Gerard Manley Hopkins

On a lark, my daughters and their friend found a lacy fern today, pressed it over a hard-boiled egg, wrapped it in a piece of tights one of the girls had worn to ballet class, and buried the egg in a nest of red cabbage leaves in a pot. I added vinegar and water. When it had boiled and cooled, the older daughter pushed away the soft cabbage leaves.

She held the wrapped egg in her hands for a moment while we guessed what would happen.

The egg was a beautiful shade of blue, the fern hazy enough to be clouds in a summer sky.

Could this be the appeal of egg hunts, beyond the chocolate? A wholly unexpected bit of beauty, sized to fit your hand? At the time of year in Vermont when all is variations of mud, scattershot with slushy snow?

…Nothing is so beautiful as spring —
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush…

Gerard Manley Hopkins

We rowed to the middle of Caspian Lake today, myself sprawled over the keel of the small wooden boat, the little child kneeling beside me. The older daughter welding the oars demanded, What are we doing?

I said, We’re hanging between the water and the sky today.

In the lake’s center, waves lapped against the boat, the oars clunked in their metal locks, a gull flapped by without a feather-whoosh of sound. I dove in, the water so clear I saw my kicking feet brushing all that water below, then raised my arms into the sky, an infinity of luminous blue broken with troubled storm clouds. Cool and sweet, the lake was fragrant as fields of growing hay.

Glory be to God for dappled things…

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.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”