Just a couple of weeks ago, my freshly washed blue Honda Fit was the second car in my father’s funeral cortege. The two years before had been an unending series of medical appointments and family emergencies and courtroom proceedings and 20,000 extra miles on my car that had left me utterly demoralized and depleted and exhausted.   And when I finally returned to work after more than a month’s crisis-filled absence, one of the first pieces of news I received was that the state supreme court had accepted a case for review that I’d pitched at it months earlier, and the shot clock was now ticking on the filing of my formal brief. Let the games begin. No stress there…ha!

And yet, I’ve spent today at home per my usual schedule and I’ve been smiling the whole time.

It could be that happiness is best found in small things. Maybe it’s that happiness is measured relative to how much unhappiness has gone before it. Kind of like the way you’d kiss the rocky shoreline if you’d been saved from drowning, even though that might not be the ideal spot to build the vacation home of your dreams should you win the lottery. 

All I know is, for the first time in recent memory, I’ve been able to stay in my house and yard and small town for an entire day and I keep heaving deep sighs of contentment.

So much of normal life and routine had escaped me for so long, the thought of sitting and rationally sifting through mail at my kitchen table with a cup of tea and a cookie instead of performing triage as I ran back out to the car for another trek to Chicago through construction traffic was incredibly soothing. I’ve been taking care of long-neglected details like arranging for the septic tank to be pumped, and the water filter to be repaired, and for the Culligan man to bring out some more salt for my water softener. I haven’t gotten around to making another (too often canceled) appointment to change my hair color yet, but it’s coming. I finally got the tires on my car rotated, 8,000 miles past their scheduled maintenance. And when the clerk at my small-town auto shop accidentally rang the transaction up as “no charge,” I gently pointed out his error…and he waved me out the door for free anyway, with a “go on, have a nice day!” 

Back in the yard, the rewards continued. I took the time to peel down to a tank top and shorts to water my rose bushes that until a few days ago were so thirsty they practically grabbed at my ankles as I walked past. I’ve been apologizing for the neglect big-time, pruning them, spraying them, paying the attention that should have been paid more than a month ago, working on coaxing and pleading and forcing one more round of blooms from them before the first frost shuts them down.

The roses soaked and encouraged, I brought the hose around the side of the house to water the rest of the garden, smelling the scents of lavender and feverfew crushed underfoot. The mums are back with a vengeance, especially the delicate “florist mums” that by all rights should have died off last winter. At three feet tall, these plants are the essence of foolhardy spit-in-your-eye resilience. And I smile, too, thinking of how my boyfriend brought them out to me in the middle of winter the year before, a small splash of color in a small plastic pot just to brighten for a little while a bitterly cold and snowy Midwestern night. 

The eleven year old chocolate lab is moving a bit more slowly today, forgoing following me around the yard with a tennis ball in favor of laying down in the shade. His days are numbered too, though some good painkillers tonight may perk him back up for a while. But he’s been a very good dog for a very long time, and he’s pretty happy to have me back around the house again too.

As Scarlett O’Hara said at the end of “Gone with the Wind,” tomorrow is another day. Who the heck ever knows what the next day will bring? Good surprises, bad surprises, they’ll find us no matter what we do.