"I'm thinking about all the graces. Susan is coming on Friday. She is very aware of the graces and makes them come and inhabit wherever she is. Of course, the chief grace for me is flowers. But I like to think of other graces: the grace of people. It's a grace when Joan, one of the women who comes to help me in the mornings, knows I'm feeling particularly bad and hugs me before she goes. This is a grace and I accept it as a grace and love it. When Pierrot rolls over on his back and wants me to scratch his tummy, that is a grace. And the way he walks, as if he ruled the world, with his plume of a tail in the air. That is a grace.
"Living here is a constant procession of such charms. When Maggie was here she helped me put up the crystals again: the little crystals, the many crystals that hang in the window. There are five of them. They make light birds on the ceiling and remind me of Pierrot as a kitten, trying to catch the light birds with his huge paws.
"Grace as behavior is quite rare, and it's getting rarer, just as good manners are getting rare. Grace is not in the thing done, but in the way it's done. My mother, for instance, was a person of infinite grace. Everybody who knew her would have known that and would have wanted to give her signs of grace when she was dying. She died of cancer of the lung, over a period of months. Friends did such imaginative things, I stilI rejoice in them. Molly Howe sent half bottles of champagne because, near the end, Mother could not eat at all. The only thing she could swallow — she who never drank — was a sip of champagne and an oyster — most extraordinary — but these did sustain her in the last weeks. And of course flowers. That was why it was so terribly hard when she said a few days before she died, 'Take the flowers away.' But it was a long time before she said that. Once a well-off friend of ours in Cambridge sent her butler with a single, gigantic chrysanthemum. There was something about this man at the door with a huge chrysanthemum — it must have been about five feet tall — which was a grace. As again, another time, the same friend sent blue morning glories in a lovely bowl. A single gesture often brings us a moment of grace."
Of little things, that grow not less.
Our moments fly — enough if on their way
You lent them loveliness.
