Curled up with my knitting, one day this week, I got to thinking about life’s little pleasures. Making something lovely is one of mine. How about the people dear to me—what are some of the pleasing aspects of life for them?
I started with my serene friend Pat. She said, “You can’t ask me that, today.” “What about meeting dogs on walks?” I countered. Her husband claims she only goes for walks to meet dogs. Pat added, “And their owners.” She and I didn’t speak long, as she needed to attend to one of a number of matters failing to deliver any pleasure that day.
Barbara enjoys being up early in the morning and seeing the sun come up. “First, it creeps along across the yard, then it skitters up the mountain.” Also, she delights in her walking group. “There are six of us ladies, all in our seventies except for one in her nineties. First we walk, then we sit in the park and talk, then we walk some more.” They do that five days a week, and have done so for some time.
Her brother, when I asked him, looked at me as if I were mentally deficient. “I’m eighty-seven!” he said, as if to say, “I got nothing.” Shortly thereafter, however, he told me he enjoys sleeping in in the morning. And walking the dog. And going to Zingerman’s Bakehouse for croissants. He has a standing order there, and the staff greet him by name.
“Can you give me a few minutes?” Daughter Number One asked when I called her. She teaches first grade and had just gotten home from school. “Otherwise, it’ll be drinking wine and putting my feet up.” When she called back—presumably while drinking wine with her feet up—she said, “Hearing my granddaughter holler, ‘Nama!’ when I’m trying to talk to my daughter on the phone.” That granddaughter is two years old.
D#1 went on to add, “Having my hair washed at the salon. When she scrubs my head, it gives me the shivers. That is heaven.” “Do you like it with cold water?” I queried. “Oh, yes!” Her grandmother liked cold water, too, routinely asking her hairdresser to use water “as cold as you can stand it.” “Also,” adds D#1, “I like being kissed by my husband before he leaves for work in the morning, whether I’m fully awake or not.”
He gets us mighty early, and his morning routine is one of his life’s pleasures: getting up, making coffee, watching the sun come up as he heads out from the house, and, as he says, “stepping into my stirrup.” Yes, that’s a real stirrup. He spends much of his time on horseback. He and D#1 just celebrated their thirty-fourth anniversary.
Daughter Number Two is flipping a house in rural Shiawassee County. She likes to sit outdoors and watch the wildlife, finding the chipmunks reliably entertaining. “One of them squeaks at me and then runs away,” she told me. A flock of turkeys visits, as well. “They’re big birds,” she tells me. “We have a flock of about ten. They like to scratch up the sand and take baths.”
Daughter Number Three cites the Nespresso coffee machine she and her husband recently acquired. Now her morning sip includes warmed and frothed milk. “Then there’s drinking that same cup of coffee outside on the deck. This time of year, the lizards are so active. They’re jumping from the house to the flower pots or just the deck, and they’re noisy when they land. I don’t know if they’re getting ready to hibernate or what.
“I’ll tell you, though, one of life’s little pleasures it not finding one smushed under the cushion of the chair where you’ve been sitting while you drink your coffee. That’s one of life’s little dis-pleasures.” D#3’s husband agrees with her about the pleasure of morning coffee, and raises her one: dark chocolate.
Daughter Number Four, immediately on being asked, said, “Quiet moments curled up with a blanket, a cool breeze, and a good book. Working a jigsaw puzzle with family. Playing the computer game, Stardew. Creating a new game or activity for the kids to play, using tech, and it works and the kids like it.” D#4 teaches elementary school music, and recalled one such happy effort she called, “Pat the Sounds.”
She pauses a moment. She’s only recently returned to work after a bout of CoVid, and I worried our conversation had worn her out. She assured me she was fine, and named a final aspect of life that pleases her: working. “Working is one of life’s pleasures.”
29 September 2023
Smiles. Stardew and Count the Sounds. Blanket and book in a nice breeze for the win.