Some Goodness for You Today
Wonderful Reader,
Wherever this finds you in the holiday season, I am wishing you gentleness and ease. This year has asked a lot of our hearts. Should your cup need refilling, here are a few sweet bits and pieces to get the job started.
As my Mum used to say, May there be many unexpected miracles ahead!
All good things to you,
Caitie
On a gray December day, I sat down to play Clue with two kiddos in a rented cabin. The board game came with the rental and the notepads to track clues were nearly full. I got a pen and as I was about to start marking Colonel Mustard, candlestick, one of my little companions gently pawed my forearm.
“I like to use pencil so other people can use the notepad again,” he said.
And as I went off to rummage for a pencil, I was reminded, yet again, that the future will be inherited by good and decent hands.
A friend and I are walking our dogs in the park. Many of the trees are strangled by bittersweet, an invasive vine that crowds out undergrowth and chokes trees to death.
We come around a bend in the path to find a woman with a tangle of bittersweet in her hand, clippers in the other, her dog sniffing around her.
Excellent! I call to her, pointing at the mess of roots she’s carrying.
I try to get some every walk, she says with a friendly wave.
Every so often, we get lucky and catch someone being part of the solution when they thought no one was looking.
Once, in Paris, I sat at an outdoor cafe taking in the romance of the city, the food, the people, thinking about how I might finally take up watercolor or ballet or - when a bird took a dump on my shoulder.
Oh come now! I cried, jumping up and looking for a napkin.
Hey-oh! a couple of fellows called from a few tables over. We’re from Australia and that’s good luck there!
They raised their glasses to me.
It was G.K. Chesterton who said an "inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."
Forty years ago, my mother bought an acorn for 25 cents at a Boston Flower Show fundraiser and planted it in the heart of the front yard.
The oak has grown two stories tall. It feeds squirrels and birds, shades ferns and a sun-shy golden groundsel. It’s outlived the winter ice that lines its branches like costume jewelry and the northwest winds that can double the 30 mph speed limit on our road.
A few years ago, when I became captivated by turning the garden into a native plant habitat, I asked my mother about that oak.
There was a Peanuts comic making the rounds back then about how hopeful people plant trees, she told me. And what is planting if not a belief in what’s to come?