Blog : Beautiful-Things
Merriment
| May 2, 2016 I was walking to the store with my brother when we stumbled upon a father teaching his daughter to ride a bike. He was in his early thirties, the age my father must have been when he left us...
The Museum of Broken Relationships
| April 25, 2016 There's this letter on the wall in there that a young boy writes to a young girl during the Bosnian War. They meet at gunpoint, marching toward a van that will drive them to...
Dandelion
| April 18, 2016 A short and seasonal classic from the original 28 days of Beautiful Things, originally posted on February 21, 2014.
Concrete Hands
| April 11, 2016 The day the crumbling front steps of our house on 2 Baldwin Road were to be torn down and replaced, my mother gave me what seemed like the most incredible and unearned gift.
Brothers
| April 4, 2016 They hold hands when watching something new or big or frightening: waves rolling across the beach, fireworks, the part of the movie where Piglet can't find his friends.
Somniloquy
| March 28, 2016 Trained by his body to wake now every two hours, he doesn't much need her voice to tell him it's time for more meds. So at first, when he stirs from his makeshift bed on their floor, he thinks she's talking to him.
Mountains
| March 21, 2016 It is always almost raining. That's something they never tell you about Seattle; they talk about the rain, but not the days the air holds its breath.
Safety Popcorn
| March 14, 2016 When I was a young child, once a week and sometimes more, my father cooked homemade popcorn in the WhirleyPop then seasoned it with garlic powder, Parmesan cheese, and sea salt. He divided it into two separate bowls -- one big blue bowl and another white square bowl with red stripes, a gift from his mother.
Sneakers in Sand
| February 29, 2016 The baby's shoes were nowhere. That morning was spent in the chaotic swirl of cleaning and packing the vacation house. Countertops lined with coffee cups, milky-bottomed cereal bowls, last laundry loads, shouts up the staircase, don’t forget the shampoo in the shower! It was New Year’s Eve. We had a flight to catch.
My Father's Only Recipe
| February 22, 2016 First, take pork spare ribs. Hack them up with an impossibly large cleaver into bite-sized pieces. Rub them with a proprietary mix of star anise, black beans, garlic, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, ginger, and secrets. Never ask him what happened in Taiwan, or why his mother never spoke the name of her former husband again.
Stay With Me Awhile (repeat)
| February 15, 2016 In honor of Valentine's Day, please enjoy this selection from the Beautiful Things archives....
Keywords: beautiful things
Waiting for Owls
| February 8, 2016 Evening returns to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the land cools. Day follows the sun across the valley floor and up into the mountains in the west. Birds settle down for the night.
Back Aisles
| February 1, 2016 The library building was my body like your children are your body, like your spouse is your body. Its wood and glass grew out of my chest. It came with a key and code.
The Art of the Drought
| January 25, 2016 The art of the drought is to reduce all things to their outlines. Leaves fall. Plants skeletonize. Dry outlines of worms and lizards, victims of the heat, are marked on the asphalt.
The Begonia is Blooming
| January 18, 2016 You leave home. You move in and out of apartments in faraway places. None have a yard, and you dream about the green spaces of your childhood, where cottonwood floated between trees and covered the screen porch like a fleece. Then you move to the English Basement with a brick patio. You fill it with potted plants. Your begonia becomes a riot of pink petals. You touch its waxy leaves. It makes you feel wild again. It makes you feel more whole.
Sewing Notions
| January 11, 2016 After the funeral, my sister spreads the contents of our mother’s wooden sewing box across the kitchen table. Mom gave up sewing as she faded in old age, but she clung to these bits and bobs. We gaze at the jumbled spools of thread, loops of white elastic and packets of seam binder in yellowed cellophane. I spot the jar of odd buttons, a nest of tiny jewels from the past.
Recovery
| January 4, 2016 Construction 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...
Visitation
| December 28, 2015 On the porch, under a Blood Moon, our fire is dying down, so we wear wool blankets over our shoulders. We’re drinking cider warmed in a pan on the stove, splashed into mugs with whiskey. This cold is still new, still exhilarating; the season is shifting, like the roll of a wave against your body. Out across the salt marsh, somewhere deep in the pines, the coyotes begin to howl. It is a sound that is hard not to love, even as it ripples through you, awakening a fear that sleeps at the base of your spine.
The Natural Resonant Frequency of Glass
| December 21, 2015 We lingered after dinner in a cavernous ill-lit restaurant that was empty, except for my husband and me, and our two young boys, and a couple who were seated far on the other side of the room. Warm and full, we were in no hurry to suit up for winter, which waited outdoors.
Interruptions
| December 14, 2015 Seek stillness. Close your eyes, relax in the lotus position, and breathe deeply. But hold on tight. Search every corner of the cosmos and you find only a universe in motion.
The Ladder Tree
| December 7, 2015 Hand-built, smoothed gray with age, the stubby ladder rests against the old apple tree, its gnarled bark accepting the still, hopeful embrace of the rails and rungs once climbed by a child when this tree by its stone wall watched over a field of corn, or was it cows, instead of this fervent jungle – green vines wrapping bushes and spindly trees, sprung from seeds blown down by wind-flung torrents of rain, and allowed to grow, unchecked by the farmer, father of that child, both now long gone, their spirits left behind, lurking in nature’s veils that canopy the path, dappling sun into shade as we walk on a summer's day, wondering: what child, living how, climbed to pick, or to see, so long ago; and accepting, as we wander, our own graying but patient embrace.
Linda on the Beach
| November 30, 2015 We don’t know her, the woman who grins and waves as we wander north along Hollywood sand, bedsheets for yoga class billowing in our hands. But maybe, I think, we do know her from somewhere, and it’s not in our nature to be rude, so we wave, too. Linda is flapping like the lifeguard’s flag. Linda is talking about her lost keys, about her husband in the hospital, about the Marriott that won’t take her back now. We look at each other to acknowledge Linda is crazy, possibly homeless.
Peanut Butter
| November 23, 2015 What was that feeling last night, of chasing a thread of thought from sleep to wakefulness, back into sleep again, not quite sure at any moment whether I was fully awake
Here's What Happens
| November 16, 2015 HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU’RE WAITING FOR MORE TEST RESULTS FOR THE SUSPICIOUS SHADOW ON YOUR HUSBAND’S CHEST X-RAY: You give money to homeless people who say they want food. You stick around to talk to them when they seem lonely. You allow those drivers in traffic who are in such a rush to cut in ahead of you. You admit it’s not death that makes you shrivel into yourself and brings up those old whimpering voices pleading for safety; it’s dread of that conversation, of giving permission to one’s life partner to take that journey alone, without you.
In Perilous Times
| November 9, 2015 The Frank Lloyd Wright calendar hangs askew on your cubicle wall, the citrus skylights of July turning right angles into August in an attempt to create unity on a Tuesday morning when you’re wearing stripes and your socks don’t match. Your feet rest on a coil of cords that tangle dangerously under the desk and your coffee cup sits too close to the keyboard without a cover. You shoot a rubber band at a window not meant to open. It’s eleven in the morning and you’ve already eaten lunch. These are signs that we are living in perilous times.
Something Sweet
| November 2, 2015 I walk the farm of my childhood in search of the sugar maple. I want to trace the brown bark, slide my fingers down its furrows, roll its needle leaf points between my fingers. Beside me, Belle, my dad’s foxhound, holds her noble head high. She catches a scent, shifts into the prairie grass. I wear a light jacket. It’s early April. Forty degrees. Cold north air is losing ground to the surge of warmer southern currents. The sugar maple stands on a ridge alongside the old tobacco barn.
For the Birds
| October 26, 2015 Birds keep getting lost in my living room. It’s my fault, for leaving the doors open. For answering the knock of valley wind so strong it rips posters off the walls, comes pounding, shaking our wood-framed house with big fists, demanding to be let in. When they come, they’re puffed up in aerial flight, thinking they’ve found a new throughway from the construction site next door to the chicken coop on the other side of our house, only to thump-thump-thump their clavicle-breaking thump against ocean-view windows that just stand there, rude as a closed door.
Cold
| October 19, 2015 On the hottest days in San Vicente, I sit on the front porch of my host family’s house, sweat dripping from under my arms, dust turning to mud on my salt-streaked legs. I watch the heat shimmer up from the dirt road, dissolving into blue sky. On these days, I long for snow, hunger after the numbing cold of January in Minnesota.
Mercy
| October 12, 2015 The Italian museum had a gory multitude of blood-streaked Jesuses. But in one immense painting, he was flanked by two anonymous thieves--palms nailed, faces obscured, genitals exposed, legs cudgeled by a guard to speed their deaths. In the crowded gallery, I tried to ignore the pointy elbows of audio-tourists, the smells of cranky feet, the eye-splitting camera flash of a stealth rule-breaker--until a museum guard in brass buttons and crisp trousers stood accusingly before me.
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