WHAT'S Beautiful TO YOU?

A Renaissance painting, a flawless double axel-yes, of course. But also, perhaps, a small or curious or simple thing only you can appreciate. On the pages to come, behold the proof that, if you are willing to take the time and really look, beauty is all around us.

THE BEATEN PATH

The dirt road of her childhood still stretches, vivid and imperfect, into the horizon of Crystal Ponti's mind.

PLEASE DON'T LET THAT BUST a hole in the muffler," my mother would appeal to the Lord as gravel pelted the underbelly of our 1978 Lincoln Continental. It's been decades, but I can still hear those tinging rocks. Sometimes, like a strike on a bass drum, a larger stone would spin up into the gut of the car, and we'd gasp, then giggle, relieved when the motorized beast kept right on humming. Only six or seven houses and a few farms sat on our three-mile dirt road, each separated by wide swaths of empty land. Our house was in the center, atop the only hill. The road, its contours hugging field and forest, ran through my hometown of Durham, Maine. Rain turned the top layer into a coating of thick muck, which gave life to the world's best bakery: I'd spend hours making mud pies on the shoulder.

When dry grass grew in the road's ruts, I'd hop barefoot between the verdant patches, bypassing a minefield of rocks, to play with my friend who lived around the bend. The rare car would barrel past, vibrating the earth, and I'd take cover in the ditch, pushing toes into the dirt thrown there, its texture gritty as powdered malt.

Some people see angels in clouds, but I beheld shapes in the dust plume behind our taillights. When it was hot, the ground dried out, forming canyons; it looked as if the earth were separating. In winter, snow hid the road, and even when it was plowed, you had to guess at its curves, splitting the distance between trees to find the way forward.