As our plane began its descent into the Des Moines airport on Tuesday evening, Alyssa looked out the window and exclaimed, "It's GREEN!" In the twelve days we had been on the west coast the Iowa landscape was transformed from winter drabness to spring glory! Words are inadequate to describe the deep emerald green velvet of the spring grass, broken only by freshly plowed fields. The daffodils that border our driveway are just exploding into sunny blooms and the lilacs are budding, their promise of sweet fragrance perhaps a week away - just in time for all our family to arrive home for Randy's graduation. That's one blessing of this year's protracted, intractable, frigid winter - things are blooming later, which turns out to be just in time for our family's final reunion in this home where they grew up. I feel enveloped by grace.
"Grace and beauty are performed whether or not we sense them. The least we can do is try to be there." Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
This afternoon I sat in a church pew and was reduced to tears by the beauty of the music that poured out of the gifted finger tips of our sixteen-year-old friend, Katie, as she performed one breathtaking piece after another - Beethoven, Schubert, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff. The notes rolled in thunderous waves and spritely laughter from the grand piano to shimmer and vibrate in the air around us. I was smitten. Her two darling three and five-year-old sisters sat in the pew directly in front of me. They never even looked at Katie. They were too busy whispering to their girl friends seated in the pew with them and drawing pictures on the cards left in the pew for that purpose. It occurred to me that this was "old hat" for them. They have listened to Katie playing the concert grand in her living room at home for hours and hours every day for as long as they have been alive. They have become inured to the beauty by too much familiarity. It's part of the background "noise" of their daily lives. It doesn't dazzle them, as it does me.
I thought about all the "grace and beauty" that are performed around me in this place every day. As I live out my last spring in this place, at least for awhile, I want to notice all of it. I don't want to take any of it for granted.
On my way home from church I slowed to car to a crawl to watch three young rabbits playing chase in a yard ahead of me. They raced full bore in a single file line around the dirt-tickling "skirt" of a cedar tree. They looped around it again, and once again, before launching themselves off the curb in front of me and streaking across the road and out of sight.
Yesterday morning I stood at the window to our sun room for a long time and watched our geriatric, black dog and our adolescent, ginger and white tabby cat take a stroll around our yard together. They are different species, different sizes, different ages, and different genders, but they are "best buds." Annie,who is almost totally blind and deaf, stops for long sniffs. Rusty rubs against her legs and twines himself in and out under her belly. She moves on and he prances after her. In fits and starts they survey their kingdom, never more than six inches apart.
In the evening the three of us, my ancient dog, my goofy cat and I, took a stroll first around our yard and then down the road behind our house. The air, crisp with the scent of burning leaves, felt like more like autumn than almost-summer. We walked through the dark under a canopy of sky dancing with stars. We had the night all to ourselves while our neighbors were tucked away indoors. A blast of rock music leaked through a door, open and then shut again. The laughter of many voices emanated from a house where a party was in progress, as evidenced by the array of vehicles crowding their driveway. Lights glowed through closed curtains. We walked along the dark corridor, feeling just as solitary as if we were walking in the woods by our mountain cabin in the "off season." Companionable, unhurried, content. Beauty and grace abounded. I was glad we had shown up to witness the performance.
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