Making Beautiful: A Talk with my Grandchild

“Grandma, why do you always have to make everything beautiful?” Miss T asks. “And why do you have to make everything perfect?”

Miss T is only six years old, but she can sense the effort I put into trying to plate food beautifully, to set a table with flowers, or to decorate the house to celebrate every holiday.

When things are beautiful, it makes my heart happy, I say. Making things beautiful gives me joy.

“Perfect,” I explain to Miss T, is a way of aiming high–giving my very best effort. Since we can rarely reach perfection, we shouldn’t be disappointed if we fall short. And it shouldn’t deter us from trying again, another time. In fact, the next time, we can consider what we might do differently, for a better outcome.

In any case, if we have tried our best, that is ultimately what counts.

Make Beautiful: Thoughts to Action

We can take a perfection mindset to small tasks, I explain to Miss T. So, when we set the table, instead of placing the utensils willy-nilly, try to line up the knives and forks to ensure they’re straight. We try to be as precise as we can because neatness looks good and order can help to create beauty.

When kids set the table, they can learn good table manners.

Every table setting and every craft project we embark on together is an opportunity to model behavior. Recently, Miss T and I made little Valentine favor boxes to fill with homemade truffles. Interestingly, what Miss T wanted to know was, where were we going to put the names? She is learning that for special occasions, we have themed place cards–and these were likely to be them.

My Mom as Inspiration

Looking back, I know I inherited my love of beauty and striving for perfection from my mother, who grew up poor, as one of nine children, on a coffee farm in Kona. She married my father in Hilo, on the other side of the Big Island of Hawaii, and we lived a blue-collar life.

My mother always had beautiful fresh flower arrangements in the house. She was an instinctive flower arranger, working with anthuriums and other tropical flowers from our garden.

A good cook, my mom plated whatever she prepared attractively. She was talented at sewing and craftwork, winning handfuls of blue ribbons at the County Fair. I spent hours in her sewing room by her side, using my imagination to stitch doll dresses and to create craft projects. I was on my way to a life of making beautiful.

One day, I hope to produce a bound photography book of table settings and household decorations for my grandchildren, as a legacy to inspire them to create beauty. I’ll use Google Photo Books or another such photo book service. I have the name for it already: “Grandma Style!”

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