· Eating shelled walnuts & Thompson raisins
· Arriving places
· The first song you listen to through headphones
· When a good bakery has good tea (I call this the complete experience)
· The crisp, blue outlines of the hills here in Western Oregon. They host thousands of trees, all sitting in serenity. How do they do it? From the outside, those hills lean along in slopes, every visible part waving in harmony from across the valley. An ecologist could tell you there exist fractals of detail in forest ecosystems; all I have is a paper planner for my own organization. Their blue mantle rises and falls in the sunshine, “does it matter?” In a two-hour drive, you too can be a quiet nobody. Let the trees take the weight of what you have to see and let them outlive how you have been seen. It’s best if you pack some walnuts & raisins for fuel.
The tall, golden grass at home, smelt just after emerging from the car. Specifically, the first lungful of air that will sustain you until the next moment you drive here, just as the world requires that you leave your most comfortable, sweetest blanket on your bed every day (the only other moments you run out of time, reluctant to wake up).
The song breaking through the glassy silence of the apartment. Its harmonies weave around the pads of your headphones and lilt in and out of your eyes. If you can keep up, faster than your typing speed, your scrawling writing, those notes will guide your own, lead you deeper into the action and feeling. You’re there for a while, if you can keep it. The headphones are pressing the cartilage of your ears into the metal arms of your glasses. It’s sure to make an unbearable pinch eventually.
The taste of a new pastry, a few seconds into realizing it’s good. The tea is good too. You sit back and let the steam rise to meet you. If the timing is right, it’s summer and you can get away with wearing sunglasses. You can glance at the other sitters, evaluate their pastry choices, listen to their phone conversations, reconnoiter the art on the walls, and watch the sun on the road. Then, feed all this information to the parched thing in your head that seems to require it. After a while, arriving at a decision, you take off the sunglasses and take out a pen and paper to dawdle for a bit. Take another bite of delicacy. Sip some more good tea.
A list of good: a good list to make