I was running errands today and Vince Guaraldi’s composition “Linus and Lucy” came on the radio. Talk about a Proustean moment. The first chord launched me right back in front of the TV watching a long-awaited Charlie Brown special.  Right there at the red light, I started laughing for the pure joy of hearing this song. How delicious it felt to tap into my young self: totally present, suffused with delight and wonder, jiggling in my seat because the body, like a wriggling puppy, must translate happy feelings into movement.

So here you go. Dance. Smile. Wriggle. Remember. 

If you know the Darvicks you know that we are rabid when it comes to Scrabble. Martin and I have a record of every Scrabble game we’ve ever played since we married. Olivia is now in the loop.  She and I haven’t played yet, but I hear tell she recently bested one of Elliot’s friends.  Emma and I now have a Crossplays game (online) running in the background. This game was a first, beginning as it did with four seven-letter words. She took that one in the end — 403 to 398 — and now leads 3 to 2.  It’s good to win but terrific to be bested by her. 

Often comically imaged, saguaro cacti are actually magnificent.  It’s impossible not to anthromorphize them. Two raised arms and they become prickly pugilists daring you to “put up your dukes.”  Sometime those arms seem raised in prayer as if beseeching the skies for rain. Or maybe simply gratitude to be alive? It takes a saguaro between 50 and 70 years to sprout its first arm. A saguaro’s average lifespan iruns between 150 and 200 years.  Desert birds build nests within them and their huge white flowers bloom at night in May-June providing nectar for bats, bees, and birds.  Walking among them is yet another experience of nature’s infinite variety and interdependence.

This trio caught my heart. What a sweet, if prickly, family!  

photo by Debra Darvick, Black Canyon, Arizona

It all began when Martin tossed our hats over a branch. I looked up and my kid brain saw a head beneath the  hats. A hiker needs some poles, doesn’t she? And if she’s going on a hike she’s going to need some supplies, right? So I outfitted her.  

A couple of years ago I found About Face,  a great kids’ game at the Art Institute of Chicago’s gift shop.  I wrote about it soon after playing it with Olivia.  Our last trip to Chicago see the girls, Leah had come up with a new way to play. Her idea was to use only one color to make the faces. It was more challenging and ratcheted up the fun as well.

On one of the endless days of morning snow shoveling a leaf caught my eye. Was it smiling at me? And what about that acorn cap a few inches away? A wandering eye, perhaps? Shoveling could wait.  The snow wasn’t going anywhere. I cast about for another acorn cap and snapped off a couple of twigs for eyebrows. Nothing like Brooke Shields’ but they’d do.

And there you go. One two three and I made a new game piece. We’re heading there soon.  I’ll have to print this, fix it to some cardboard and sneak it into my next game with Leah.

I love my evening walks with Martin. We talk about nothing and everything, sometimes interrupting one another to be sure the other doesn’t miss an expecially beautiful garden or to bemoan an unfortunate choice of paint color on a new house. Some evenings we spend a good few minutes snapping shots of lavender globes of allium or a bee burrowing into the heart of a hosta blossom. Then we compare images. Martin’s sense of composition is exquisite; I love learning from him.

Given the disparity in our heights we do not see the same world. Sometimes I’m mildly frustrated that I cannot see over fences or get a proper angle on something because I’m too low to the ground. Yet that also scores me palm-sized treasures just waiting to be noticed: broken eggshells, feathers, a fallen nest so carefully woven I must believe there’s a bit of love and anticipation tucked into all that instinctive avian industry. These small treasures lift my heart, giving me a charge of utter delight. I carry them home cradled in my palm, all the while singing the bee song* silently to myself. Though there’s no mamma to show them to, it was she who taught me that Nature’s magic and gifts surround me. All I have to do is look.

*Martin had no idea what “the bee song” was and suggessted that I provide a link for others who might also be unfamiliar with ths nursery school classic.  Then I listened to it.  Either I forgot the grimness of verses two and three or Mrs. Schwartz and Mrs Gussack were way ahead of their time and never taught them to us.  Oy, what an apiphobic song!