I almost stepped on the thing before I yanked myself back at the last minute.
Whatever the thumb-sized object was, it appeared to be fashioned of gold.
Kneeling to inspect it in the sharp morning sun, I saw the gilded glaze was actually a haze of dew veiling the fur of a mole. It must have surfaced and died during the night. The perfect cloak of droplets spangling its coat bespoke the low-hanging clouds that form around false dawn; a seamless mantle of condensation.
With a finger, I nudged the mole into the palm of my left hand, then traced a line up its spine.
The fur over the tiny ridge of bones rippled like liquid — so exquisitely soft, it was like stroking the belly of a chick.
Why should a creature born to spend its days underground among the worms possess such a luxurious pelt? Or perhaps the more reasonable question is: Why should I find mole fur so outlandishly luscious? How do we weigh and decide what’s arrestingly beautiful? Is a velvety golden coat inherently better than serviceable brown scales? Certainly both have evolved for maximum utility to their owners, yet I rarely give skittering anoles a second glance.
I’m not the only one puzzled by unexpectedly extravagant natural beauty.
The other day, as Nash and I were walking the perimeter of our property, he gasped with an almost choking sound.
He was gasping at what I’d almost stepped on. “Mom look at that flower,” he exclaimed, pointing just ahead of my right Croc. There, asprawl in a mass of translucent tendrils was a passionflower, a rococo confection of lilac and cream from which tentacles of perfume wisped up toward us.
“Why, Mama?” he asked. “Why does it look that way? Let’s not pick it — let’s show Daddy.”
So my husband Roger came out and looked, too, and agreed with us that it was amazing.
Yet why? What was it about this assembly of cellulose and water that merited sighs of pleasure?
As I watched the two of them bent over the blossom, eyes wide, I was struck by yet more startling beauty: those eyes themselves — Roger’s in shades of jade and slate, Nash’s in horizon blue. Why should I find these simple organs of perception so profoundly appealing? How greatly does my love for husband and son color my view when I look into their eyes and see beauty?
Later, brooding over the whole question, I came to no conclusions, other than that I’m glad I’m neither philosopher nor poet nor aesthete, and that I don’t have to wrestle with such matters.
My powers of judgment and discernment aren’t sufficiently developed to say what it is in beastie and blossom, boy and man, that stops my heart.
If I’m condemned to spend the rest of my life stumbling around not understanding the beauty I find around every corner, so be it. And glory be.