chasing beauty in durham, n.c.
I recently returned from a trip to Durham, North Carolina to visit a dear friend. The days spent there were full, easy, and had the quality of an otherworldly portal.
I started each day slowly. On one of my favorite mornings, we ate some leftover chicken biryani for breakfast and my friend made me a rose chai late sprinkled with rose petals and rose dust (grinded rose petals with cardamom powder, yes it’s as magical as it sounds) ! The rose became a kind of ritual for me there. I started each day in my friend’s home with the romance of rose petal tea.
My morning rose chai <3
The entire trip was underlined by a gravitational pull towards beauty. The Durham cherry blossoms we drove to marvel at were just as dazzling as the practice of packing our wicker picnic basket, heavy with the weight of sardine salad on sourdough bread that was charred stove top-style in hot butter, plump mandarin oranges big as fists, fig jam and feta cheese, watermelon juices cold-pressed by a sweet Black man earlier that day. Everywhere we were called to go, I heard Durham whisper to us: won’t you knit beauty out of the threads of this city?
After a night of watching an interior design Youtube video about how to set a table for a party of guests, we went into a frenzy. The video modeled how a table could be a world to meet our loved ones – with the simple magic of fabric, color, florals, and lighting. Now everywhere we went, we became heaven-bent on listening to the city’s command. At the farmers’ market, we were magnetized by bouquets of poppies and the long-branched forsythia flower that blooms all yellow-like out of the wood stem it calls home. A pair of gorgeous, blue bowls from Morocco caught our gaze at an after-dark vintage fair. Gilded picture frames and china sets with pink roses blooming out of them set our heart aflame at a large antique mall.
Sarah P. Duke Gardens. Durham, NC. April 2025.
As the days came and went, these objects pulled me towards a newfound groundedness. Every meal in the kitchen felt special. Every time the yellow forsythia glittered in the corner of my eye as I washed a dish in the sink, I felt grateful to have beauty so close to me.
And then it dawned on me: beauty rescues us from the mundane and the stagnant. What refuses to move or is blocked to move within us or around us can be moved by what is beautiful. No wonder I come from women (North Carolina women to be exact) who made an art of chasing beauty their entire lives. My maternal, great grandmother, Mary, was the first Black, licensed interior designer in the state of Pennsylvania. My maternal grandmother, Sallie, made a living making drapes for people’s homes. And their own homes were magnificent portals brimming to the top with beauty. I wonder then, what did beauty mean to women who were constantly faced with the violent stagnancy that racism, Jim Crow, land dispossession, and familial separation produced? They often had to look at the ugly face of the world… so they made things of beauty in response.
At the altar of their dining rooms, their kitchens and their china cabinets, their sewing machines, closets, and family photo displays, they conjured beauty to keep moving, to imagine the unimaginable beauty that their lives still had to offer. And in doing so, beauty became a part of them.
I’ll say it again but I’ll say it slant: beauty can cut through the stagnant illness of the world so that we can meet our dreams and desires on the other side. Thank you, Durham, for clarifying that within me.