This week felt slow and fast.  Camp took up all the driving times.

The experiences were great for the kids.  But I’m sort of glad they’re done.

 

 

funny

 

I couldn’t find the laundry detergent.  It was a recent purchase so I knew it wasn’t empty.  Yet.

I looked around the laundry room.  Questioned the house residents.

And then.  I found it.

It was in the freezer.

 

 

Obviously.

All I had to do was think like a twelve year old boy.  (I had asked him to put something in the chest freezer.  The chest freezer is beside the washing machine.  The laundry detergent usually sits on the chest freezer.  He had to pick up the detergent to open the freezer.  That’s all I really needed to know.)

 

fashionable

 

She’s a lucky one – this girl.  Her skin is olive and creamy.  Her eyes are deep brown pools of cute.

And her hair.

Well – cut it, grow it long.  It’s good hair.  Wake up and crawl out of bed and shake your head and be completely ready to leave the house kind of good.  (And all the rest of us are jealous.)

Mosely decided to get a dramatic hair cut.  (Less for fashionable reasons and more for practical – she dislikes ponytails and braids on herself.)

 

 

flavorful

 

This week I ate lunch a few times alone (or with friendly adult company) while the kids were at camps.

You know what is good?

The peach crepe at Tandem with a glass of cold chocolate milk. (Maybe they made fun of me there for ordering chocolate milk when I was without kids!)

 

 

faithful

 

If it’s truth, it’s divine.  I’ve said that a billion times, I’ll say it a billion more.

I believe it.

I love all the words on this page by writer Annie Dillard.

But I especially love these:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur’s life a good one, or Thomas Mann’s?

• Annie Dillard

 

feels

 

My kayak adventure was a birthday gift from Hannah.  And that was quite satisfying.  But, apparently, it was more a ruse than a gift.  Who knew?

As we pulled into my driveway (me wearing a swimsuit and baseball cap, mind you) a bevy of generous and kind-hearted friends were lining my driveway and shouting “Happy Birthday”.

 

 

Nearly a week early and a complete surprise it absolutely was.  My grown up daughter was the planner I have since gathered and that was a sweetness indeed.  I have an embarrassing richness of friendships and when the faces of those friends are lining my driveway and crowding in my kitchen and spilling onto my porch, well, I don’t know where to begin or how to keep up.

There were also 44 candles on my cake.  I don’t know how to keep up with that number either.  (I suppose neither did my young friend Ephrem – because now that I study this photo just a bit, I see him there holding a spray bottle filled with water.  I guess he was ready for anything.  Smart kid.)

 

 

It’s beyond humbling and always surprising and it leaves me with the overwhelming senses of both grateful and good fortune.  Beyond what I deserve, always more than I expect and never taken for granted.  If you are wondering where all the good people are, where all the kindness lives – it’s here in my town and in my community.  

I will never not be in awe of all the spectacular humans that make up my world.

 

 

_________________________________