Strange Splendor.

I might be outgrowing beauty.

At least the carefully curated blog and instagram version.  Of course, I still crave those tiny photographs that fill my phone screen with four square inches of intense perfection.  But I’m getting restless.

The woman who lives here steals plastic flowers from the town cemetery up the street.  The police have tried to stop her, but she’s too committed to her vision.

I couldn’t possibly count how many flowers there are.  They fill the front porch and stairs, and they line the walk and continue up the side street.  They gorge the window boxes and climb the door frames.  They bury the back porch and reach beyond, out of sight from the public walk.  I have no doubt that, if I’d intruded deeper into her private space, the flowers would have continued all the way back around to the front.

It might be the most beautiful house I’ve encountered recently.

Is it just the sheer number of flowers that makes it so?  If there were only half as many flowers, or a tenth, would it be simply garish instead?  Is it the defiant mind behind the display that makes it so compelling?

Or is it just the charm of seeing found objects, not especially valued in their particular selves, transformed into this striking whole?  I typically dislike art that operates that way: it seems so arch and precious, so ironic and self-congratulatory.

But there is nothing self-conscious here.  Just strange.

And very beautiful.

Snow Angel.

Traveling with family is no vacation.  Three fidgety boys, two large dogs, one puppy, and an intemperate load of ski gear and Christmas jetsam:  our aged van skids perilously near joy’s far border, beyond which there be dragons.

But boys are expert at turning on a dime.

And a good thing, too.