TAG, I'M IT!

I had no idea before I started this blog of all the tagging that goes on. No, not a bratty teen with a can of spray paint writing inscrutable (they hope) symbols over my prose. This is one of those tags that says ‘I like you.’ Melody over at My Little Blue Cottage has tagged me with a “Tree of Happiness” award, and I think her most sincerely for the honor!

I'm to regale you with six things that make me happy. Of course I can't do that until I've mused first. Somewhere in the world is a blogger who started this Tree of Happiness thing, and they decided that six was the perfect number of happy things. I wonder why six? I do like the number six. I was born on the sixth day of the month, and I was six when I learned to read, which—gosh!—is one of the things that has given me the most happiness in my life, not to mention a profession. Perhaps the originator was influenced by the Ingrid Bergman film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. I got this recently from Netflix and thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the inauthentic casting. Turns out that though it is set in China, it was actually filmed in Britain and Wales, which would perhaps explain using Robert Donat as the Chinese mandarin.

There’s also the scene from Alice in Wonderland, when Alice tells the Queen that one can't believe impossible things. "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Maybe the Tree of Happiness originator was a Kipling fan: “I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.” Or perhaps they trust this anonymous quote, as I do: “Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth - a sense of humor.”

All right, enough pontificating. You already know that reading makes me happy, and you can probably guess how much I love, love, love getting up on Saturday mornings and finding cool stuff on people’s driveways that I can buy for practically nothing while they tell me their life stories and then I get to rush home and write about it. The value added on this happiness is your comments—talk about the icing on the cake!

My home contains a lot of happiness too. That sweet man I've been married to for over 35 years (yes, of course I was a child bride!) and the furry folk we live with. (He’d probably rather not have his picture here, but I know that Lizzie, Edward, Noll and Mrs. Wilberforce won’t mind.) What do people do for laughs if they don’t have pets? And how the heck would you keep the kitchen floor clean?



This will mark me as terribly shallow but…my swimming pool makes me very happy. I never in my life thought I would have my own pool. I think it's beautiful, and it means I never have to be hot when I'm home. I just hate being hot!


Oh lord. This is even shallower. (At least the pool has a deep end!) But what can I tell you—my car makes me happy indeed. I never get in it, crank down the top, and take off that I don’t feel sixteen again and terribly cool.

But let me try to redeem myself a little. I'm very happy to work in a worthy profession with wonderful people. My friend Marcia runs our literacy program that has taught hundreds and hundreds of adults to read, and changed their lives. I hobnob every day with thirty fabulous women who work so hard to connect every child they meet with the fun and information to be found in public libraries. Jeez, am I lucky or what—all that and garage sales on Saturday too!