It would be a fine view in March or even early April. But it's mid-May, and I am as crusty and frozen as the lingering snow. A flash of brilliant yellow startles me; a thunk pulls me to the back window. On the porch lies a quivering feather ball, yellow mottled with dark gray-blue and black. A bird hit the window. Its breast feathers pulse, golden and glowing.
Skipping Stones
| July 14, 2014 I am standing with my children in the bed of river rocks that have been broken and smoothed to flat disks, millennia wearing away the rough places. My daughter gathers stones and skips them along the shallow surface. As I dip my hand into the river to retrieve a couple pebbles, I see the stones I wear on my left ring finger, glistening in the creek. They are new and old, ancient in their creation and recently purchased by my husband of ten years. Five are on my wedding band—diamonds I deemed “stones of remembrance” after we married. Stones like the Israelites carried through and across the Jordan, stones the children could see later and ask, “What do these stones mean?”
Ritual
| July 7, 2014 Most nights I nurse my four-month-old daughter to sleep. The internet connection is terrible in our bedroom, the light thrown by the little green glass lamp not enough to read by, so I end up sitting in the semi-dark, looking across the bed to the window, or down upon the face of my baby in her steady, drowsy pleasure. The first couple of months, I listened to the dry rattle that preceded the radiator's strange atonal song. I watched ice crawl up the sill, watched storms fling themselves across the prairie, flapping tree limbs across the neighbor's outside light.
Bolt
| June 30, 2014 You couldn’t go where you wanted so you settled for walking the George Washington Bridge, no one’s favorite. It is a fixture You couldn’t go where you wanted so you settled for walking the George Washington Bridge, no one’s favorite. It is a fixture though, speared deep into rock on both sides of the river. It seems so solid, the bridge, so much of itself, one color, of the sky on a forgettable day—solid. On the pedestrian overpass, not in the cars, you hear the cars, and they sound like old men in a sick ward, wheezing, coughing, insides unsettled, towing the tonnage of themselves. The bridge bears all their weight, a servant of transience, of betweens, ruled by its little gains and losses.
Peaches
| June 23, 2014 The peach's soft flesh is so barely protected by its thin and fuzzy skin that I think it can't possibly be serious, but rather a jubilant sunburst, radiant and unworried in the brief noon of its summered existence, simply satisfied with the bright sweetness of its being.
My Father's Shoes
| June 16, 2014 The day my father died, my husband and I drove in the bright, tilted light of autumn, past farms, pastures, and ponds, finally arriving at the orchard. We parked the car, picked up two half-bushel bags to fill, and walked up the trail of powdered dust, fine as confectioner’s sugar, that led to the grove. That’s when I noticed them—my father’s shoes on my husband’s feet.
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