sprite writes
broodings from the burrow

May 7, 2009


fame!, little fingers, and a good end to the day
posted by soe 5:40 pm

As Clare pointed out in last week’s comments, I have been blogging three beautiful things each Thursday (and on the occasional off day, as well) for more than four years now. If you look through the TBT archives, that gives us 24 pages totalling 232 posts on beautiful things. Even not accounting for the posts where I had seen so much loveliness it spilled past three items, that still gives us roughly 700 small moments of beauty noted since 2005.

Clare herself will mark the fifth anniversary of her blog, Three Beautiful Things, on May 18. She records three pleasurable moments every day and is narrowing in on 5,500 beautiful recordings over the course of her tenure. Clare, I salute you!

I write this introduction in part because it’s been a rough week. Work has been hard. Personalities have conflicted. It seems like the sun may never come out again. And yesterday, a student at Wesleyan, where I worked for seven years and the source of my master’s degree, was murdered by a stalker a block from where I used to live. It’s weeks like these when beauty seems secondary to hatefulness and ugliness and malaise. Yet that’s probably when it’s most important for me to note down that life is not without hope and that the rain leads (eventually) to rebirth.

1. At the ballpark, a horde of teenagers come rushing toward me on the concourse. They are skipping. And singing.

2. A woman and her young son sit on the bus. The baby is sucking his pacifier, his head on mom’s shoulder. His hand reaches toward her cheek and gently caresses it.

3. Susan and I head downtown to meet up with Michael and Julia. We sit by the fountain for a while, watching a duck make a water landing (as opposed to using the duck ramp on the far side of the pool). Then we head up to the tea shop and sit outside and drink warm beverages and eat cookies and talk. It rains a bit off and on, but it doesn’t matter.

Category: three beautiful things. There is/are Comments Off on fame!, little fingers, and a good end to the day.