Simple Elegance

I love getting together with my local daughter-in-law to catch up on our lives: her five kids and feeding the masses and homeschooling and being-the-hub-of-everything-all-the-time (a busy-busy bee), and my continuing advances into seniorville (an explorer of uncharted depths).

When she agreed to join me for a dinner of soup and salad at my house, just the two of us, I decided to go girly with my mother’s antique blue china and “soft” table accessories. I pulled out an ancient linen tablecloth with hand-appliqued flowers (actually too small for the table, but it looked pretty cocked at an angle), and a couple of not-too-tall taper candles for ambiance.  But what about a centerpiece? My flowers in the garden were goners; any lingering zinnas and marigolds had recently been struck a lethal blow by freezing temps, leaving their blossoms either limp and lifeless or dead-brown.

But then I thought, I have fresh herbs that survived the freeze!  They were still green and aromatic, lovely and varied in appearance.  I cut a handful of sage, oregano, mint, and rosemary sprigs and arranged them in my favorite silver-plated vase, a relic from our wedding day in 1971.

Although sweet-smelling and visually interesting, they still needed something else for contrast….ah, a single flowering offshoot from a succulent I’d brought indoors!  The bouquet seemed “almost there” at this point, and yet not quite. I decided to explore our roadside, and returned with tall grasses that were drying into artsy curls, and tiny, leafless spikes dotted with miniscule pink buds – the perfect finishing touches.

I’ve heard beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is true.  But even more essentially, beauty is everywhere, all the time, reflecting the Giver of it “who art in all places and filling all things.” (Trisagion Prayer) It’s a matter of having eyes to see the simple but elegant, real-time beauty of life-in-progress.