A profusion of roses in July. A roomful of expectant children’s faces on the first day of kindergarten. The nave of a Gothic church. The paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts. It is easy to discern beauty in the expected places.
Out of my mid-November window, the sea and sky are composed of myriad grays, nameless (in our language) and yet distinct from one another. I wander into my yard and spy fragment of color in the dull leaves and grasses. Beacon-like, they conjure images of girls in colorful party dresses long after midnight. Their fiery crimsons, burnt oranges, and breathlessly screaming yellows have hidden dormant under summer’s conventional greens. Now it is there turn to flicker briefly before being frozen, buried, and turned to rot by rain and time. I think of a friend who is facing a milestone birthday. I think of the splendor that sometimes flares before decay, its assets brought into sharper focus on its cusp. Beauty can be sharper, more intense, more poignant, in the face of its own mortality.
I’ll end by a quotation from Dylan Thomas: “Time held me green and dying / though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
