Reverb11 Day 10 – Beauty

Beauty – Describe a moment of beauty that you witnessed this year.

I recently had my little ToyPom shaved for the first time in her 10year existence.  We are having what feels like one of the hottest summers so far and she was really suffering, so I decided to take her to the doggy parlour.  She came out looking like a little lamb, but even more beautiful than my little puppy’s new look, was the change in her personality.  She is loving the short hair and is strutting her stuff, being all cute and playful around the house.  She is being too beautiful for words.

Before:

After:

The most beautiful thing ever written

“Her father had taught her about hands.  About a dog’s paws.  Whenever her father was alone with a dog in the house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw.  This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world!  A bouquet!  Great rumours of travel!  She would pretend disgust, but the dog’s paw was a wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt.  It’s a cathedral! her father had said, so-and-so’s garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen—a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day.”

I love this passage from The English Patient.

I have grown up loving the smell of a dog’s paws  Cuddling up between my dog’s legs when she falls asleep;  the most comforting smell in the entire world.  I have never met anyone else who gets this, and that is why this excerpt is so powerful for me, Michael Ondaatje just explains the essence of the smell so well.