You know what I love? I love “yes”. I love “yes” so much, and so hard, and  also its more boisterous adjutants “hell yes” and “fuck yes”.

This year, watching the Tour de France on TV, I heard one of the announcers say, “There’s the beautiful sunflower field” and it made me happy that, given all the manful muscling in the pelotonic tumult, he thought to mention that quiet golden place. Since then the words”There is the beautiful sunflower” have lodged themselves in my imagination in the inexplicable way certain words and phrases do from time to time, becoming something like a prayer or an offering or a streamer of solace unfurled the way a strand of birch bark can be freed from the tree.

Also?

Butcher’s charts take it all apart.

Sewing patterns put it all together.

The sundering and the reconciling … they interest me, both. I maybe love taxidermy because it requires both; I should maybe love the jigsaw puzzle more than I do, for the same reason.

Yellow! I don’t really like it, most of the time, and yet my favourite shoes in the whole wide world are yellow and I love it when a cool-toned garden is warmed by splashes of yellow and I think lemons are not only delightfully delicious  as foodstuffs but delightfully delectable in every aesthetic aspect and I like looking at my bookshelves and seeing the yellow spines of Upside Down and Cheap Chic and A Prick Up Your Ears and What It Is and maybe now that I think of it I do like yellow, not as the object or the subject, mostly, but in small illuminating punctuatory doses.

You know, I’m not really a big fan of birds (the Byrds, yes, birds, no). Okay, truth be told, I find them horrible and creepy, more than is strictly reasonable — if in fact there’s a degree of finding-birds-horrible-and-creepy that could be characterised as “reasonable”. Mostly, of course, my distaste for birds doesn’t matter, doesn’t have an impact on my life — except when preparing a whole chicken for consumption. Yow. Now that is the stuff nightmares are made of. Mostly, however, I don’t think about birds or worry about birds.

“Mother” … now there’s a big topic for you. I’ve been thinking about this post and trying to fashion this post and I’ve been uncharacteristically lacking synaptic activity or volubility. Sometimes when this happens, I hurl myself off the precipice into the unknown of the internet and find words by finding pictures. But the problem with the pictures you find when you Google “mother” or “mom” or variations on that theme, is how reductive they are: it’s nearly all glowing pregnant ladies or beaming ladies cradling babies or high-heel-and-pearl-clad June Cleavers doing housewifely things, and there is so much more to motherhood than changing diapers and running the vac.

The world spins on its axis, on and on and on, no matter who comes here or leaves here, no matter how happy or sad you are, no matter, no matter.

Oh. My. God. The happies, they are upon me.