Sweet Dreams

• Warm days with low humidity.

• Laughing about all manner of things with my daughter.

• Mornings that manage to conclude without any fights about which shoes someone should wear or whether that someone was told she was going to have to take a shower.

• Making an unexpected connection with someone at work.

• Watching my much bigger than before but still quite little child walk from the car into her school.

• Knowing the questions for a majority of the day’s Jeopardy answers.

• Picking my child up and feeling her little nose against my neck.

• Bravely facing something that scares me.

• Texting all day every day with my BFF about absolutely nothing.

• Laughing about 20 year old inside jokes with my siblings.

These are a few of my favorite things.

Grandmother

The other day I went into work and found that my boss had taped a note to the punch clock.

“Stop by the copy room for a doughnut,” it read.  “Thanks for all you do.”  Always nice to be appreciated.

I somehow managed to go directly to my office.

Sometime later I needed to make some copies…  Shoot! I said to myself.  These damn doughnuts are still in here.  But I don’t even want one.

Oh, but then I went and lifted the box’s lid. 

I still had the delicious taste of a maple-y flavored doughnut in my mouth when I stepped back into the hallway.  Feeling not as guilty as I perhaps should have (my plan is usually to eat sweets only on the weekends), I spotted someone walking toward me carrying 2 big bags of plain Lays potato chips.

OMG.  Suddenly I went back in time and was 8 or 9 or 10 years old all over again, getting off the school bus and walking to my grandmother’s apartment.  When I got there, she’d nearly always have some doughnuts with white icing and plain Jays potato chips waiting for me.  Not sure how we came up with this combination, but it was absolutely divine.  We would eat our sinful treats and laugh about whatever.  She’d sip 7Up and we’d play cards–1500 Rummy, as I recall.  And she’d keep score in her 1930s handwriting on her rectangular, brown sheets of “scratch” paper.  Where did she even get such paper?

My God, do I miss her.

I smiled as I passed the woman with the bags of chips and silently thanked my boss for such a sweet treat.