In Search of Details

A lace of ice on Jacoby Creek the morning of December 1.

By Audrey Hackett

Sometimes it’s good to take the long view. But sometimes — often — it’s good to take the short view. The view in front of your face, or at your feet.

“The devil is in the details,” we say. And we mean by that not that the details are unimportant, but exactly the opposite — the details are the mysterious hidden element on which the larger whole turns, or fails to turn. The details, far from trivial, are in fact so subtly crucial that we figure them as “the devil,” an agent of insidious yet frightening power.

Details can wreak havoc. But they do so mainly because they’re overlooked. Underestimated. Wholly unseen.

We’re a big-picture society. We value the grand vision, the sweeping gesture. We abstract reality to the point of failing utterly to apprehend reality. Which is, after all, a welter of details. Little bits of stuff down to the mind-bogglingly small stuff. Little bits of stuff combining, interrelating, layering, communicating, connecting, webbing, wafting, swirling together, spinning apart, reconfiguring, cohering, meshing. Cosmically dancing.

I went in search of a few details on Thursday morning. Temperatures had dipped to 20 the night before, inviting ice to form along the margins of a pool in re-meandered Jacoby Creek. A lace of ice, a contour of clear ribbon candy. “I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags,” Walt Whitman wrote. That’s just what the water had done overnight. Effused into swooping crystalline rainbows, every band the inscrutable color of ice.

Another detail that caught my eye was the metal watering can hanging from a fencepost at Front Field. Sunlight kindled its matte surface, while the weave of the fencing caught it in a net of delicate shadow. Another bit of lace. Less lacy and more frothy was the floss of a milkweed pod by the barn, spilling out of its little boat. Tucked into the floss was a cargo of seeds, a detail of the plant that’s precisely the point.

And when Facilities Manager Matthew Salazar scooped out a dark “snowball” from the compost pile — to show me how finished compost coheres into a ball the consistency of a wrung sponge — my brief tour of details seemed complete. What is sweeter than the detail we hold, like a tiny yet complete world, in the palm of our hands?

*Audrey Hackett is associate editor of Agraria Journal.