My Dad was never the world's best guitar player, but he had lots of music in him and he came from a place where music mattered and was essential to life. He scraped and bought a Gibson L model in 1964. He took some lessons and used his ear. He would strum and play "Five Foot Two Eyes of Blue" and the "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds" Never for long though. He'd take his guitar out, play for 10 - 15 minutes and put it back in its case and the case would go back in the front hall closet.
Music is my life. I play, I teach. I never really touched Dad's guitar. Not because he wouldn't let me, it just seemed too special. It was really well taken care of. As he got older he couldn't play as much, I convinced him to set it up on a guitar stand so he could just pick it up and play, and he did, for awhile. Until his Parkinson's Disease got so bad that it was no longer possible. The guitar has a sunburst finish, and there is wear on the fretboard , but mostly in first position where he liked to play. The white tuning pegs are still hard to turn. There are a few little dings here and there, and the grain is very visible through the finish. It's a parlour size with a narrow neck. But it's the sound of that guitar that makes time stop and brings my Dad to me. When he was dying in the hospital he asked me if I had brought his guitar home yet, I hadn't. He said "Jackie, just take it, it's yours." I couldn't do it until after he was gone, but now it's mine. It's one of my most prized possessions. 3 of my 4 kids learned to play on that guitar at Grandpa's. The beauty of it lies in what I can't see - in its sound, its stories, its imperfections, and the love that it was given with.
Jan 21Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Holly Huitt, Carmen Radley
After losing two beloved golden retrievers to cancer within a six-year span, I told my vet, “I can’t do this again.” She had just put my second one to sleep. She told me about her dog, a collie mix, and said there was a woman with a rescue group who came in about once a month. Would I want her number? Sure, I said.
Nine days later I was dragging my husband and daughter to a woman’s home to look at her collies. I wanted to see if I liked the breed. They were wooly and not what I wanted. But she was fostering a young mix, a smooth collie-shepherd who had big brown eyes -- soulful shepherd eyes -- and the cutest ears that stood up at times and bent forward and pivoted at others. He had a long pointy snout and brown spots on his white paws. His fur was soft as a mink.
My daughter only wanted a golden. But this mixed rescue, Marty, rail thin from being abandoned, had a sweetness about him and I fell for him. A week later he was ours, renamed Chase as a concession to my daughter (she was obsessed with Chase Utley of the Phillies).
Chase’s first week home he destroyed a sofa and pooped twice in my daughter’s bedroom (revenge for her bratty non-welcome). But he followed me everywhere like a baby duckling and one by one we fell in love with him. He stopped cowering around men as my husband became his Daddy and earned his trust. He won over our daughter who became his fiercest protector and grew up to tattoo his silhouette (one ear up, one bent) on her ankle.
He doesn’t lick, will randomly bark in an empty room, refuses to eat unless we decorate his food with toppings, doesn’t play ball or like toys, and hates to be brushed. He’s offended by closed doors and will use his snout to burst into my daughter’s bedroom every morning.
But he’s sweet and quirky and loves to go on walks. He still follows me everywhere. Once we accepted that he wasn’t a golden, we got to know his chill but sweet personality and all three of us love him completely. He has outlived both previous dogs and will be 15 this year (we think). Every day with him is now tinged with knowing this could end at any time.
Jan 21Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Holly Huitt, Carmen Radley
We had a table that was handed down from another family with five kids, and I think it had been handed down to them. We could have bought a new one, but we were about to move overseas, and I didn’t want to “invest” when it might get damaged in shipment. And anyway, I really loved it, even if the top needed refinishing (a project I always said I’d take on but never did). It was solid wood in a sort of cottage style, and some of the chairs had broken, so I bought blue chairs in a French cafe style. After our move, when the table was set up in our apartment in South Korea, we always thought about our friends who had given it to us and on lonely, homesick days, that was a great comfort. My youngest was just barely one at the time, and as she grew, the surface got scratched and painted on and lots of food spilled, and I never worried. I was just happy that there was room for all of us around it, and room for friends when we put the leaf in, that it had been a place of happy memories before us and that we were making more happy memories at it. When we moved last year, some circumstances more or less dictated that it was time to pass it on to someone else. I posted on a giving circle page, and a woman responded. She and her husband had four kids, and their table was so small that she would usually just sit on the couch to eat. I told her she’d need someone to help her move it into her place because it was solid wood and heavy, and she said, “I love solid wood tables.” When she came to pick it up, she told me she was pregnant with her fifth. I miss that table even though I love the one we bought to finally replace it, but I know it went to just the right family.
Jan 21Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Holly Huitt, Carmen Radley
Over 40 years ago my husband gave me a small ceramic pear with a cute painted face, shaped a bit like a blob, imperfect from the start. It’s two tiny eyes appear to spin. There was tiny black text across the belly that read ‘you make me spin’.
Sweet, gentle & loving words long gone.
The little guy has taken many falls over the years, and although encumbered by chips, fading color, and scratches here and there, he has served a purpose at our front door, before texting was a thing, by holding handwritten notes like ‘dinner is in the fridge’, ‘please hang the laundry’, ‘Kevin called’, ‘at ER, will call’.
He is there, still.
In fact, if I were to add tiny black text across his belly it would read “I’m still here”.
Jan 21Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Holly Huitt, Carmen Radley
I love me in spite of all my flaws, which opens me to loving others in spite of their flaws. It’s a gift that keeps on giving. I’m so grateful that , for me, I’ve lived long enough for this wisdom to come through.
I was raised in a home where being perfect was confused with being loved. Then I met my husband. It was love at first sight. His eyes caressed the scar on my cheekbone, which I’d gotten from a ski accident when I was eleven. He admired it because he sees scars as a sign of strength. When I heard him say this, I knew I was safe. He has since proven to love my so-called flaws.
May everyone feel this kind of acceptance.
Thank you for your gorgeous essay, Suleika, and the opportunity to reflect with this prompt ♥️
Jan 21·edited Jan 21Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
We moved from a house built in 1886 to a cabin built during the 1970s about 1 1/2 years ago. There are things I love about both. I miss the creaking floors and the old stone lined basement of the old house. We lived there longer than any place I've ever lived...25 years. The walls hold thousands of memories, ones I can no longer hold in my own brain. And I used to sit in the living room, drinking my coffee, and imagine the lives of the people who lived there before me. I mean the house was built not that long after the Civil War ended! It's like if the war ended in 2003 compared to this year. That's mind boggling to me. I wondered what the homeowners thought about the Civil War. But what makes my newer cabin home to me is the scarred and dented antique furniture I brought with me from the old house. I love the wood, the patina, every nick and scratch. They tell a story. A story of lives lived. A story of craftsmanship we no longer seem to value. We used to have an old screen door on this cabin. It creaked and slapped shut in a way that said "summer" to me. One year, family members stayed at the cabin for a week by themselves. That sound bothered them so they "helpfully" WD 40'd it for us. It was one of the first things I noticed when my husband and I came down from our old house to the cabin for a weekend. Silence! I was more disappointed than I should have been I guess. But we took the screen door off and got rid of it completely. To me, it was useless. The sound of an old screen door in summer was the only reason I had it there in the first place. Old, used, furniture, certain sounds, like ticking from an old clock or the creaking of floors or an old screen door comfort me in life in ways that new and shiny cannot.
My new apartment is the first floor of a house built in 1880. You walk in the front door and through a long hallway with windows before you reach the living areas. My brother joked that it was the world’s biggest mud room, since coats hang at one end and I have a spot for shoes and boots (and bird seed). When I was puzzling how to use the walls, I realized: it’s a perfect art gallery. So, I have hung a selection of paintings, prints and photographs there. When I go out, and when I come in, I walk by art. Instead being over things, like sofas and other furniture, my pictures surround me.
I have long loved the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi an aesthetic that finds beauty in things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. I love the mark of time on the human made. And that includes myself.
Jan 21Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Holly Huitt, Carmen Radley
Up the hill behind the pond is a tree that struck me as a minor wonder of the world when I first came upon it: an enormous white pine with seven trunks. Lateral branches from some of these trunks fused into others, creating windows gilded by the late afternoon sun.
It is more common to see white pines with straight, singular trunks shooting up over a forest of bushier trees. In colonial times, and in the times of the Lenape before that, they grew to towering heights, the tallest on record measuring 250’, the height of a 25-story building. The shape, rot-resistance and comparative lightness of these trees made for excellent masts, prompting the King of England to claim every sizable white pine for the Royal Navy, much angering the colonists, but that is another story.
This story is about the minor wonder on our hill. According to a visiting ecologist, the creature responsible for its peculiar form is the white pine weevil, or rather, a host of them. White pine weevils are rather cute little bugs with anteater-like snouts that seek out the leaders (or central trunks) of healthy, sun soaked white pine saplings. They climb to the top, plunge their proboscises into the soft young bark, and do their business, eating and laying eggs. When the larvae hatch, they feast on the insides, an activity that is often fatal to this part of the tree. However the lower lateral branches are spared. They curve upwards, as if to become new leaders. But instead of one, now there are many.
I was astonished when I took a class on pruning and discovered that such trees are considered malformed. Foresters want trunks to be singular and straight in order to produce valuable lumber. City planners believe that multiple trunks are less stable than singular trunks, and therefore dangerous. Arborists are sometimes called in to cut them down. But I was also amused: What better tree to have growing on a patch of land intended to be a haven for people with disabilities than a gorgeous, extravagantly malformed white pine?
Yet also, what clunkiness. The mal- and dis- of malformation and disability tend to shut down the mind, subjecting subjects under their heading to a category deemed lesser and imperfect. What if instead of being guided by a dis- or mal-, we were led to the idea of responsiveness? The white pine responds to the white pine borer. The bone responds to the accident, the nerve responds to the mutation, the memory to the assault.
Don’t get me wrong. I use the term disability frequently; it is a necessary word these days, and does not cause me offense. It is just good to remember that it can, as can many other words that try to pinpoint identity, diminish our perception.
In any case, I am glad our seven trunked pine would have never been claimed by the Royal Navy! Perhaps you would like to hoist yourself into the cup formed by its many trunks the next time you visit; if so–you will not be the only one. I often find scat and feathers of other creatures who spend time there when I am not around. It is a popular tree.
Many years ago a coworker bought a pendant with a Rhodochrosite stone. I think she bought it on EBay. The stone had a crack through it which she couldn’t love. I loved the stone the moment I looked at it. The crack made it special. No other Rhodochrosite looks exactly like this stone because of the crack. I bought the pendant from get. Imperfections are perfect. It makes everything unique. And it’s all subjective anyway. The pendant is really pretty and it has received many compliments when I do wear it.
Suleika I love your farmhouse. Old houses are characters. I admire the craftsmanship that went into building these structures. I love the windows that were blown and have the whorls. The craftspeople who worked on that Hoyle may have left behind a part of their spirit. I’m sure they are grateful you love the house they built.
There is no perfect. Perfect hoods us back. I’m trying to let go of what I think others perception is. I wonder how many drawings or painting never were created because of the fear of not reaching perfect. Or unwritten books. Perfection is overrated. I know this! If I could just manifest this into my daily life.
Jan 21·edited Jan 21Liked by Holly Huitt, Carmen Radley
Jericho’s lovely poem on crepe myrtles struck a chord with me. I believe what I love anyway are the things that are less than perfect in this world. The misshapen trees in the woods come to mind. There is a monster of a pine tree in the woods behind the house, all of its weight is in the top cluster of branches. It finally gave in to the wind and has been slowly falling, with its crown snarled in the crown of another tree, locked in a grip that is slowly bringing both of them down. They no longer reach for the sky, but for each other. Like two silver-haired friends who cannot stand alone, they hold one another up. There are more perfect trees all around them, but they are the ones I look to first when I open the curtains in the morning.
Suleika, I loved your reference to Annie Dillard. I'm reading a wonderful book, The Book of Nature by Barbara Mahany, and she quoted Annie with this:
“If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go . . . That which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.” I’m flint most of the time, with a little scorching around my edges.
I love the idea of extravagances. Most of what strikes me are the contorted and bent things in life, Not perfect, but more striking because of imperfection. I feel right at home among them.
Our first dining room table was a treetop we carted on the VW Bug in 1975 to our first apt. We added wrought iron legs and it’s been my office desk in my therapy office and at home since the 90s. I love the time we sit and think and breathe as i stare out the windows at the trees...we are imperfections growing and aging together.
Jan 21Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Holly Huitt, Carmen Radley
The quarryings of time, oh my heavens!! Words are so powerful.
Is there Flawed??
In the entry hall, my friend Margaret, had about 25 beautiful wedding photos framed. I asked her about her ancestry of all these glorious brides. She burst out, strangers!! They were loved on this day, and I want to honor them. Flawed and forgotten? Never.
I borrowed her idea, and gathered dozens of old photographs, when I would come upon them. Strangers, covered and smothered on my coffee table!! Flawed and not forgotten.
I opened my house to these strangers, my extended family members.
My dinning room has become my art studio since I have aged. My family dinner table from 1960’s is my watercolor table, my grandmothers dinning table from 1940’s is for pastels, the piano is also in that room.
All the paint brushes are in some of my aunties flower pots.
The dinner table, had marks on it, from a tool that looks like a pie cutter but it was for dart lines I think. Mom made all of our clothes on that tables. Cutting out patterns, and marking up the table.
Beautifully flawed . Still telling stories.
I think heaven may be in the flawed, delicious details.
My Dad was never the world's best guitar player, but he had lots of music in him and he came from a place where music mattered and was essential to life. He scraped and bought a Gibson L model in 1964. He took some lessons and used his ear. He would strum and play "Five Foot Two Eyes of Blue" and the "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds" Never for long though. He'd take his guitar out, play for 10 - 15 minutes and put it back in its case and the case would go back in the front hall closet.
Music is my life. I play, I teach. I never really touched Dad's guitar. Not because he wouldn't let me, it just seemed too special. It was really well taken care of. As he got older he couldn't play as much, I convinced him to set it up on a guitar stand so he could just pick it up and play, and he did, for awhile. Until his Parkinson's Disease got so bad that it was no longer possible. The guitar has a sunburst finish, and there is wear on the fretboard , but mostly in first position where he liked to play. The white tuning pegs are still hard to turn. There are a few little dings here and there, and the grain is very visible through the finish. It's a parlour size with a narrow neck. But it's the sound of that guitar that makes time stop and brings my Dad to me. When he was dying in the hospital he asked me if I had brought his guitar home yet, I hadn't. He said "Jackie, just take it, it's yours." I couldn't do it until after he was gone, but now it's mine. It's one of my most prized possessions. 3 of my 4 kids learned to play on that guitar at Grandpa's. The beauty of it lies in what I can't see - in its sound, its stories, its imperfections, and the love that it was given with.
After losing two beloved golden retrievers to cancer within a six-year span, I told my vet, “I can’t do this again.” She had just put my second one to sleep. She told me about her dog, a collie mix, and said there was a woman with a rescue group who came in about once a month. Would I want her number? Sure, I said.
Nine days later I was dragging my husband and daughter to a woman’s home to look at her collies. I wanted to see if I liked the breed. They were wooly and not what I wanted. But she was fostering a young mix, a smooth collie-shepherd who had big brown eyes -- soulful shepherd eyes -- and the cutest ears that stood up at times and bent forward and pivoted at others. He had a long pointy snout and brown spots on his white paws. His fur was soft as a mink.
My daughter only wanted a golden. But this mixed rescue, Marty, rail thin from being abandoned, had a sweetness about him and I fell for him. A week later he was ours, renamed Chase as a concession to my daughter (she was obsessed with Chase Utley of the Phillies).
Chase’s first week home he destroyed a sofa and pooped twice in my daughter’s bedroom (revenge for her bratty non-welcome). But he followed me everywhere like a baby duckling and one by one we fell in love with him. He stopped cowering around men as my husband became his Daddy and earned his trust. He won over our daughter who became his fiercest protector and grew up to tattoo his silhouette (one ear up, one bent) on her ankle.
He doesn’t lick, will randomly bark in an empty room, refuses to eat unless we decorate his food with toppings, doesn’t play ball or like toys, and hates to be brushed. He’s offended by closed doors and will use his snout to burst into my daughter’s bedroom every morning.
But he’s sweet and quirky and loves to go on walks. He still follows me everywhere. Once we accepted that he wasn’t a golden, we got to know his chill but sweet personality and all three of us love him completely. He has outlived both previous dogs and will be 15 this year (we think). Every day with him is now tinged with knowing this could end at any time.
We had a table that was handed down from another family with five kids, and I think it had been handed down to them. We could have bought a new one, but we were about to move overseas, and I didn’t want to “invest” when it might get damaged in shipment. And anyway, I really loved it, even if the top needed refinishing (a project I always said I’d take on but never did). It was solid wood in a sort of cottage style, and some of the chairs had broken, so I bought blue chairs in a French cafe style. After our move, when the table was set up in our apartment in South Korea, we always thought about our friends who had given it to us and on lonely, homesick days, that was a great comfort. My youngest was just barely one at the time, and as she grew, the surface got scratched and painted on and lots of food spilled, and I never worried. I was just happy that there was room for all of us around it, and room for friends when we put the leaf in, that it had been a place of happy memories before us and that we were making more happy memories at it. When we moved last year, some circumstances more or less dictated that it was time to pass it on to someone else. I posted on a giving circle page, and a woman responded. She and her husband had four kids, and their table was so small that she would usually just sit on the couch to eat. I told her she’d need someone to help her move it into her place because it was solid wood and heavy, and she said, “I love solid wood tables.” When she came to pick it up, she told me she was pregnant with her fifth. I miss that table even though I love the one we bought to finally replace it, but I know it went to just the right family.
Over 40 years ago my husband gave me a small ceramic pear with a cute painted face, shaped a bit like a blob, imperfect from the start. It’s two tiny eyes appear to spin. There was tiny black text across the belly that read ‘you make me spin’.
Sweet, gentle & loving words long gone.
The little guy has taken many falls over the years, and although encumbered by chips, fading color, and scratches here and there, he has served a purpose at our front door, before texting was a thing, by holding handwritten notes like ‘dinner is in the fridge’, ‘please hang the laundry’, ‘Kevin called’, ‘at ER, will call’.
He is there, still.
In fact, if I were to add tiny black text across his belly it would read “I’m still here”.
I love me in spite of all my flaws, which opens me to loving others in spite of their flaws. It’s a gift that keeps on giving. I’m so grateful that , for me, I’ve lived long enough for this wisdom to come through.
I was raised in a home where being perfect was confused with being loved. Then I met my husband. It was love at first sight. His eyes caressed the scar on my cheekbone, which I’d gotten from a ski accident when I was eleven. He admired it because he sees scars as a sign of strength. When I heard him say this, I knew I was safe. He has since proven to love my so-called flaws.
May everyone feel this kind of acceptance.
Thank you for your gorgeous essay, Suleika, and the opportunity to reflect with this prompt ♥️
We moved from a house built in 1886 to a cabin built during the 1970s about 1 1/2 years ago. There are things I love about both. I miss the creaking floors and the old stone lined basement of the old house. We lived there longer than any place I've ever lived...25 years. The walls hold thousands of memories, ones I can no longer hold in my own brain. And I used to sit in the living room, drinking my coffee, and imagine the lives of the people who lived there before me. I mean the house was built not that long after the Civil War ended! It's like if the war ended in 2003 compared to this year. That's mind boggling to me. I wondered what the homeowners thought about the Civil War. But what makes my newer cabin home to me is the scarred and dented antique furniture I brought with me from the old house. I love the wood, the patina, every nick and scratch. They tell a story. A story of lives lived. A story of craftsmanship we no longer seem to value. We used to have an old screen door on this cabin. It creaked and slapped shut in a way that said "summer" to me. One year, family members stayed at the cabin for a week by themselves. That sound bothered them so they "helpfully" WD 40'd it for us. It was one of the first things I noticed when my husband and I came down from our old house to the cabin for a weekend. Silence! I was more disappointed than I should have been I guess. But we took the screen door off and got rid of it completely. To me, it was useless. The sound of an old screen door in summer was the only reason I had it there in the first place. Old, used, furniture, certain sounds, like ticking from an old clock or the creaking of floors or an old screen door comfort me in life in ways that new and shiny cannot.
My new apartment is the first floor of a house built in 1880. You walk in the front door and through a long hallway with windows before you reach the living areas. My brother joked that it was the world’s biggest mud room, since coats hang at one end and I have a spot for shoes and boots (and bird seed). When I was puzzling how to use the walls, I realized: it’s a perfect art gallery. So, I have hung a selection of paintings, prints and photographs there. When I go out, and when I come in, I walk by art. Instead being over things, like sofas and other furniture, my pictures surround me.
I have long loved the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi an aesthetic that finds beauty in things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. I love the mark of time on the human made. And that includes myself.
Myself a work in progress-as a friend once wrote "scars are stronger stuff".
Up the hill behind the pond is a tree that struck me as a minor wonder of the world when I first came upon it: an enormous white pine with seven trunks. Lateral branches from some of these trunks fused into others, creating windows gilded by the late afternoon sun.
It is more common to see white pines with straight, singular trunks shooting up over a forest of bushier trees. In colonial times, and in the times of the Lenape before that, they grew to towering heights, the tallest on record measuring 250’, the height of a 25-story building. The shape, rot-resistance and comparative lightness of these trees made for excellent masts, prompting the King of England to claim every sizable white pine for the Royal Navy, much angering the colonists, but that is another story.
This story is about the minor wonder on our hill. According to a visiting ecologist, the creature responsible for its peculiar form is the white pine weevil, or rather, a host of them. White pine weevils are rather cute little bugs with anteater-like snouts that seek out the leaders (or central trunks) of healthy, sun soaked white pine saplings. They climb to the top, plunge their proboscises into the soft young bark, and do their business, eating and laying eggs. When the larvae hatch, they feast on the insides, an activity that is often fatal to this part of the tree. However the lower lateral branches are spared. They curve upwards, as if to become new leaders. But instead of one, now there are many.
I was astonished when I took a class on pruning and discovered that such trees are considered malformed. Foresters want trunks to be singular and straight in order to produce valuable lumber. City planners believe that multiple trunks are less stable than singular trunks, and therefore dangerous. Arborists are sometimes called in to cut them down. But I was also amused: What better tree to have growing on a patch of land intended to be a haven for people with disabilities than a gorgeous, extravagantly malformed white pine?
Yet also, what clunkiness. The mal- and dis- of malformation and disability tend to shut down the mind, subjecting subjects under their heading to a category deemed lesser and imperfect. What if instead of being guided by a dis- or mal-, we were led to the idea of responsiveness? The white pine responds to the white pine borer. The bone responds to the accident, the nerve responds to the mutation, the memory to the assault.
Don’t get me wrong. I use the term disability frequently; it is a necessary word these days, and does not cause me offense. It is just good to remember that it can, as can many other words that try to pinpoint identity, diminish our perception.
In any case, I am glad our seven trunked pine would have never been claimed by the Royal Navy! Perhaps you would like to hoist yourself into the cup formed by its many trunks the next time you visit; if so–you will not be the only one. I often find scat and feathers of other creatures who spend time there when I am not around. It is a popular tree.
Many years ago a coworker bought a pendant with a Rhodochrosite stone. I think she bought it on EBay. The stone had a crack through it which she couldn’t love. I loved the stone the moment I looked at it. The crack made it special. No other Rhodochrosite looks exactly like this stone because of the crack. I bought the pendant from get. Imperfections are perfect. It makes everything unique. And it’s all subjective anyway. The pendant is really pretty and it has received many compliments when I do wear it.
Suleika I love your farmhouse. Old houses are characters. I admire the craftsmanship that went into building these structures. I love the windows that were blown and have the whorls. The craftspeople who worked on that Hoyle may have left behind a part of their spirit. I’m sure they are grateful you love the house they built.
There is no perfect. Perfect hoods us back. I’m trying to let go of what I think others perception is. I wonder how many drawings or painting never were created because of the fear of not reaching perfect. Or unwritten books. Perfection is overrated. I know this! If I could just manifest this into my daily life.
Jericho’s lovely poem on crepe myrtles struck a chord with me. I believe what I love anyway are the things that are less than perfect in this world. The misshapen trees in the woods come to mind. There is a monster of a pine tree in the woods behind the house, all of its weight is in the top cluster of branches. It finally gave in to the wind and has been slowly falling, with its crown snarled in the crown of another tree, locked in a grip that is slowly bringing both of them down. They no longer reach for the sky, but for each other. Like two silver-haired friends who cannot stand alone, they hold one another up. There are more perfect trees all around them, but they are the ones I look to first when I open the curtains in the morning.
Suleika, I loved your reference to Annie Dillard. I'm reading a wonderful book, The Book of Nature by Barbara Mahany, and she quoted Annie with this:
“If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go . . . That which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.” I’m flint most of the time, with a little scorching around my edges.
I love the idea of extravagances. Most of what strikes me are the contorted and bent things in life, Not perfect, but more striking because of imperfection. I feel right at home among them.
Our first dining room table was a treetop we carted on the VW Bug in 1975 to our first apt. We added wrought iron legs and it’s been my office desk in my therapy office and at home since the 90s. I love the time we sit and think and breathe as i stare out the windows at the trees...we are imperfections growing and aging together.
The writing cottage is a palimpsest. New lives being written over the old, with traces of the previous lives peeking through. .
The quarryings of time, oh my heavens!! Words are so powerful.
Is there Flawed??
In the entry hall, my friend Margaret, had about 25 beautiful wedding photos framed. I asked her about her ancestry of all these glorious brides. She burst out, strangers!! They were loved on this day, and I want to honor them. Flawed and forgotten? Never.
I borrowed her idea, and gathered dozens of old photographs, when I would come upon them. Strangers, covered and smothered on my coffee table!! Flawed and not forgotten.
I opened my house to these strangers, my extended family members.
My dinning room has become my art studio since I have aged. My family dinner table from 1960’s is my watercolor table, my grandmothers dinning table from 1940’s is for pastels, the piano is also in that room.
All the paint brushes are in some of my aunties flower pots.
The dinner table, had marks on it, from a tool that looks like a pie cutter but it was for dart lines I think. Mom made all of our clothes on that tables. Cutting out patterns, and marking up the table.
Beautifully flawed . Still telling stories.
I think heaven may be in the flawed, delicious details.
Mother of five, four boys, one daughter.
Grandmother of 4 boys
Woman of 71 years, blessed and highly favored.
Flawed and present
Love you Sulieka