The ghost of life/Gratitude Monday: All trades

It’s Gratitude Monday, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am particularly now that my trash and recycling are still being picked up. Every Monday, Tuesday and Friday, those guys are out there, doing their jobs, no matter how crappy the weather is. Same with the letter carrier—I’m expecting prescription refills, and they’re going to be in my mailbox in a day or two.

When almost everything is shut down around us, it is an extraordinary mitzvah that these services continue just as though there’s not a pandemic throttling the world.

While I’m talking graces, have you noticed what pleasure there is just getting out and walking around your neighborhood? The other day I was just strolling around my cluster. I was trying to shoot through a cloud of white dogwood blossoms into the cobalt blue sky in someone’s front yard, which is a total crapshoot when your camera has only a screen, not a viewfinder, and a woman came out to see what I was doing.

(Badly, as you can see:)

Well, I told her and she replied that I was welcome to take all the pix I fancied, and we got to talking. It turns out that the HOA had wanted her to cut down the dogwood, because HOA, and she shut them up by reminding them that dogwood is the Old Dominion’s state flower. Turns out that many decades ago she originally had a pink dogwood, which died from something. And then a year or so after they pulled it out, this little sapling started up. Lo—it was a white dogwood. Carolyn (that’s her name) thinks a bird carried a seed from one of the other dogwood trees in the cluster.

I love that story, and I love the joy I feel when I get out and notice the little beauties around me.

So today my entry for National Poetry Month is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty”. Just the first line opens me up for the joy and the loveliness that’s all around us, in both nature and the work people do to make our lives easier.

“Pied Beauty”

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.