I have been thinking a lot about moments of beauty in hardship. Maybe it’s because this week –in a week of November cold and grey—in a week of rain—there have been amazing glimpses of beauty—of blossoms. Earlier this week on my walk I saw an azalea – a shrub that blooms in May—covered in pink flowers. Yesterday a white rose in full bloom still held its June fragrance. And today, a bright yellow forsythia blossom shined its April radiance on a cold afternoon. It was a reminder to me that you don’t always know when beauty will show up. And that some beauty shows up in the places you expect it the least.

I began my psychology career as a staff member at a residential treatment center for adolescent girls. I worked first in the dorms and later became the art teacher and activities director. This was more than thirty years ago, but everything I have done since has dug its roots deeply in that first soil of experience. I doubt that the staff and girls I worked with then would ever imagine how much they have traveled with me. How much I learned from them and lean on that learning all the time.

Early on in my work in the dorms I created a routine of summer weekend activities that started with Walden Pond on Friday nights. The early afternoon would be spent baking brownies or cookies and packing a picnic dinner. And then we would leave at dinner time in a large station wagon. The girls were mostly city kids and skeptical of nature and lakes. But it was hot and there wasn’t air conditioning in those days—so a chance to be cool won out over their resistance.

What was striking about this trip was the juxtaposition of the week that had come before it –and the evening at the lake. Often the weeks were stressful—and the girls fought with each other and us. There was anger, disappointment, frustration. Sometimes even on the car ride out. But we would get to the parking lot and pile out—girls trailing towels and bags. Some with suits if they had them and some in shorts and t-shirts. Staff carrying blankets and bags of food. We would cross the street and head down to the lake—where the girls would wander into the crowd sometimes saving a space for us, and sometimes being truly teenage—and asking us to sit further away.

We would swim, eat our sandwiches and brownies. Hang out on towels and watch the sun go down over the far end of the lake. The girls would go from their tense and angry, and perhaps, fearful selves into something that was truly miraculous—they would relax—and be calm and content. They laughed. They rested. They absorbed the beauty of the place.

They always looked different as we headed back to the car. They were quieter and more thoughtful. They were more relaxed—less pulled together—their hair disheveled from swimming—clothes more haphazard-- which seemed to let their beauty shine through. They laughed more easily. They were easier with each other.

It’s hard to know whether the beauty shined through because the stress had lifted –or whether there was a beauty available only because of the sorrow they had lived. I’ll never really know—but the glimpses of it were not unlike the flowers I have seen this week. Rare gifts that nourish and sustain.

 

A Natural History of Beauty and Loss

Dusty cement walls,

Windows with bars.

Wood crate chairs too heavy to lift.

Everything here a defense

against some form of protest or escape—

a citadel of cinderblock

feigning refuge.

 

Girls crash land here

blown in on the winds

of their own personal storm

or washed ashore on

a riptide of abandonment.

 

Their wreckage delivers

black garbage bags

that float in and out

with every new arrival and departure.

Bags marked like the girls

with their name but no location,

piled precariously in the hall.

 

Black bags that weigh nothing.

T-shirts, leggings, underwear, socks,

one shoe with no laces,

a blanket with Tigger or Care Bears,

half of a spiral notebook,

and always hairspray and comb,

but never a toothbrush.

The staff will unlock one from the cabinet.

 

What is heavier are the photos.

Crumpled pictures of their child selves,

in Brownie uniforms

or bathing suits,

sitting on the floor with a brother,

holding a kitten, in front of a cake

blowing out candles,

wishing for a future.

 

Heavier still is the chart,

an oversized rust colored

folder—Sisyphus’s rock.

 

A chronology of loss

pushed endlessly uphill

by a tired social worker

standing in the doorway

shaking her head and declaring

time after time that—now--

is their very last chance.

 

Sorrow and exhaustion

streak the faces of young staff

who look older than they are.

But the girls are protected,

for now,

from the weight of despair--

their emotions frozen and numb.

Not gone, but buried the way

ice holds memory blue and deep

for millions of years.

 

It is true that ice can fracture

dangerous and loud

when you try to learn its history

by bringing its core to the surface.

 

But I’ve also heard that

without winter’s biting cold

spring flowers won’t bloom.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Quote above from St. Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell