I Like to Make Lists

A list of things that have made me happy lately.

I’m still fretting about a few things (I mean, always) but I’m also trying to focus on the good things, the little moments of joy and satisfaction and the common pleasures of modern life. Here’s a list of what’s making me happy lately:

1. I’m a farmer, y’all! Just kidding. We put a couple of small, raised beds in our back yard and filled them with some herbs and marigolds. We also planted a few rose bushes in April and some pots of flowers for the front porch. My job has been to water everything and keep an eye on it all and even though I kind of suck at it, it’s been a lot of fun! So far, the only thing I’ve managed to kill is the thyme which apparently needed a lot more (or less?) water than I was giving it. The basil is growing strong, though. Two of our new rose bushes gave us roses almost immediately but the third one needed more time to settle in. The other day its first rose finally bloomed and now it’s going crazy. It feels nice to track the progress of all my plant babies.

2. Early summer evenings. On Saturday we went to a free outdoor symphony performance (complete with cannons for the 1812 Overture) and there’s just something really special about sitting outside on a beautiful June evening as the sun goes down. Feral children were running around in the grass, the clouds changed color as the sun went down, and the bats swooped overheard. It reminded me of the joys of being a kid right after school lets out with the whole summer is ahead of you. The best! All of this set to a symphony soundtrack just made for a really nice time.

3. A solo movie date. A few weeks ago my husband was out of town so I took myself to a matinee of The Devil Wears Prada 2, a movie I knew he’d have no interest in watching. I loaded up on snacks and went to a sparsely populated matinee and had a grand time all by myself. This is something I used to do when I was single, only back then I had access to CineBistro, which serves dinner and cocktails right to your seat. I took myself out on many a solo dinner/movie date and it’s still something I like to do, even if we don’t have the fancy theater option.

4. I DNF’ed a book and it felt great. What little I’d heard about Theo of Golden made me not want to read it, but it’s for the book club so I gave it the old college try. Look, I have no problem with subtle religious undertones, but I will DNF in a hot second when a character (who you’re supposed to like!) casually refers to an undocumented immigrant as “an illegal” like it’s a normal thing to say. It stopped me in my tracks. And the writing! It’s heavy-handed, condescending, and it does a lot of telling but no showing. I had been slogging through and was suddenly like: I do not like this. I quit reading it immediately felt great about my decision. Life is too short to read shitty books! This will definitely make for an interesting book club, though.

5. Something to look forward to. This weekend I’m driving to Tennessee to visit Marianne, who I haven’t seen since early December. Some solid friend time is much needed and I’m really looking forward to seeing her and her family and catching up on everything that’s happened in the last five months. I was supposed to go visit at the beginning of May but we both got sick and had to reschedule and now I’m so glad we did because I really needed something to look forward to.

What’s been making you happy lately? (And hey, if the answer is “nothing” I want to hear about that too.)