By Jess Ada

Image: Seth Hahne

Beauty is a lilac tree thriving in a vacant lot that is covered with broken glass and scrap metal.

Beauty is the juncture of 10 AM sunlight and a hard shadow slammed across the side of a three story tenement.

Beauty is the oceanic sound the interstate makes while standing on a sand hill, above a ditch and behind the rust-stained back of the supermarket, at dusk.

Waiting

I spent a lot of time as a child roaming the streets of my neighborhood looking for some type of diversion. I was a latchkey kid as it was called and consequently had a lot of time to fill, wandering around getting into small troubles. There were old rusty nails to dig from my neighbors gravel driveway and tulips to steal from an elderly widow’s garden over on Sherwood. There were innumerable boxes to salvage from the local furniture store which could be turned into fantastic (though impermanent) club houses. There were yards to cut through and fresh rectangles of wet concrete to despoil with my initials.

This was a New English mill neighborhood, built in late-nineteenth century utilitarian style, with few native embellishments. The siding of the houses was white, the doorways were hooded and cracked black, and pocked concrete was everywhere.

It was cold for a good part of the year. I remember how the snow would pile up from the plows on the sides of the road and become so black with soot and dirt and diesel exhaust. The sound of city buses would echo against the cold air from one end of the neighborhood to the other.

It was very cold. For a long time. Going outside from late October to early April was almost impossible, and if possible, it would be too cold to stay out very long, even on snow days. Children grew angry and stood helpless and trapped at their windows. Parents grew even angrier. There was little to do for so long.

The approach of spring was a big deal. We yearned for it. Weeks and months would pass. Cold, freezing, snowy, wet, slushy winter would snail its way past until finally, after what would seem like several eternities in the mind of a kid, the daffodils would bloom. Not long after, one would see the bright yellow flecks of the forsythia flower and their yellow-green leaves burst out from the black wet sticks of their branched bushes. This was April. Soon after the forsythia, here and there a shard of greenish grass would make its way through the packed sodden dirt in my backyard. And every May, like clockwork, from of that trampled muddy mess outside my kitchen window, the lilies of the valley would bloom.

This is how a New Englander is initially trained in the school of beauty. You learned, through deprivation, to wait for it.

Seeking

Now this all seems so clear in retrospect, but as I unknowingly undertook this education it felt like fumbling and chance. As time passed, the joy and the music I had only found intermittently and via blooms and shadows and the sound of the highway began to manifest itself in an orderly fashion. I was able to look for things, to create a pattern, and to look in the right places. I began to draw, to make crazy things in my bedroom from thread and toilet paper and my mom’s knee highs.

And one day my class went to the Art room.

To find oneself in the presence of the Art room at Windmill Street School is to have survived a fateful journey, of sorts. The school building was four stories high, including the basement, and to get to the top floor, where the art room was, required a great deal of walking. In single file we trudged up what seemed like landing after nameless landing. Our elementary-aged legs grew so tired with the many starts and stops, and put your finger to your lips, our teacher commanded. After many days and nights of walking, we arrived; we found it.

There was a door. And Light. And color, shape, and movement, everywhere (there were mobiles hanging from the ceiling). Boxes of yarn, stacks of magazines and construction paper, fabric, markers, scissors, and glue. It was like a dream, this wonderful place. I had weathered a long journey to find it. I pursued it and here it was, right at the top of my school, in Ms. Alcott’s cluttered, hot, and brilliant art room.

Listening

The church I worshipped in as a child was an elegant, but modest, cathedralesque structure built in the neo gothic style of the early twentieth century. It was dark and drafty, with a bell tower you could climb up and a bowling alley in the basement. It was interminably cold, with secret passages and rooms, and most fantastically, a working dumb waiter that would lift trays of cookies and coffee from the basement kitchen below up to the fellowship hall every Sunday.

The sanctuary had a stained glass window in the chancel. Louis Comfort Tiffany’s New York Studio had crafted and installed it in 1910 at the church’s dedication. It was a pastoral scene, full of milkily, streaked and opalescent glass shaped into leaves and rocks, petals, and sky. There was a river that flowed large in the foreground and receded two thirds of the way up the window, where it disappeared in the distant horizon. I thought it was the Garden of Eden at twilight, and every Sunday while kicking my feet on the wooden pews I’d stare at it with a kind of awe.

It quieted me, and I listened.

Image: Jess Ada

Years later, having collected a great deal more of my own beauty in the midst of brokenness after college, grad school, five kids, and a failed marriage, I revisited that sanctuary of my childhood. My eyes once again traced the familiar ascent of the water in the window as it crept into the background. I paused upon the autumnal foliage on the trees, the grey blue of the rocks and the distant hills. This time, strangely, it was not only the carefully cut and colored bits of glass, suspended and glimmering in the east light that I noticed. They were beautiful still, but this time I kept hesitating as I sensed something else was demanding my attention. I saw something new, something equally real and equally important as the design of the glass itself.

I saw the leading.

And I realized that here, in this juncture of light and dark was the same juncture of the yellow forsythia against the black, wet sticks of the lilac in the vacant lot. The black lines of lead had gained greater importance and seemed to be the foundation upon which all the many arrays and hues of the glass were, of all the places that beauty, as by now I had learned to call it, had taken me since those very first years of waiting for the snow to melt and the flowers to bloom.

This is beauty on earth. And it was broken, lying somewhere in the tension between the old and the new, the darkness and the light, the already and the not yet. In a desperately fallen creation, intermingled and inseparable from the opposite that both reflects and amplifies it, was a true beauty, albeit very fragile and austere.

This is honest beauty. Images of perfection never stirred me. Perhaps due to my experience as a child, if I couldn’t imagine it, or see it against the contrast of darkness I was not able to connect with them. Perhaps this is why. Although I know that one day I will experience a new creation, renewed or restored or recreated, it is something I will never know in this life.

This beauty beckons us out of ourselves. In the confessions, Augustine says to God, “It was your beauty that drew me to you.” Tense, fragile, unexpected, broken or not, beauty in the midst of what isn’t is a grace that simultaneously reminds us of our broken state, and draws us to the only one who can right it.

Jess Ada, a native Rhode Islander, currently resides in Memphis, Tennessee with her children. When she is not packing lunches or doing laundry, she can usually be found reading, researching, teaching, coffee drinking, art making, or urban exploring.

Feature illustration courtesy of Seth T. Hahne. Check out Seth’s graphic novel and comic review site, Good Ok Bad.

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