While the last few days have challenged my definition of dry, the weekend was as spectacularly beautiful as they come.

Here are three beautiful things from my week past:

1. It’s been months since Karen and I managed to get one another on the phone. Finally, she suggests meeting for lunch via our cells. Although she’s talking from the grounds of a monastery and I from a downtown park, it’s almost (if you tilt your head and squint) as if we were both at a picnic table together watching ants steal bites of her muffin and squirrels climb the trees. Honestly, it’s the best use of a midday hour I’ve had in a long time.

2. Rudi and I head over to Virginia for a Tour de France viewing party. As chair of the local cycling club (which is hosting the shindig), Rudi knows everyone in the room and is eagerly sought after by them all for a word or two. I enjoy watching him chat, because unlike me, he really enjoys it. I have a few brief conversations with some very polite cyclists, but am completely content to knit on my sock and split my attention between the Tour stage on the big screen and the Mets game on the smaller ones.

3. My cell rings early in the afternoon on Saturday. It’s Rudi, who is out in the Virginia countryside on a typical weekend bike ride. Immediately a frost forms around my heart. Why is he calling when he should still be on the bike? Is it someone else using his phone to reach me? It turns out he has had an accident, but is mostly okay. While one bike wheel is out of commission, Rudi’s corporeal injuries are of the scrape and bruise variety, painful in the moment but easily healed from. I breathe a deep sigh of relief.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world?

It’s not until you spend a couple of hours listening only to birdsong and wind blowing through trees that you realize how much ambient noise there is in the city. Although I live near a happening area of town, I would describe my block as a relatively quiet one. And, yet, Sunday afternoon, I kept pausing along our hike to marvel at the lack of noise. Oh, sure, there were sounds — in addition to the birds and the wind, cicadas whirred past, unseen animals occasionally crashed through the woods, frogs kerplunked through puddles in their hurry to escape us, and the earth crunched under our feet, grass whistling in our wake. But they were actual, discernible sounds, rather than the omnipresent buzz of urban life that you don’t notice has settled into your head until it is lifted. (more…)