Tag: missing pieces

Looking Over

The more rarefied the vantage point, the rarer (and hence ordinarily overlooked) is the view.

I once followed waterfalls, hiking through woods to a mountaintop garden in New Hampshire’s Ossippee Mountain Range. The mountains were rendered in green at street level, but bathed in bright blue from on high.

This rose stretched exuberantly at the Castle in the Clouds that Father’s Day. Like an outgoing youngest child in a large family, it launched itself above its brethren and refused to be overlooked.

It was not so very far from Mt. Washington, which my husband and I had tried to climb on our 15th wedding anniversary. Ultimately we had to give up on seeing the sights from the highest vantage point in New Hamspshire available to mere mortals. I had insufficient ballast, and was no match for fierce winds across a broad open expanse of rock. It was too difficult to hold onto my steady spouse, and I was nearly swept off the mountain’s face.

(The nearby Mt. Washington Hotel is sometimes mistaken for a very different overlook: The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel; I can assure you the White Mountains’ version is far more serene).

Sometimes I have found myself in thinner air, overlooking a golden world as the sun sets. Or walking through seas of swirling pastel clouds atop Acadia’s Cadillac Mountain, taking in the Northeast’s crown view of a rising sun.

In more recent years, I’ve looked over land and sea and sandscapes from atop camels and towering dunes. From watchtowers and volcanic islands. I’ve surveyed ancient blue and pink cities and violet seas from slitted holes in stone castles and fortresses.

From a distance of many years, I realize I’ve found myself climbing ever-farther upwards on such days.

At dizzying heights, I feel closer to my missing piece. He frequently took photos from such spots when he was here with us, on “earth, our heaven, for a while.” Words I read from Mary Oliver’s “A Pretty Song” at his service.

In some ways, we can best see what we’re missing from on high. Where the heady view is also heavenly.

A man looking out over the City of Lights with his daughters, not knowing it would be the last time. The same man on a Equatorial island cliff, knowing it was for the last time, and seeing the rarest of Pacific nesting birds.

One of my children recently told me of Sgùrr Dearg, where we earthbound folks may survey both very present Puffins and great swaths of the visible world from the Inaccessible Pinnacle.

If she climbs it someday, I hope she’ll send me a picture of what she overlooks.

Picking up the Pieces

In the brief light between June storms in New Hampshire, lyrical liquid gold held four centuries’ reflected and refracted images. It was the Portsmouth Clipper Marching Band‘s 400th birthday. Alums from the past five decades–including some who had marched during the 350th band birthday celebration–played past colonial and Victorian and modern homes on Market Street.

Elongated fragments. Shards. Parts and particles of the past.

Pieces of our histories, our hopes, and our uncertain futures can filter into both our waking and sleeping selves.

And, as with most things, John Hiatt wrote (and sang) it best: “The missing pieces are everywhere.”

There are at least two very different ways of considering the sentiment. We perpetual pessimists see the fissures, the empty spaces from which parts have gone missing. The misshapen space that taunts us after that last errant jigsaw puzzle piece has somehow escaped its box. The sub-zero empty harbor after summer’s celebrants have hunkered down for another winter. Holes in our hearts and homes.

But there is another way to look at it: to see all around us the melifluous, misfit missing pieces. All the gold that stays.

Not to restore what was, but to reconfigure it, piece by piece, row by row. Kintsugi of sorts. Never the same, but with its own beauty, born of time and healing and adapting as best we can to whatever comes our way.