What Gives Me Joy

Adult Western Screech Owl by Alexandra Mackenzie/Flickr (CC BY NC ND 2.0)

1. Now that spring is nearly here, the little screech owl that doesn’t screech, greets me every early morning in my garden. I haven’t seen this small bird but her soft “who who”—her mating call—brings in the new season. I never hear her at any other time of day or at any other season.

2. Night breeze: the goddess’ hand. Sometimes when I’m struggling with sleeplessness, a small, cool fresh breeze creeps across my face from my open bedroom window. It is the blessing of the goddess’ hand and it nearly always puts me to sleep.

3. Adventurous cooking: a few days ago a stranger pressed several bags of a strange green vegetable into my hands, grown in the community college garden. He didn’t ask me if I wanted the bags and I didn’t refuse them. When I got them home, I realized that this was some sort of long green vegetable I’d never seen before. Not lettuce, not spinach, not chard or kale, but an anonymous looking pale green stranger. Always open to improvisation, I chopped the things up, sauteed them with some onions, then blended them with home-made stock. I won’t say it’s the best soup I’ve ever cooked but with a lot of seasoning, it passes.

4. Listening to Los Tropicanas: this is a local group made up of four musicians who play the sweetest, softest Mexican music I’ve ever heard, a perfect background for cooking strange greens.

5. Hearing other women’s stories: yesterday after meeting for a totally different purpose, a woman I don’t know well launched into an account of her life. For sixty years, she’s run a guest ranch (sometimes called a dude ranch) in the deep Pecos wilderness, cooking three meals a day, including a four-course dinner, for the guests who come to ride and hike. Now she faces a familiar dilemma: the ranch, started in the 1930’s by a relative, has been divided between a group of inheritors; she is only one of them. While the others don’t work at the ranch and seldom come there, they want to make use in some way of their pieces of the ranch… And yet she holds on, and will hold on, fitting herself somehow into the complicated family pattern. I’m going to visit her ranch next summer and sit in a log cabin by a wood stove…

6. The faces of my audiences: long ago when I first started public speaking, I had a certain amount of stage fright, as most of us do. I had to overcome it; authors must sell their own books now, since publishers, large and small, no longer make the effort, and social media and public speaking are the only way. I learned by experimenting that if I turned from side to side, including the whole audience, I began to feel at ease; a crowd of strangers quickly becomes a crowd of friends. There is nothing like the eyes of strangers, beguiled, curious, drawing in the words I write and now speak.

7. I look forward avidly to the publication of my next book in September, 2025, How Daddy Lost His Ear And Other Stories when I’ll begin my speaking and reading round again.

How lucky I am, how lucky we all are, who can find moments of joy to set against the chaos that surrounds but must never be allowed to overwhelm us.

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