Blog Post #8
Enchanted trees....
That’s how I think of Jacarandas. They sprinkle fairy dust underneath their
canopied branches of lavender blossoms. On streets lined with Jacaranda, rivers
of purple flood the curbs reflecting the swaying limbs above. I love
Jacarandas! I look forward to each May and June, when they’re at the height of
their enchanting color, their exquisite beauty, and their—what was that? Did I
hear someone say, “Mess?”
More than one
person who has a Jacaranda tree has told me how much they hate them and the
mess they make. But they’re so beautiful,
I protest. These people are beyond enjoying their beauty. All they can see is
the mess that follows the delicate display of their lithe, trumpet-like flowers.
Lavender petals that fade and dry and moosh and get tracked onto the carpet and
make it hard to clean up the yard. Pretty soon, I’m told, they wither and even become
ugly.
Here’s a truth:
messes and beauty go together; they walk hand-in-hand—opposites that not only
attract, but also cooperate. Beauty is almost dependent on a mess. Before I
have a beautiful jar of peach preserves, I have a kitchen full of bottles, pots
and ladles, sugar granules on countertops, paring knives, bowls of pits and slimy
peels, and sticky stuff just about everywhere. A real mess. But have you ever
stopped to admire a jar (better yet, a dozen jars) of freshly bottled peaches?
Beauty. Simple beauty. I make a practice of leaving jars of freshly preserved jams
and fruit sitting in neatly ordered ranks and files on the table for a day or two where I can admire them each
time I pass by. They make me happy. They radiate beauty born of months of
growth, harvest, honest toil, and…a mess.
So many messy
situations culminate in beauty: creating a work of art, reorganizing a closet,
sewing a new dress, preparing for and planting a garden, a haircut, making a
Thanksgiving feast. Probably the most rewarding of messy situations are labor
pains.
I can’t think
of anything more beautiful than a baby.
But even a brand new baby has to be cleaned up at birth—and frequently thereafter;
one continuous series of messes coming out of every end. Not to mention the
state of the house as the baby grows. Constant upheaval and disarray. Stacks of
laundry. Piles of dishes. Toys. Books. Pots and pans. All pulled from their
places and scattered abroad like seaweed on the beach.
It’s all worth
the beauty that attends the mess: crayoned pictures laden with hearts—drawn and
given by the stacks; hugs and wet kisses; holding a tiny, trusting hand; the
words “I love you, Mom” scraped into the dirt on the hill in the backyard….there’s
nothing like it for the price of a mess. Nothing.
My mother
appreciated a good mess. She understood that messes were companions to creative
beauty. She urged us to make messes and praised the beauty—or attempts at
beauty—we created. She gave us (almost) free range of the house in which to
make our messes. She also taught us to
clean, and somehow managed to have a clean house underneath the messes we made.
I recall the
day I discovered that we did indeed make messes. (Frankly, before that day, I
hadn’t noticed.) That day of enlightenment came when I was only about….oh, fourteen.
(Not kidding.) My mother had a calligraphy project going at her drafting table
at one end of the family room. I was busily mass-producing pictures to sell
that required tedious cutting of burlap, fabric scraps and construction paper, as
well as gluing and the use of markers at a card table set up on the other end
of the family room. My sister was also occupied with a project of her own in
the same room. (Heaven only knows where Craig was at the time. Probably making
an entirely private mess of his own in his room.)
The doorbell
rang. A friend was at the door. My friend. What’s worse, the friend happened to
be a boy I liked. Someone I never expected to come to our house….ever! When I first opened the door, I
was oblivious to the mess. When my friend walked in, I saw THE MESS in all Its Terribleness.
I tried to stand in front of the card table to block, at the very least, my
mess from view, but to no avail. My small frame was no match for the sheer quantity
of MESS splattered across every square inch of that room screaming the
words “Look at me!” like a flashing neon sign.
It turned out
OK in the end. The friend left after a brief and, for my part, extremely uncomfortable
few minutes. He surely had an eyeful of what went on in our house. But we
continued to make messes, and we enjoyed the beauty we created. The real
beauty, however, was in the time we spent, and the love that grew from making
the messes together.
The beauty of
Jacaranda trees comes before the mess
they make, but the order really doesn’t matter. Shedding their flowers is so
important to the production of fruit, seeds, and growth. It’s a necessary step
toward an encore display of their magical fairy dust in years that follow. As I see it, what
does matter is that they first give something splendidly beautiful
to the world before casting their refuse on the ground, (which, by the way,
still looks magical when it first falls). It is part of an important cycle. They
make the most of their few moments to sparkle, knowing what will come.
Maybe that’s
why messes are important to life: to help us better appreciate and recognize
the beauty in special moments. Messes also help us see order in creation and throughout life. A mess can have elements of order to it, it can be part of a greater
plan—as with the peach preserves. It may look a mess to the untrained eye, but
there is order in the kitchen chaos working toward a planned goal. I always
clean up after (sometimes during) a messy situation: an important lesson
accompanying messes. The “cleaning up” lesson, if never learned, creates its
own mess!
So, here’s to
messes! And may our messes create as much beauty as the Jacaranda!
© Copyright June 7, 2014
Tweet
No comments:
Post a Comment