It’s only been a couple of weeks since my last Happy Little Things post, so instead of posting about one thing at length, today I’m going to share five mostly little things that are giving me hits of happiness right now. After all, life is so much better when we stop and enjoy the simple pleasures. 

1. Fresh flowers. I love fresh flowers but don’t often spend the money for them. This week, though, for three dollars and change I brought home these gorgeous hydrangeas:

They should last at least a week, if I can keep Prudy out of them!

2. Doctor Who. I know, I know, Doctor Who has been around a lo-o-o-ng time, but it’s only been this summer that my husband and I have made his acquaintance when we started watching the reboot of the series that started with the Ninth Doctor. We’re about to move on to the Eleventh Doctor (oh, how I will miss you, David Tennant). We’ve been borrowing DVDs from the library and have quite a few seasons to go before we catch up to the current season. Which is a good thing, because we don’t get BBC America and we won’t be able to watch the current Doctor until he comes out on DVD. (If you want to know why there are so many Doctors, you’ll just have to watch the show. It’s “timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly stuff”…

3. Pumpkin Spice Lattes at Starbucks. I used the last of a gift card to buy one this morning. Yummy.

4. Freegal Music. This awesome service, accessed through my library system, lets me download three free songs every week. I’ve significantly expanded my music library, three songs at a time. You library may also offer this, so check it out at Freegal.com.

5. Airplane reservations for California! In less than a month, I’ll be visiting my family—I can’t wait. (Better start choosing books to take with me, right Danielle?) 

Desk of writer Frances Parkinson Keyes

Introduction by Ted Kooser: If writers are both skilled and lucky, they may write something that will carry their words into the future, past the hour of their own deaths. I’d guess all writers hope for this, and the following poem by Peter Cooley, who lives in New Orleans and teaches creative writing at Tulane, beautifully expresses his hope, and theirs.

The One Certain Thing

A day will come I’ll watch you reading this.

I’ll look up from these words I’m writing now—

this line I’m standing on, I’ll be right here,

alive again. I’ll breathe on you this breath.

Touch this word now, that one. Warm, isn’t it?

You are the person come to clean my room;

you are whichever of my three children

opens the drawer here where this poem will go

in a few minutes when I’ve had my say.

These are the words from immortality.

No one stands between us now except Death:

I enter it entirely writing this.

I have to tell you I am not alone.

Watching you read, Eternity’s with me.

We like to watch you read. Read us again.

Here in Florida, summer—at least the weather part of it—won’t be over for another couple of months. However, since kids are back in school and fall decorations fill the stores, I’m going to pretend summer is over and do a summer reading round up. Maybe that will help fall get here sooner?

I broke with my usual summer reading traditions (no Wilkie Collins this summer—I missed him—and no writer’s biography). Instead, I’ve been steadily reading from my own shelves as well as consolidating my massive TBR (“to be read” for the uninitiated) list. As I have time, I’ve been looking up each book on my current list and deciding whether or not I still want to read it. If I do, I’m creating a brand new TBR list.  As I do this, I’m choosing a book here and there from the list to check out of the library. Nerdy as it sounds, it’s been a lot of fun!

Here are just a few highlights of my summer’s reading:

From my own shelves:

The appropriately-titled So Many Books, So Little Time, by Sara Nelson. Nelson’s chronicle of a year’s worth of reading a book a week woven into the events of her private life. I loved this and have added it to my shelf of “books about books.”

Old Filth, Jane Gardam. New-to-me author, and so good! I read about this on Danielle Simpson’s blog, and had picked up this copy at my library’s bookstore for a dollar. I will be reading more of Gardam’s work.

Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff, was another library bookstore purchase. This fascinating biography had me from the first page: “Among the most famous women to have lived, Cleopatra VII ruled Egypt for twenty-two years. She lost a kingdom once, regained it, nearly lost it again, amassed an empire, lost it all. A goddess as a child, a queen at eighteen, a celebrity soon thereafter, she was an object of speculation and veneration, gossip and legend, even in her own time.”

From my enormous TBR list:

The Awakening of Miss Prim, Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera. I was disappointed in this book. It sounded like the perfect read for me, but I was left with an overall feeling of “meh.” Still, it did have this lovely passage: “Miss Prim sipped her tea and nestled down into the storeroom armchair. She too believed in the value of the little things. Her first coffee in the morning drunk from her Limoges porcelain cup. Sunlight filtering through the shutters of her room, casting shadows on the floor. Dozing off over a book on a summer’s afternoon. The look in the children’s eyes when they told you about some fact they’d just learned. It was from the little things that the big ones were made, it definitely was.”

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters. Just the right amount of spooky, and a story I keep thinking about.

And while I didn’t read a writer’s biography, I did read Agatha Christie at Home—and now I want to visit Greenway, her home in Devon!

There were also comfort rereads: Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders and Death in the Air (also known as Death in the Clouds), and This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart. (I forgot all about The Crystal Cave…still need to check that out at the library.)

As far as reading challenges go, aside from the Mount TBR challenge, I’ve been slacking. Time to get back to the classics and the Vintage Mystery Challenge.

Recently I had blood drawn for a physical. My veins were especially uncooperative that day, and for a while I sported a pair of bruises on my forearms from the experience. They weren’t painful, but they were noticeable (sadly, I wasn’t able to think up a more dashing story to go with them). This got me thinking about bruises in general, and scars, too.

We can’t get far without collecting our share of bruises and scars. Life, it seems, has a way of marking us, reminding us of both our fragility and our resilience. We’re so fragile that a bump can break blood vessels under the skin and cause blood to pool in the tissues, and we can easily be cut or scraped, sometimes resulting in a scar.

But we’re also resilient. Bruises fade and heal, and scars, in fact, are proof of healing, at least according to Wikipedia: “Any injury does not become a scar until the wound has completely healed.”

Bruises and scars are badges of honor. We don’t get banged up by staying safe at home in our comfort zones. If we’ve gotten a bruise or scar, we were probably out doing something, learning something, experiencing everyday adventures. 

Sometimes bruises and scars don’t show up in our outer appearance. Sometimes the injury occurs internally, but leaves a mark nevertheless. Those emotional wounds can be more painful than physical ones, but they eventually heal, too, little by little becoming less painful. If we can remember that healing is a process and an inevitable one at that, we’ll be able to handle the initial pain better. We’ve all heard Ernest Hemingway’s words from A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

“The truth is, you can skip the pursuit of happiness altogether

and just be happy.”

—Joshua Fields Millburn