I tried to pay extra attention to beauty and small kindnesses, yesterday, I suppose because my heart was hungry for distraction and gentleness. Maybe your heart could use the same. It seems a smallish sort of thing to give, tonight, but I give it with hope and love:
There is a birch tree that in these cold months is all soft gray, silver and whispers of white tipped with deep red-brown clusters of sleeping leaf-infants, waiting for spring to unfurl them. They grow on the land west of the FH property and against the blue sky give a color set that means winter to me. I saw one as I walked to the Cheese Shoppe. There was a child's swing tied to one of the lowest branches.
I was able to be patient without difficulty when I was at the Cheese Shoppe and some elderly ladies were insistent. One of the clerks noticed and his small acknowledgement was a kindness.
There is a row of three tall true pines between two houses on Grape Street. I hadn't thought about it before, but they are the trees of play and make-believe from my two, three-year and six-year old childhood and I like them better than all the other coniferous trees with their long needles and blue-less green. I know the sound of the wind in them, the smell of them in the sunshine and the shape of their bark patterns. I find their needles gentle and graceful compared to the spruce or fir. They are comfort trees.
The clouds in the evening sky were lenticular in one part and mare's tails in another. The mare's tails remind me of the sky-scape at the FH because they are common there. The lenticular ones were literally silver-lined and beautiful with the gold and blue sky behind them.
There was a little dark-haired girl whizzing down the street next to the park on her scooter. She was a tiny little thing with her mother trailing a fair way behind, pushing a stroller. I was afraid the little girl would ride right into the intersection at the north end of the park, but at the last minute she swerved onto the sloped corner, dropped her scooter and went running along the sidewalk. There was a kind of joyful look-at-me-be-free-and-able attitude in her little body as she did it.
My cashier at Sprouts (oranges for 19 cents/lb!) was giving cheer with her thoughtful little conversations as she did her work. I thanked her for it.
