Blog : Beautiful-Things
A Walk on Wooded Isle
| April 20, 2015 Spring had been so long in coming. At last tree buds, gray-green and plump, were braving the frigid sunshine. I had left my office in only a thin windbreaker, with just my keycard in my pocket, my cold hands clasping the cuffs of my sleeves. I had intended to circuit the Japanese garden--gravel path, half-moon bridge, stepping stones across the dry pond--then go back to work. Instead I pressed on into the less kempt part of the park.
Fearless Eye
| April 13, 2015 I sat on the plank deck of a house in the forest and shared my watercolors and brushes with my nine-year-old nephew. I painted the chestnut-colored ponderosa pines with their puzzle-piece bark. I painted the blue morning sky and white clouds. My nephew said, "I want to paint that sunset we saw last night!"
Surf Check
| April 6, 2015 November on the coast. Cracking cold and painfully clear. We cram 12 of us in a one-bed cabin on the Quileute reservation, not caring about personal space or what is whose. In the morning we're up as soon as the sun starts to slide its slow half-circle around the horizon. It feels like you can see to Japan if your eyelashes don't freeze shut first. We pour weak coffee, put on puffies, and scramble stiff-legged over the driftwood toward the break.
Letter to a Ladle (Stainless Steel, $18.99, Purchased Three Years Ago)
| March 30, 2015 How glorious: the invention of soup! How stunning: the invention of fire to heat the soup! I've watched the water boil. I've witnessed my wife and her designs of scallions and carrots. I've studied the smell of garlic and cayenne pepper. It filled our hallways with the history of our families. Not once--Dear Ladle--did you fail to do the one thing you do.
Highway 13
| March 23, 2015 "Time after Time" played on the radio, static through icy Colorado. I wished I loved the man I was driving toward the way Cyndi Lauper loved someone once.
Fireflies
| March 16, 2015 Up in the air are hundreds of fireflies, like scattering sunlight. We—me and the man I've been seeing—pedal our bicycles through dusk on the Keystone Trail in eastern Nebraska. Neighborhood playgrounds and thickets of trees line either side of the cement pathway.
Grace
| March 9, 2015 "Thank you," I tell the manager, "for taking my order so late." The sizzle of the grill frames my words. "I appreciate it." "Not at all," he says. Sweat curls his hair. "Is a good time. We’re still open."
Red Wings
| March 2, 2015 A familiar sound breaks through the morning quiet as my dog and I head out for our usual walk alongside a rocky beach and the marsh that drains into it. Without even looking up, I recognize the rhythmic thwap, thwap, thwap overhead. It’s from the main rotor blade of a helicopter, airlifting someone from the rural island where I live to an emergency room on the mainland.
Army
| February 23, 2015 In southern Spain, in the military, in December, I once danced in a field of sunflowers. Or not danced, so much as sang.
Motorcycle Riders
| February 16, 2015 On the back of your motorcycle, somewhere between Leadville and Castle Rock, I plan our future together as we ride along jagged eggshell cliffs overlooking canyons whose gaping mouths open to swallow anything that falls.
Bananas
| February 9, 2015 While I eat lunch with my father today, he stares at the bunch of bananas in front of him. "They're so beautiful," he says. "They're so yellow." He smiles, then giggles. Who is this man?
Catching Snowflakes
| February 2, 2015 I remember childhood school days, just learning about the singularity of snowflakes, no two alike, the teacher said. At home, my sisters and I duplicated her classroom experiment, substituting white paper rubbed thick and waxy with black crayon for the black construction paper she had used. I stood in the snow with my arms stretched out before me, holding that crayoned paper out like a plate to catch sugared delicacies as they drifted down.
Night Dancing in the Kitchen
| January 26, 2015 It was country-late: the air outside getting cool and damp and purple. I sat at my grandparent's dining table making clothespin dolls while the crickets whined and Teddy-dog sat by the back door smacking his muzzle at errant flies. The doll project made me feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder. I clipped red and white checks and velvet strips from grandma’s quilting stash.
Thunderstorms
| January 19, 2015 He awakes crying just after 6 a.m. Hard rain pounds against the windows, and the sky is black as coal, electric with dances of lightning. But it is the thunder that woke him. It breaks in heart-stopping claps and low, penetrating rumbles. The violent sound is a noise he can’t make sense of. He reaches for me from the edge of his crib.
Hands like Sunrise
| January 12, 2015 From the riverbank I watch a great white egret on jointed stilts near a patch of tall reeds, calm as the shallows where it stands. My father would come here the way other people come to morning mass, this river his wide altar. Explosive, the egret’s yellow beak spears through its own reflection then bursts skyward throwing diamond droplets.
Maple Spile
| January 5, 2015 We called that hill of sugar maples at the end of Deacon Parker Road "the big bush." In March, with the sun dropping gold and the slosh of snowmelt soaking our boots, we hauled buckets of sap down from those endless trees to the waiting truck, back and forth till the air turned chill and our shoulders throbbed. We loved that time though--
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.
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