Delights: March 6 to March 12

March 6:  I was jolted this morning by a surge of website creator energy. For a project I’m undertaking (and to refresh my website recollection), I opened Fashioned for Joy for the first time since 2024. Did I instantly remember how to create web pages? No. Was I infused, though, with wistfulness and delight? Absolutely yes.

So I sit before you, my eyes alight and my arms outstretched, reaching metaphorically back out to you after a fifteen-month absence. Today’s delight, I realize, is you, my dear reader-friends. I greet you. I salute you. I miss you. 

March 7: My mother used to say that she needed to wear a girdle to the grocery store because she never knew who she’d meet. Exercise has spared me the girdle, but her point remains: at our weekly farmers market, I collect as many conversations as cucumbers.

Today my sister Dianne and I chatted with my old pals Dick and Patricia, who shape live-edge scavenged wood into furniture. We thanked the lady at Sexy Veggie who kindly sent us to Jack the Olive Oil Man for sun-dried tomatoes. I bumped into my friend Martha near the radishes. And the granola guy gave us yummy samples of roasted peanuts (for book club with Martha next week?). That vendor runs a business called “Family of Nuts.” My sister and I are quite sane; we simply allow 30 minutes to do five minutes of shopping.

March 8: Last autumn, my sister gave me about sixty daffodil bulbs for my front garden. This weekend, I proudly showed Dianne the shoots, including a handful of emerging tulips Kevin gave me. Good luck with those, Dianne predicted: They will eventually be food for the squirrels.

Well, they who taketh apparently sometimes giveth as well. For there in the back garden, shimmering in our resplendent sunshine, are a pair of crocus clusters. If I may borrow a term from the flamingos, a flamboyance of croci now sparkles in a place previously unadorned.

Looks like some squirrel forgot its snack, Kevin mused. Dear squirrel, let my eyes enjoy them for you.

March 9:  Regarding that website creator energy, I will tell you about my latest project. I am six-feet deep in preparing a walking tour of historic Oakwood Cemetery in Falls Church, Virginia. Once a month from May to November, participants will encounter poets and soldiers, spies and villains, faith leaders and storekeepers, ornithologists and egg farmers. All I need to do is research, organize, write, publicize and practice this thing by May 24. As Jeremiah would exhort, “You’ve got this, Mom!” So, wish me luck!

March 10: In light of my extended hiatus, I feel I have a bit of catching up to do. So, on a day made delightful “merely” by warm temperatures, brilliant sunshine and the fresh-raked fragrance of spring garden beds, I’ll report on my docent adventures. 

When last we chatted, I was in the early overwhelming days of training to become a docent at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). I have since completed the training, passed my tests and led more than twenty tours. I don’t lecture; rather, my emphasis is fostering engagement, curiosity and risk-taking. I’ve prompted 6^th graders to decipher a license-plate version of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution (it’s surprisingly moving to hear them declaim phrases like “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”). I’ve guided a women’s club through Grandma Moses’ work and listened to memories of childhood visits to family farms. I’ve engaged people from across the country on complicated pieces of contemporary art. And I’ve gaped as teenagers guided me to fresh insights about a piece I’ve studied for hours.

I stagger away from my tours exhausted — and exhilarated. I’m not sure which of us is doing the educating.

March 11: Another one of the surprising and wonderful things about being a docent at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is all the cultural enrichment we bestow upon ourselves. We remind our visitors that we tell America’s story through the visual arts, so naturally we need to visit historical sites. We help our visitors make connections among different schools of art, so naturally we need to form book clubs. As continuous learners, we need to study SAAM’s art and the art of viewer engagement; so we teach each other.

We also climb aboard buses for museum field trips – to admire the work of other artists and the skill of other docents. Today, we traveled to the Baltimore Museum of Art to see the exhibition Amy Sherald: American Sublime. Originally slated to appear at SAAM’s sister museum, the National Portrait Gallery, this exhibition reminded me why, for art that challenges me, I must look, and look again, with big doses of curiosity and humility. 

I have seen Sherald’s work before: I carried into the exhibition memories of her paintings’ matte colors, flat brushstrokes and gray-scale skin tones. 

I saw all those things today — and meticulous craft, gorgeous faces, and depths of interiority suggested by the figures’ props and completely transcending them. I rejoiced at the lyricism of certain titles. And I remembered, remembered, remembered: yearning or fearlessness or possibility or belief in oneself. None of this is explicit on the canvas or, necessarily, intended. Nevertheless, I found paintings that opened themselves to me.

Drawing from Lucille Clifton’s 1980 poem “what the mirror said,” a Sherald title reads, “Listen, you a wonder. You a city of a woman. You got a geography of your own.” 

Yes, I do. And so do you.

March 12: Bam, crack, dot. Flower, soap dish, north wind. Green dragon. (But you have to sing it as though you were promoting, ho ho ho, frozen vegetables). On Thursday afternoons, I now play mahjong. 

My fingers savor the smooth cool tiles as I help mix them. My senses settle into the gentle rhythm of the tiles’ clack. My heart delights in the kindness of my new friends who patiently taught me how to play. (And gently correct me: “that’s one bam, Carol Ann, not one crack.”)

By the end of the afternoon, though, my brain is broken — as I constantly try to pivot mid-game to a less hopeless arrangement of tiles. (Thank goodness they are smooth and cool.)

“May you get a lot of jokers” we wish each other.  And sometimes we do. More often we don’t. But we always have fun. 

Readers, to receive notifications by email each time I make a post, just scroll all the way down this page (next to the “word cloud”), look to the left and click on the black button that says “Join Me!” And if you think a friend might enjoy these, please share the Delight!

If you’d like to browse my past delights, please consult the “word cloud” featured at the very bottom of this post. Find a theme or two that interests you and sift through the sands. Or learn a bit more about my Blog by visiting my Welcome page. You’ll also see links to four essays that were published in print magazines. I’m glad you’re here!