my curvaceous moment

Every time I venture outside (usually carrying a harvest of overripe trashbags, their plastic stems clenched in my cold hands), my heart reacts to today's beauty the way I've seen the thick patch of ice on the cement beneath my feet respond to sunlight.

You've seen what ice does when stricken by light. That is how it is for me this afternoon: that inexplicable arresting shimmy of color and glow that flares in my chest at the moment of kindling and then holds, steady and alive, until the attention wavers or the sun departs.

It's an ovation inevitable as a reflex, as natural and irrepressible as ice in the sun. As vital and insignificant as that.

Remember how Mary Oliver speaks of words as "the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments"? I'm pretty sure that this is the sort of thing she had in mind.