It rained the other night.
Here in a fire-weather parched landscape came a few minutes of rain... creating the rich smell of hot dust meeting raindrops as it turns into damp earth. There wasn't enough time to rush out to dance in it. but I stuck my head and arms out the window and laughed.
Later that day... my first invitation to design a stage show in what will be two years.
That fertile and heady smell of first rain on dry earth has a name: petrichor.
It's intoxicating.
Taking a vacation - even though not traveling away from home - is still a Nice Thing. Let's appreciate the Nice Things in life in this difficult year.
Several pleasant or absolutely wonderful! things have happened here: most important, an addition to the family! This is too public a forum for details of such personal rejoicing, but it's comforting to know that life really does go on.
A smaller example: last night brought rain and with it coolness to dry, hot Texas - we celebrated under the porch roof of a favorite restaurant, watching the blessed rain.
Our newly-planted tree must like it too.
Other rejoicings I can share here are the enduring joy in art. Now that museums are cautiously reopening, it's possible to visit old favorites. (I'm not the only one treasuring this freedom, the art critic for the Washington Post sounds giddy too, HERE.)
The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth is a good stand-in for the Met locally...
Maybe that explains something I'd always found disturbing about late Monets - the way these serene images are made up of fierce, even violent and frenzied, brush strokes. I knew the artist was losing his sight as he was painting these, but it seems that the publicly shared horror of these years of war may have added to his personal pain during this creation... an artist losing sight and deaths of young poets are in the depths under those floating lilies. Channeling pain into beauty.
Art is a miracle.
