Satisfying Saturday: My Happy Places

I just read a marvelous post by Mandy Chew that got my full attention. Both the writing and the ideas were excellent, and I enjoyed it a lot. She hit my head (great word usage and grammar), and my heart (I could SO relate to her thoughts), something that doesn’t always happen.

It also got me thinking about what I love about life, what makes me happy. As Mandy wrote, some things are just oddly satisfying, like waking up before the alarm goes off, or a traffic light turning green just as you coast up to the red light (something I ALWAYS do for the same reason Mandy does).

So, in no particular order, here are five from me:

1. Sunrises and sunsets. The picture at the top is one I took of a sunset over the bay I live on near Cape Cod., Mass. The back of my 525 s.f. cottage overlooks the bay on the southwestern side, so I get the privilege of watching some extraordinary sunsets. Once in a while my iPhone even captures the beauty, as it did above.
2. The bay I live on. It’s called Buttermilk Bay, and it changes constantly from slick and glassy to trying-to-look-fierce-but-failing wavelets. Yes. Wavelets. The bay is landlocked except for the entrance/exit to the larger, better-known Buzzards Bay, so we don’t get big waves. But the bay is more than big enough to give me a sense of real peace. Many mornings I walk down the hill (all four house lots’ worth), coffee cup in hand, and sit at the wooden picnic table on the beach. Quiet. Peaceful. Birds wheeling above, finding clams, dropping them on the rocks to crack the shells. Yes. This. (And the pictures below show the view from my back sun porch.)

3. Winter here in the village. We’re a seaside community of about 265 small cottages, and only about 25% of us are here year-round. Winter here can be harsh — winter anywhere can be harsh — but it’s also beautiful in its own right. We see our maintenance crew out plowing, we see the bay get ice-encrusted and frozen, and we hunker down and enjoy the peace and quiet of the off-season .

4. Living in a 525 s.f. cottage. Yes, it’s small, but it’s not tiny. It has cathedral ceilings, 40-year-old wide pine floorboards, and a completely rehabbed interior (including the sun porch that faces southwest and gets all that warmth, so necessary in the wintertime). There’s a new kitchen, probably a little big for the space, but because there are no interior walls (except for the bathroom), the cottage feels bigger than it is. Simple to clean, heat, and live in. Pure bliss.

5. My dogs, Gibbs and Abby (that’s Abby, asleep on the couch). I rescued them four years ago through an agency in Tennessee, where they had been dumped behind a Walmart, along with a dozen or more bigger dogs! I cannot understand how anyone can do that; can you?

So the rescue put Abby’s face (below, right, in the pink jacket) on its FB page, and I knew she had to be mine. I called. The woman I spoke with played me well, letting me know that there were TWO small dogs among the bigger ones, that they looked a lot alike, and that they probably came together. It would have been a shame to leave one behind, right?

Oh, that woman at the rescue was gooooood.

I would not want to live without dogs. They’re warm and loving, and they make me laugh. Snuggling up to them, watching TV, walking outside and seeing the kids come over to pet them — priceless.

5. The sounds of a baby’s laughter, my all-time favorite. I mean, seriously! Is there anything better in the world than hearing a baby laughing? Can anyone resist laughing, too? It puts me in the best mood for hours, and thanks to the wonders of the Internet, we can find videos of babies laughing any time we need a mood lifter.

This is a very short list; I have many other reasons to be positive. Maybe I’ll share more later, but right now:

What about you? What makes your heart sing? Your pulse race? Your face shine with happiness?

If this post resonates with you, please clap or click the heart, or whatever we’re doing here to share it with your connections, OK? Let’s do our part to create happiness.

And for more of my posts, visit my website: GrammarGoddess.com.