Recent moments that made me happysad
Thinking of R's super-happy laugh, when the sound gets squeezed right out of him, and his smile crinkles into that cheeky one I saw in that old photo I love so much: about seven years old and spaghetti sauce dribbled all over his chin... just pure mischevious joy.
Looking at the mirror in my kitchen and seeing the pencil mark on the wall just above that measures my dad’s latest height.
The comically perplexed bambi eyes my mum makes when I try to explain how to use the pharmacy app on her phone. The comically perplexed way my mum taps at said phone afterwards, as if it might explode in her hands upon closing a tab.
Knowing that Spitz, the blackbird baby from last Spring, is undoubtedly all grown up now and long gone, with a family of their own, and has most likely matured out of the strange, stuttery chirrups that led to their namesake (and easy spotting) in the first place. But what if they were still here and we just hadn't recognised them?
Popping into town and seeing that my favourite antique store is tossing all of its books. Old books, new books, the lot. The shelves just look like big gaping caves now, unquenched mouths missing their papery stacks of teeth. Perhaps it was too many to handle. They did eat away most of the carpet, too, in piles and pools and wobbling jenga towers. Finding a banger was almost the same as finding buried treasure because you really had to dig around for it. Ode to the smell of crumbled, speckled pages...! Okay, maybe this one's more sad than happy.
The daffodils that went up and under so quickly, almost a whole month earlier than last year. I miss their yellow heads already.