Beauty

Beauty will probably be the death of me. I pursue it relentlessly, seek it in everything from the pattern of rain on my windshield to meteor showers in the sky and mosaics of crushed leaves on the forest floor. Conventional? Not so much. You can keep the tiaras, sashes, painted faces, and lacquered hair that can withstand a hurricane without displacing a single strand. That’s not for me. And while I can appreciate a beautiful shoe, I love shoes best when they’re not on my feet.

The most beautiful I’ve ever felt was when I was 27 years old. I was in my car, a hand-me-down Buick Park Avenue that had been my mother’s. I was on Walton Way in Augusta, Georgia, at a red light with my sunroof open and delicious late-spring sunshine spilling into the car. I stretched into the sun, really feeling it on my skin, feeling feral and female, lost in the moment, eyes closed in pure sensation. When I opened my eyes, the man in the car next to me was staring as if he were witnessing Aphrodite’s birth. I suppose it was his moment as much as mine, but I have never in my life felt so fiercely feminine, even counting my wedding day.

When I consciously think about beauty, I think about the guy in American Beauty filming a discarded bag pirouetting in the wind on a sidewalk. I also think about him rejecting the conventionally beautiful blonde cheerleader and pursuing the quirky brunette next door.

I think about other things as well: blissful baritones, soulful cellos, electric guitars, and steel drums please my ear, and I love lovely language languishing on the page, lying dormant until read into my register, creating images in my mind, delighting me like a child’s smile. All of these are intrinsically beautiful to me.

Hawks’ great, sweeping wings and pointed predatory beaks, cedar and cypress, flowing rivers, autumn foliage, irises, wisteria, and azaleas in the spring. The first breath of forsythia bursting into a cascade of buttery blooms, honeysuckle and wild blackberries in the summer, the long shadows of winter.

The light in my husband’s eyes when he looks at me, a perfect cup of coffee, the look on students’ faces when knowledge locks into place and a new realization is born, the cascade of a freshly poured draught Guinness, a grand slam in postseason baseball, the violence of hockey, an egret on a rock in a river, a quiet town under a blanket of freshly-fallen snow, old cemeteries with stone fences and tombstones blown smooth by time, church steeples rising above a city skyline, the sun rising over the ocean and setting into salt marshes.

They say it’s in the eyes of the beholders. There’s a specific beauty bound to beholding, but ultimately, the moment is all that matters. The most beautiful thing of all is making the mundane magical.