1) The lilies on my table have bloomed. Don’t they looked just like a crowd of faces, all straining and trying their best to get your attention? Last week, I was given this bouquet as part of our goodbye at church – a jumble of carnations, roses and lilies. We took some of the roses to my granny’s grave early last week, but the rest of the flowers have stayed in a glass jug on the table. Slowly, as the days went by, the closed white lilies flushed pink and, more slowly than we could have imagined, they opened. One curled tentative petal at a time. This morning, they are absolutely, flagrantly gorgeous and the whole house is fragrant.
2) I heard a dulcimer today in the park. I was walking home from a morning meeting – one of those end-of-job-wrapping-up-the-details kind of meetings which tend to inspire twinges of regret. But the day was green and gold and there were a lot of tourists in the park, enjoying the summer morning and the view of the city. Then I heard the dulcimer. A little haunting, a little gimmicky. Perfectly July and almost sentimental. And the tune?
Home on the Range.
I loved it. Hokey busking gets me every time.
3) 
Beangirl wrote a poem. Just before breakfast (read – before coffee) she came to me with a fistful of papers and she wanted help making them into a book. I helped her cut paper to size to make pages and find some blue cardboard for a cover. We stapled in together and on the cover, she wrote A Little Book of Poems. She had two poems already written and lots of blank pages for more. But this one is perfect.
4) Look what I found on the website of the National Gallery in Ottawa:
This installation has travelled around the world and been experienced in many different kinds of spaces. It is enchanting, inviting, a little confusing and lovely. For years, I’ve been following reviews and write-ups of Cardiff’s sound sculpture, but I first met it at the National Gallery where it felt so beautifully at home. I even wrote about it for my final year undergraduate religious studies paper back in 2001. I love how human voices, cleverly recorded and presented, create a sense of sacred space. I was particularly interested in how people experienced sacred music in a gallery setting and so I sat on the floor and people-watched for hours. It was fascinating and moving. Repetitive and yet always different, too. Just like every crowd.
If you haven’t been, do. It’s worth a trip to Ottawa.
Which brings us to Beautiful thing #5
At the crack of dawn on Wednesday morning, the kids and I will be headed for the airport to catch a plane home to Canada. Home? Yes. Home and away from home and however you can untangle to strings of this transatlantic life we’re weaving. Home to Granny and Grandpa and the house where I grew up and to aunties and uncles and a whole mess of beautiful cousins, too. Beangirl remembers it from when we used to live in Ottawa, but Blue only knows it from our last visit and even those memories are hazy. Plum hasn’t been there at all and none of the cousins have even met him yet. So in this in-between time as we say goodbye to one stage of life and before we can plant our life in another, we’re going home and far from home. I don’t imagine that there will be antelopes to be sure and there are bound to be discouragements along the way but I wonder if we just might glimpse a few of those cloudless blue skies – from the airplane window, if nothing else.
