Category: Five Friday Happy Bringers

Friday!  Here are five wonderful adders to my happiness   (Is “adder” a word?)  (Well, in the way I’m using it, I mean?)  (Because “adder” is a type of poisonous snake.)  (Yuk!)  (Or something non-understandable having to do with computer circuits and addition.)

1.  Being okay with not knowing whether some words I use are actually words.  Because since I have reached a certain age, I don’t care about such correctness so much.  I’m trying to embrace my “is-ness,” you know?

2.  Seeing the sun rise over the ocean on Amelia Island Thursday morning.

(Okay maybe I went straight back to bed afterwards.  But I did leave the doors open so I could hear the surf.)

3.  Earlier in the week, I visited my parents in the small North Georgia town of Ball Ground (where I grew up).  Tuesday morning, as is our tradition when I’m home, we made our way to Hardees for coffee and breakfast biscuits (sausage and egg for me, in case you’re wondering).

Well, as luck would have it, when we were handed our coffee cups (by a talkative caramel-colored lady who made the biscuits earlier and who was leaving for Puerto Rico the next morning–I’m a good listener/eavesdropper) and went to the urn (cool word) to pour our brew, the huge container was empty.  [That sentence is “weigh” too long, but I don’t feel like revising it right now.  There’s a severe heat warning in the Eastern U.S. and I really need to take a cool nap ASAP.]

Back to the coffee urn–since it was still nearly dawn (7:30 ish!) and I was only half conscious, I kept pushing that little handle/lever thingy up and down (in maniacal poking-the-elevator-button-to-make-it-come-faster style) hoping to force some joe into my two-dropsful cup.

My mom, 85, who broke her leg a couple of months ago and struggles with walking, relying on a walker, which we fold up and put in the trunk of the car, had already found a table near a group of extremely LOUD senior citizens and waited semi-patiently for her coffee.  Seeing me struggling foolishly with the urn spout, she yelled at a shocking volume over the partying old folks, “Neal it’s empty!  Can’t you see that?  Tell your daddy to get that pretty black girl to get us some from behind the counter.  We know her.  Are you sure you don’t want the breakfast platter?”

But my father, 89 in November and an extremely efficient doer-of-things, had other plans.  While I was staring, openmouthed, at a hauntingly beautiful, ancient and tiny, bird-like, blue-haired lady wearing an oversized Lady Gaga t-shirt cinched at the waist with one of those orange plastic rings, my dad picked up the large, empty urn from the beverage area and carried it slowly, shakily and singlehandedly to the counter.  “There you go,” he said to Caramel, who laughed a good-natured “Oh my!” and said we would have coffee in no time.  And we did.

4.  Sea oats.

5.  The incredible fragrance of jasmine growing on trellisses.  Find some and smell it deeply.

These fragrantly beautiful vines were growing in abundance in my parents’ side yard.

Have a spectacular last weekend in June!