small things.
It’s been another long winter, and we’re starved for green and fresh breeze and air that’s not parched and brittle. The sight of a robin hopping from branch to branch outside the window is enough to spread a smile thick across my face. Even the cold rain feels luxurious, for the simple reason that it doesn’t need to be shoveled from the driveway.
We moved into this house in October, during the last glorious blaze of dahlias and cosmos in the beds, when a few straggling tomatoes still dripped off a weary plant. Quickly, things wilted and the green subdued before a pitiless snowstorm on Thanksgiving weekend put an end to the last vestiges of green and started the long slog of white.
Our home’s last resident was clearly a skilled, artful gardener who poured a lot of love into the placement and care of each plant. I imagined she would have planted hundreds of bulbs throughout the years, sunny daffodils and jewel-toned tulips that would fill the beds and shock my thirsty eyes, accustomed to the grayscale of winter, with color, texture, life. I ached to be knocked out by the vibrancy of it all.
But anyone who actually knows about gardening knows that’s not really how an April garden looks. In reality, it looks a lot like a March garden. Or a February garden, with less snow but more mud. The view out my back door looks pretty much the same as it has for the past several months.
Last week, in a fit of impatience, I headed out with my rake to clear the detritus of leaves and twigs from the beds, in hopes that tidiness could somehow summon shoots and leaves and petals. The wind still bit and the damp curled wisps of hair into my eyes and the only thing that I was turning up under the spongy layer of leaves and old grass was more spongy goo. Then, I stilled my rake in mid-air. Right beneath it lay a single, perfect, exquisite iris, so tiny that I could just as easily have missed it. I looked all around the rest of the bed, certain I’d suddenly see all the others I missed. But there was just the one. This minuscule, stunning iris only a couple inches high.
So I did what any sane person would do and knelt down in the mud, letting the wet earth soak through my jeans and kiss my knees, then brought my elbows down, too, and looked at the flower up close. It was all the more stunning because I had to stop and get down low to appreciate it. And even then, I thought it was kind of silly that there was only this one little bloom in a bed that could have fit thousands of these beauties. What a sight that would have been, I thought. If one was good, how great would a profusion of them be? I could have appreciated them from the other side of my dining room window as a blue and white cluster… without ruining my pants.
A few days later, walking in from the garage, I spotted a tiny glimpse of pink and yellow under a shrub. I gave in to my curiosity, despite the steady drizzle and my suspicion that it was a granola bar wrapper. And for the second time in a
A few days later, there was a tiny little bunch of crocuses next to the deck, each one no bigger than a toddler’s nose. I know, because my toddler put her nose in them, as she’s now seen her mother do several times in as many days.
It seems random, this scattering of such small, easily-missed beauties. In a season where our hearts long for the profusion of green grass and flower beds bursting with color, these tiny slips of intricate petals and leaves seem… unimportant? Pointless?
And yet, these tiny green slips are changing my heart for beauty. It’s no secret that I can summon up awe for massive tree limbs spreading over me, a prairie field that seems to go on into eternity, or the blaze of a summer sunset. I have a sneaking suspicion that standing in awe of these things is at the beginning of our quest to figure out what makes us human. To have our breath taken away simply because we’re standing where we are in the moment we are.
But it’s easier to be consumed by the grandeur of a sunset or the sparkle of stars on a lake, isn’t it? It’s a wide view. You simply have to look around and pay the slightest bit of attention. You don’t even have to stop moving. Much less kneel in the mud.
I’m finding there’s another kind of beauty. It’s smaller and quieter, less riotous. But for all that, it carries with it the possibility of touching a deeper place in my heart. It’s a beauty that makes you stop what you’re doing, bring yourself down to the earth, smell the ground and soaked leaves and old mulch, muddy your knees and elbows, and still your fingers as you reach to touch it. This is a beauty that confirms my best thoughts about humanity, that despite being so very small, we’re all the more precious, wild, cherished. Our world is so vast and sparkling and beautiful, and yet so small and sparkling and beautiful, and so are we. Do you see it?