Live with Beauty

There are those early flashes of memory. 

For me, the smell of the puppy. The grunt as I lift him. I still feel his warm fat belly pressed into the cup of my palm. His smell. His warm milky, dust-ridden smell. 

I remember pressing my ear down into the amber wood of our dining room floor, straining to hear below me in the dark. Flicka, our German Shepherd half-mutt, would give birth in the adobe caverns under the house. Impatient, I would go down there with a flashlight and my brother, looking for Flicka and her dirt nest with her treasure of squirming pups. I’d always choose the black one. The smallest. The runt. Blackie, I named him and I would hold onto him fiercely as he grew fat in my lap. The last to be chosen. The last to be pulled from my hands. 

I remember the light in the morning. The dew drops glistening. The silky stripe on the lizard’s crown. The glimmer of phosphorescence left by the snail. I remember the smell of geraniums, the sharp red taste of petals, the snap of the calla lilies' stamen, the yellow dust on my thumb. 

I  remember the taxo coming to fruit. 

I remember the capulí. Fat. Black. Juicy. The colibrí hovering. 

And I wonder, do genes have memory? And if so, what memories do they hold?

Does my body remember the song of my grandmothers singing to their Swedish cows? Are there cows today in Sweden who still, in the spiral of their being, remember my grandmothers’ song?

What imprint of beauty do we still carry? What beauty will we leave behind?

I wove the frame in class with Camola Valarezo from recycled materials against cardboard backing. Photo by my brother Tod Swanson of me in the backyard of our house in Quito with Blackie in my lap and my plastic bucket and spade. I was 4.