Musings from a bus ride coming home from the airport and renaissance art

I went home for fall break and cried on an airplane and a bus

This edition is about a week late. I meant to write, but fall break rolled around, and I was having a lot of feelings about it. I wanted to prioritize my time around my family (and my dog!), and I didn’t have a piece ready to go.

In sixth grade my friend read me a poem about hands that she had written. This was years before I would fall in love with poetry, years before I embraced a truly optimistic view of humanity, and it would be about a year before I held hands with a boy for the first time (a momentous occasion?). Something touched me about her poem though. She talked about seeing people holding hands on the bus, old women clasping the hand of a wriggling child, watching her mother wash her hands in the sink, and painting her nails on plush couches at sleepovers. I remembered the importance of the hands of my loved ones: my mother’s cool palm on my forehead when I had a fever, my father’s sure fingers as he drew back the string on his bow, ready to fire an arrow into an archery target.

And from that point onward, the picture of familiarity and devotion became hands. I became the person who loved to see people holding hands in restaurants on first dates, and the person who watched how carefully house painters would dip the thin tongue of their brush into a can of “eggshell white” paint, their hands almost reverent on the worn wooden handles.

Over spring break in eighth grade my grandparents took me and my cousin to Italy, and we got to visit the monuments that we had been hearing about for years—the Sistine Chapel, Herculaneum, the Colosseum. I’m not sure that I had a complete understanding of how incredible all of the art that I was seeing was. I still adored all of it. I craned my neck for almost an hour in the Sistine Chapel, looking up at the stunningly painted ceiling.

In renaissance paintings hands are painted with such detail, with Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam being the most well-known example. (Side note: I absolutely adore this piece!!!!)

The Creation of Adam (c. 1512)

An honorable mention to Adam’s foot as well (though I refuse to spend too much time singing its praises for fear of it coming off too weirdly).

Permit me to wax poetic about Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine for a minute because look at the hand!!!! The detail in the fingers, the eyebrow ridge, the eyes, the slight blue tinge of the shadows, the ermine!

Lady with an Ermine – Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (ca. 1473–1536)

I couldn’t find the artist of this next painting, however, everyone needs to see this painting at least once in their lives. The skin appears a little translucent, and I can’t even begin to imagine the skill it takes to be able to paint something like it. Let me draw your attention to the veins on the back of the hands, and the slight pearlessence of the nails. It is just unbelievably impressive that someone could paint something like this.

Recently the concept of “modern renaissance” art has been surfacing on a lot of the social media platforms that I frequent (which should tell you about the kind of content that I approach daily—the vast majority of it related to history and art). This photo (shown below) surfaced in my feed around 2021, and I found it to be extremely moving.

This photo particularly speaks to the simultaneous feeling of community and isolation that happens on public transportation. As soon as you step on you’re encapsulated in your own little world, with headphones in or just listening to the other people around you.

I wonder if all of our most private and personal moments happen on busses: receiving breakup texts and crying in the carpeted seats, talking to an old man clutching a newspaper like you’ve known him your whole life, listening to strangers recounting their life stories to people that you could swear they’ve never met before until they embrace like old friends when one of them has to leave.

In my first month in Portland on an incredibly crowded city bus, I let my foot rest briefly (and accidentally) against the leg of somebody I had never met. I don’t think I’d really had physical contact with someone within that first month, minus a few hugs from new friends in the first week, so this tiny moment of contact was a lot more meaningful than it usually would be. I remember pulling out my notes app and simply writing down the words humanity, connection. These things that had been feeling a little foreign in the first weeks of college.

I am (almost notoriously) a crier. So it makes a lot of sense that I have cried on multiple modes of public transportations, at concerts, when I’m very happy, when I’m very frustrated. I visited home last week and I cried on the plane to get there because I was so excited and relieved to be going home, and I cried on the way back to my dorm (which has started to feel like home too) on the MAX red line because I missed my family already and I was overjoyed to be back with the roommates that I have spent so many hours joking around with since getting here.

I’m writing before dinner right now, and I’m about to go have my little weekly meetup with the friends who gave me my first college hugs. Finals season is coming up and I really do feel like I’m finally settling in (although I’m about to leave for almost a month for winter break).

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A new segment to Slipping Through Sunshine:

Weekly R.E.P.O.R.T.

R is for Reading

Both fantastic, both devastating, both well worth reading.

E is for Eating

Dining hall food, again. No photo for this one since its not worth taking photos of.

P is for Playing

This whole album, and especially Suzanne (I’m listening to it right now!)

O is for Obsessing

A vintage postcard of women sword fighting gifted to me by my roommate and the Pantone wide tea cup in aubergine.

R is for Recommending

Trader Joe’s Ultra Moisturizing Hand Cream for those of us whose skin hates cold weather. My mom gave this to me for the holidays one year and I’ve never gone back.

T is for Treating

Re-watching Season 1 (and seasons 2, 3, 2, 5, and 6)

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And the obligatory poem for the middle of your week:

After Twelve Days of Rain by Dorianne Laux

I couldn’t name it, the sweet
sadness welling up in me for weeks.
So I cleaned, found myself standing
in a room with a rag in my hand,
the birds calling time-to-go, time-to-go.
And like an old woman near the end
of her life I could hear it, the voice
of a man I never loved who pressed
my breasts to his lips and whispered
“My little doves, my white, white lilies.”
I could almost cry when I remember it.

I don’t remember when I began
to call everyone “sweetie,”
as if they were my daughters,
my darlings, my little birds.
I have always loved too much,
or not enough. Last night
I read a poem about God and almost
believed it—God sipping coffee,
smoking cherry tobacco. I’ve arrived
at a time in my life when I could believe
almost anything.

Today, pumping gas into my old car, I stood
hatless in the rain and the whole world
went silent—cars on the wet street
sliding past without sound, the attendant’s
mouth opening and closing on air
as he walked from pump to pump, his footsteps
erased in the rain—nothing
but the tiny numbers in their square windows
rolling by my shoulder, the unstoppable seconds
gliding by as I stood at the Chevron,
balancing evenly on my two feet, a gas nozzle
gripped in my hand, my hair gathering rain.

And I saw it didn’t matter
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds—nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. And the sounds
came back, the slish of tires
and footsteps, all the delicate cargo
they carried saying thank you
and yes. So I paid and climbed into my car
as if nothing had happened—
as if everything mattered — What else could I do?

I drove to the grocery store
and bought wheat bread and milk,
a candy bar wrapped in gold foil,
smiled at the teenaged cashier
with the pimpled face and the plastic
name plate pinned above her small breast,
and knew her secret, her sweet fear—
Little bird. Little darling. She handed me
my change, my brown bag, a torn receipt,
pushed the cash drawer in with her hip
and smiled back.