Carmen came into our lives right after Tropical Storm Fay. The lizard appeared a little later, but I am getting ahead of myself. Entire civilizations have been built -- I just read -- on the beauty of women, or, as in Helen of Troy or Cleopatra, the beauty of one particular woman.

Carmen is one of those beauties who makes it possible to see the beauty all around her. She walks in beauty like the night, said Lord Byron. But it isn't the night; it's the day and the hours in between the crack of dawn and the first spike of sun. There's beauty in a smile and in a snail shell. There's beauty in a hangnail, if you see it that way. I haven't and won't. But I once heard a Zen abbot say that there is no thing unbeautiful, if you see it that way.

What way?

Somehow, Carmen made all things beautiful. And her own beauty was not the lesser for it. When she saw our pond, she said it was exactly like the ponds in Australia where she is from. I don't know why but I saw the land, the trees transfigured in the moment of her saying that. The lily pads were a mosaic, the water shivered into a Monet. An anhinga flew up and its armor caught the sun and gleamed. Around the side of the house where Carmen walked, a scrubby little pile of leaf trash lay, and when she walked by, I saw a flower.

She walks in beauty, the Navajos say. Referring to Changing Woman or Mother Earth. All is beauty around her. And so it is with lovely women ... and then I saw, we all saw, the tiniest footnote to a lizard. Erik, Carmen's best friend, put his thumb next to the lizard, and we noticed how really tiny he was.

So -- to Carmen... hail to beauty six feet tall.

And to the lizard, so beautifully, beautifully small.