30 Things I Love Right Now: April 8, 2020

30 Things
  1. John Prine
  2. “Haven” by Alice Munro
  3. “Surprised by Joy” by William Wordsworth
  4. “blessing the boats” by Lucille Clifton
  5. Old Bay seasoning
  6. Mixed nuts
  7. When, apropos of nothing, my son shouts “Beach day!”
  8. Climbing up into the attic for J–‘s summer clothes
  9. The Snoopy toboggan she found in one of the bins and which S– now wears like a tiny Mic Christopher
  10. Singer/songwriters, I suppose, the ones with legends surrounding them, whether obscure or somewhat less obscure
  11. “Heyday”
  12. “Sam Stone”
  13. This realization: I now almost exclusively write for small audiences of very specific people. Ten people or less, all of whom I know personally. I labor over this writing (usually) and use too many words and expend too much time and it is very messy and inefficient and (very often) this writing is not necessary for this small audience of people to read. It is, however, almost always necessary for me to write. It is how I find my way, my thoughts, my boundaries and my limitations.
  14. Learning, slowly if not surely, the enormous value of not hitting “send”
  15. Water with bubbles in it
  16. Enumeration
  17. My plain blue t-shirts
  18. A warm bath with baking soda and epsom salt
  19. Epsom, the word
  20. Salt, too, the mineral, which I gather is now becoming a precious commodity again, as in days of yore
  21. Salting the pasta water
  22. Salting the coffee grounds
  23. Cinnamon-ing them (the grounds, not the water) too
  24. Which is to say: layers of flavor, I suppose
  25. The blessings of poetry
  26. The wisdom, gleaned from a student, that Joy and happiness are not the same thing — that Joy is a kind of eternal field of spirit where, if we choose to, we can dwell
  27. The prospect of Easter dinner that sates J–‘s craving for Jamaican (jerk chicken, peas and rice…)
  28. The mysterious pain in my hip, loosened and diminished by #18 above
  29. A second cup of coffee, notes of salt, cinnamon
  30. The sound of my early-bird son, stirring in the nest