The Lovely Bones

10 Beautiful Things

9. Dry Leaves

There are no leaves in Arizona. There are stubby green things that yellow and fall off in a carpet of crackling wildfire-risk, but there are no leaves.

I think if everything in the world died and I was the only one left, I would miss leaves the most. On vacation to the East Coast in autumn, the trees were orange and red and yellow as if on fire. Then when the leaves fell, people walked on them. A leaf would become brown and wrinkled, desiccated, and shoes would crunch it into the pavement. Once it wasn't bright and golden, it was worthless. All the life was gone from it. There is nothing pretty about death.

And yet there are monuments to the dead. Great bronze statues immortalizing those who have gone before, who have done something that no one else did. Names, carved in neat lines into metal and stone. That is death, too. So why don't we shy away from it?

I remember freshman year of high school, the buses would stop at two schools. At the second, I sat in my seat staring out the window. All the trees along the side of the bus pick up lane shed their tiny green stubs at the same time. The gutters clogged with little bits of yellow from the flowers-that-aren't, to be swept away over the weekend. Then the dead things would fall again and the cycle repeated itself.

When there was wind, it picked up the leaves. They danced in eddies, sometimes falling, sometimes drifting away, somewhere else, somewhere not here. Even though they were dead, they went places. The world picked them up again.

Then in other places, where the trees dropped their leaves in great piles to wade through. Those leaves barely moved in the slightest breeze. A lot of those leaves are never picked up. They grow brown with age and disintegrate slowly until the winter snows cover them. When the snow clears again, they are gone. All things dead get buried eventually. No one remembers the leaves of the last autumn, only this one.

I think dry leaves are beautiful, strange as that may seem to those who acquaint beauty with glamour and makeup. But leaves on a tree are pretty, things to be smiled at and admired from afar. Dry leaves are ground beneath the soles of hundreds of shoes. Dry leaves are buried by snow and dry up in the sunshine. They become uninteresting and flat, slivers of the past trampled beneath the present. But they are broken up and become dirt and ash and fertilizer. We walk on dry leaves. We breathe them in. All the time we sweep them away into neat piles, we are creating order out of chaos. Life from the bones.

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it” (The Lovely Bones 320).

A Certain Slant of Light

10 Beautiful Things

10. Light.

I wake up to the blinds pulled shut and a dark, dark room. If I peer closely, I can see the outline of books against the far wall, and the faintest reflection on my computer screen. I wake in darkness, thin and fragile. The only light I see slips through cracks in the blinds, which are white and horizontal.

The light enters there. Morning sunshine is golden white, purer than the purest metal. Those fey strips of brightness are strangely lovely against the dark. They are neon letters written in a dead language, still alive and vibrant but unreadable. Someday perhaps I will understand what they say. Then, I know, I will have lived.

Slants of light decorate this strange Earth. In a prison cell in Somalia, the morning sun creeps through gritty bars. And a prisoner wakes in the darkness to watch the light. He doesn't know why it's so fascinating. The Sun has risen for millions of years, has cast all manner of rays on objects near and far, alive and dead. Yet this slant of light is special because it is his slant of light. The beautiful thing is not that the Sun is shining, but that the Sun is shining on these bars, in this place, on him. It is the loveliest thing he's ever seen. It is as delicate as hope.

Enter now the pink-bedecked bedroom of a five-year-old girl. Unicorns prance in wild lines across the walls, obscured by shadow. Her nightlight burnt out, plunging the room into darkness. And so she wakes with tentative blinks, wondering why there is no light to guide her, only the sunshine leaking beneath her floral curtains. It scares her. Her heart beats faster in an well-known rhythm. An ancient dance. Even as her mind registers fear, her eyes soak in the light. She doesn't know why it calls to her. It is a siren's song, these strips of piercing gold against the velvet dark.

Somewhere deep in the snowy mountains of Northern Europe, a thin woman wakes up late. She pushes up from the hard bed, resigned to the work ahead of her. Then she stops, her gaze caught on the sunshine creeping between boards in the wall. It is an ugly house she has, but it serves her well enough. Winters are spent hunched around a fire until only embers remain. Summers are spent chopping wood with callused hands. There is no time to waste staring at a trick of the light. But the way it shines carves pretty patterns on the wall, reminding her of all the things she dreamt of, until her dreams died beneath the weight of life. She is reminded of that weight every day. She never thought about her dreams until now, remembering what it feels like to plan and imagine a life beyond the constant cold and ache from work. The light stirs the shadows in her heart.

Light, that light, the light that throws away the dark of reality and reveals the truth nonetheless. Because that which is true is not always real. And from a little girl waking in a pink room to a prisoner watching the bars of his cells, they all feel the brush of light through the cobwebbed shadows.

A stir of brightness, a certain slant of light.

"Like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone" (A Certain Slant of Light).

Cherry Blossom Extract

I am constantly amazed by the progression of life. How one day, we are all best friends and then the next day a new routine sets in and we are no longer anything at all besides strangers passing at night.

It is also very curious how everyone loves each other but no one really likes one another.

I wore my track shirt to band last night, the one that says: "Don't do your best, do better than your best." If I was on the football turf with people that instead of trumpets and flutes wore spikes and throw discus, no one would have said anything. They understand the notion. Such is the world of track and field - numbers on scoreboards where milliseconds really do matter (at least in the sprints).

I kept getting comments from the band kids though. Not that they don't strive to do better than their best, but we aren't graded in any real way. We only have four categories to fluctuate in between and band is more of a team than I would consider track.

The comments I kept getting last night where along the lines of, "If you do better than your best, you have to do even better than that the next time and it will keep going and going! You'll never win!"

Exactly.

That is exactly how you win.

It was so easy to fall into routine at my shadowing. I would come in right when they opened and put my stuff down, talk about music and the differences between it and entertainment and what one I was truly working for. Then we'd lapse into a comfortable silence. Then, twenty hours later I'm not part of that routine anymore and it feels...fast as if I've gotten another grey hair or a wrinkle. I like both though, they make me feel distinguished.