Andrew Bertaina
Dutch Golden Age
He was saying to his daughter, now fourteen, now in the throes of things he didn’t want to write in essays, that the clouds were stunning as they floated across a deep blue sky. She said that the clouds were marvelous, stunning really, though she rarely noticed them. She said she’d remember this day, the two of them sitting on a grassy hillside beneath a sweet gum tree, where minutes before, in a moment of childish joy, childhood now decades ago, he’d climbed into the tree with the children, encouraged them to get a better look at the sunset they’d driven out to see, faint light above a row of bare trees. But now they were on the ground, admiring the cloud scuttle, the golden lining on the clouds, and his daughter said that she’d remember this day as the day she discovered the sky was beautiful. And wasn’t that precisely the sort of memory he’d hoped to implant when he’d dragged the recalcitrant children out of the house and on a walk to enjoy the sky? To make it a day that would be remembered for her, his teenage daughter, who had gotten so distant the previous year. And he said, pedant that he was, that the sky was probably more prevalent when the majority of humanity had a more agrarian lifestyle, that it had been present, the sky, in everyday living, its gentle fading, its glow in the distance even after it had fallen, and he said that was maybe why the Dutch landscape painters were so popular during a period of history, because they represented, not just Dutch life, but the reality of life, which was pinned together by the architecture of the sky, by the light fading in the bare trees, and the cows wandering into the shed before dark. It was as though he and his daughter had traveled through a portal into the 17th century, where they were foregrounded in a painting by one of the Bruegel’s Older or Younger, who would capture them in repose with the great sky blooming in the background. He thought she was lucky to have a father who could fill her in on Dutch Golden Age art, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you said aloud. She broke up his thoughts, “You’re going to write an essay about this, aren’t you?” And the comment shook him, of course, he could see writing an essay about this particular moment, when he was reconnecting with his child after losing her for almost a year, the two of them both looking at the clouds and thinking about the way society caused someone to ignore the clouds now, to look incessantly at their phones, as he did, as he always was, five plus hours a day according to his phone, and at least that according the carpal tunnel he was now dealing with, an obsessive scroll that had no purpose, and so he too couldn’t recall the last time he’d bothered to admire the sky, but now she was ruining it in a way, his daughter, trying to capture the moment and quantify it via an essay as opposed to experiencing it. His wife would document this moment on the hillside, father and daughter, with the great banner of sky unfurling beyond, and he’d post it to various social media sites, and later, he would write an essay about the moment his daughter discovered the sky was beautiful, because why the hell not? Why shouldn’t he document the day. It was something to remember. The spiky balls of the sweet gum tree burning his hand, the sharp breeze on his reddened cheeks, the children, briefly off screens and carping at one another to take one brief look at the sky, all together, this blended family, briefly, in a landscape he thought he might be able to capture with words.
Andrew Bertaina
Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus 2024), the book length essay, Ethan Hawke & Me (Barrelhouse, 2025), and the short-story collection, One Person Away From You (Moon City Press Award Winner 2021).He has an MFA from American University and more of his work is available at andrewbertaina.com